Home > The Magazine > The Week

Thursday 4 December 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

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

Matthew d'Ancona

Wednesday, 6th August 2008

Matthew d'Ancona reviews the week in politics

Tony Blair would never have said such a thing. Nor would he have edited an academic collection of essays called Reinventing the Left, as Mr Miliband did in 1994. In the introduction to that volume, the young policy wonk wrote that ‘advanced industrialised societies are corrupted in fundamental ways by inequalities of income, opportunity and perhaps above all power’. He also directed readers approvingly to the chapter on socialist economics by a certain highly intellectual member of the shadow Cabinet: Gordon Brown.

Who could have imagined, 14 years ago, that the two men would become such ferocious rivals for the crown? Different, of course, but so alike in so many ways. Both sons of the Labour tribe, both profoundly cerebral, both believers in active government. So my message to the comrades is: relax. If you make Mr Miliband your leader, you will be electing not a wicked neo-Blairite, but one of your own.

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

More articles from: Matthew d'Ancona | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (5)

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

D Webster

August 7th, 2008 8:24am

Calling the Milliband/ Kozak axis 'part of the Labour tribe' stretching things a bit, Miliband Sr. is usually best remembered for his antagonism to the mainstream 'Labour' movement and its accommodations to power.

Searcher

August 7th, 2008 1:42pm

The apple doesn't fall far from the Marxist tree.

Vespasian

August 8th, 2008 3:46pm

Tony Blair English? Since when does being Scotish make you English?

Robert

August 18th, 2008 12:42pm

If Blair is the Poodle then Milli Vanilli is a Chihuahua those pop eyes give it away.

john problem

August 28th, 2008 5:53pm

Milburn for Chancellor? Of course. He was/is a Trotskyite and Trotsky separated from the Bolsheviks because they were for robbing banks to fund the party which Trotsky was not. Good news, eh?

Letters

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

This battle has just begun

‘I was excited and delighted by it in that first Bombay minute,’ says the narrator in Gregory David Roberts’s great novel Shantaram.

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

New Labour has always preserved from the hard Left the Leninist idea that the party (or, in Blair/Brown theory, ‘the project’) is the only reality to be respected.

Diary

Rani Singh

I’ve just emerged from the gym, winding down after a day’s writing, when my son Sukhraj calls, alerting me to sudden news of explosions and fatalities in Mumbai.