Ralph Miliband died before New Labour

The Marxist academic writer, Ralph Miliband, died in 1994 before the establishment of New Labour under Tony Blair, and before his sons, David and Ed, became involved in the Blair-Brown governments.

Throughout his academic career, Ralph Miliband wrote about the Labour Party from its inception up until his own death in 1994, with his main area of interest being the Party's role during the Post-War consensus. His thesis from the mid sixties onwards was invariable: the Labour Party could never bring about socialism in Britain. And his insistence on this point gave rise to the quip that he even produced two sons to prove it.

Ralph Miliband emphasised that the maintenance of capitalist rule in the West required both repression and reform. The post-war Labour prime ministers: Atlee (1945-51), Wilson (1964-70, 1974-76) and Callaghan (1976-79), for any number of reasons, were loyal to the British power structure and the post-war consensus, and therefore never sought fundamental change in favour of working people. These men, however, envisaged, and did to some extent achieve, a limited number of progressive reforms.

In 1994, Ralph Miliband died and in the same year Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party. Blair and New Labour found themselves on a completely different political landscape in 1997 compared with any of their Labour predecessors. But crucially, they had no social democratic aspirations and intended to reconcile the Party and the electorate to market fundamentalism. Both Miliband’s sons, David and Ed, found leading roles inside New Labour: David rose to be foreign secretary and Ed became Labour opposition leader in 2010. Both have no experience in, nor desire for, class or socialist politics. David retired from active politics in 2013.

The issue that Ralph Miliband confronted was the inadequacy of Labour Party reformism. He could never have envisaged a Labour Party, led by his own son, which had deteriorated even further, and had abandoned reformism and even mild social democracy.

Can David Miliband succeed?

Can David Miliband succeed?

Just look where he is coming from as a loyal Blairite. New Labour junked everything that Labour hitherto stood for, social equality, civil liberties and international law, in order to profit from and ingratiate itself with big business and win ephemeral support from Middle England. Electoral success became the only raison d'etre for this compromised and unprincipled party.

Today the Labour Party has the backing only of its core voters who have nowhere else to turn. David Miliband has nothing in common with those people and their problems.

The great shame is that David didn't learn anything from his famous and much respected father. But there again if he had he wouldn't have risen to the top of New Labour.

Miliband hides the torture of Binjam Mohamed

It is hard to see how the Miliband’s suppression of the details of Binyam Mohamed’s torture by the Americans is even in the government’s own interests.

Not only does his tortured logic for covering up the information make Miliband look ridiculous, but precisely because everybody knows Binyam was in fact tortured, the speculation over the details will continue. Had the government ‘come clean’ the story would have died much sooner.

If ever released alive and sane, this Binyam Mohamed can presumably give first hand testimony of the details his torture at the hands of the Americans.

If this Binyam Mohamed has held British resident status, then even though he is an Ethiopian citizen, it is clear that this country owes him a duty of care; even David Miliband seems to recognise this.

Apart from humanitarian grounds, he should be returned to Britain for two reasons: first, so that the details of his torture at the hands of the Americans can be properly documented; and second we need to enquire into his activities and his kidnap.

All the information should then be placed into the public domain.