The most curious thing about David Miliband’s article for the latest New Statesman — which is causing quite a stir this morning — is that it should appear now. After all, the Roy Hattersley essay that it purports to be responding to was published, so far as I can tell, last September. That’s five months ago. Which is fine, if it’s really taken MiliMajor that long to get around to it. But it certainly fuels the idea that he has chosen now, this moment, to make a political intervention — and Hattersley is just an excuse.
And the intervention itself? Basically, Miliband warns against what he calls ‘Reassurance Labour’, a strain within the party that has cosy ideas about a big, centralised state and its capacity to do good. That’s wrong, he says: the party should own up to the mistakes of its past, keep on devolving power and keep on reforming. Which would also be fine, were it not for the fact that many disgruntled MiliD supporters regard Ed Miliband’s leadership as a doomed exercise in Reassurance Labour. Could their master now be putting voice to these concerns?
David Miliband makes a point of praising his brother, with sentences such as, ‘Ed Miliband has shown he understands this with the policy review now under way.’ But it’s like I said last month: the more the elder Miliband makes ambiguous interventions such as this, the more speculation there will be about his intentions, and the more difficult things will become for his brother. Surely David Miliband realises that, which is what makes this article more venomous than just the sum of its words.
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