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Thursday 4 December 2008

Relax, comrades: David Miliband is Blairesque, rather than Blairite

Matthew d'Ancona reviews the week in politics

With Blair gone, the standard-bearers of this reforming philosophy are dyed-in-the-wool Blairites like Stephen Byers and Mr Milburn, and the Cameroons, especially George Osborne and Michael Gove. Mr Miliband buys some of this — but only some of it. Personally, he favours the phrase ‘double devolution’, which means delegating some power to citizens — but plenty to town halls, too. If you trawl through his speeches and articles, you find that he wants power to be devolved only ‘to the lowest appropriate level’.

According to one advocate of Miliband: ‘The real Blairites actually have great reservations about him. They fear there are echoes of planning, and a bit too much of the Labour party.’ On the last point, their reservations are surely justified. Unlike Mr Blair — and this is surely the crucial point — Mr Miliband was born into the socialist movement, being the son of the great Marxist political theorist Ralph Miliband. This much he has in common with Mr Brown, who was born into the tradition of Scottish Presbyterian Labour personified by his father, the Revd Dr John E. Brown.

Mr Miliband is a high-tech Fabian, not a factional Blairite. When I first encountered him, he was secretary to Labour’s Commission on Social Justice, whose findings laid out a blueprint for progressive taxation, egalitarianism and social reform. The commission was instigated by John Smith in 1992, but its final report was not published until after his death. The new leader, Tony Blair, did not so much shelve the volume as hide it in the attic.

But, for all his modernising credentials, Mr Miliband never forgot his roots. As Environment Secretary, he said that ‘green had to be the new red’. In all the verbiage about his Blairite background, his passionate traditional belief in social justice, collective action and the need for government action is easily forgotten. But he could not have been clearer than he was in his response to a Green Alliance announcement in February last year: ‘I don’t believe we will tackle this problem unless you understand and feel to the fundamentals of your being what market failure is, and what collective action is required in order to correct market failures.... It’s totally legitimate for people to wake up in the morning and believe that the extension of liberty is what makes them get up in the morning — politically that is an important strand of thinking. It doesn’t happen to be mine.’

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