Miliband and the Mail: seeing red

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/01/daily-mail-ed-miliband-attack

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Last Saturday's Daily Mail carried a trenchant hit job on a dead man: Ralph Miliband – a man, the paper claimed, who "hated Britain". Professor Miliband's son, Ed, requested an opportunity to reply, which the Mail granted. Extraordinarily, the paper also reprinted most of the attack on Professor Miliband, together with a splenetic editorial lambasting his "evil legacy". Such an assault, unmistakably aimed at the Labour leader, has provoked a rare political consensus. Both David Cameron and Nick Clegg criticised the Mail and sympathised with Mr Miliband's fury.

Professor Miliband, who died nearly 20 years ago, was a Jewish refugee who had joined the navy in time for the D-day landings. The account of Ralph Miliband's politics, supported by partial quotes from diaries and letters beginning in 1940, when he was barely 17, will be familiar to many as the essence of the thinking of the mid-20th century non-parliamentary new left. Some – although not Miliband senior – were sympathetic to the Soviet Union, but the objects of his derision – Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, the Times and the church – were shared too by critics of communism such as George Orwell, whose dissection of the national character, England, Your England, mocks a land of snobbery and privilege. Forty years later, Professor Miliband's rage at the Falklands war and his accurate observation that it would strengthen the hand of Margaret Thatcher were equally a part of the contemporary discourse.

The Mail thinks his views are dangerous intellectual claptrap. They are perfectly entitled to think that, though not, as his biographer argues today, to distort either Professor Miliband's views or the biography itself. By delving back into the fight against fascism, the Mail inevitably invites consideration of its own record in the 1930s and 40s. The first Viscount Rothermere supported Mosley and the Blackshirts in the early 1930s. Later the paper favoured appeasement and tried to subvert the constitution in Edward VIII's favour during the abdication crisis. The 1930s were uncertain and difficult times and hard judgment calls were made. It is only with hindsight that it is clear how wrong, even – looking back – how potentially treacherous some of them were.

The Miliband legacy – in so far as there is one – is the determination to make Britain a fairer and more equal place. Like many Marxist intellectuals who grew up before and during the second world war, the professor – remembered fondly by students as a compelling author and lecturer, rather than, as the Mail would have it, the pedlar of a poisonous creed – never abandoned his critique of the Labour party, as both his sons have ruefully observed. Arguably his greatest work, Parliamentary Socialism, was a frustrated analysis of the party's determination to work within the constitution, even though, in his view, it made the achievement of socialism itself impossible. Ralph Miliband lived to see the fall of the Soviet Union. He came to recognise that capitalist democracy, for all its failings, was less oppressive and more democratic than any communist regime.

The last paragraphs of the Mail's editorial manage to elide Karl Marx and the "hammer and sickle" with Ed Miliband's stance – shared by Mr Cameron, Mr Clegg and the overwhelming majority of MPs – on press regulation. The paper suggests that Mr Miliband, motivated perhaps by communist genes, is poised to "crush" the freedom of the press in this country. There are echoes here of the extraordinary issue of the Mail last November in which no fewer than 10 pages were devoted to a similar character assassination of Sir David Bell, one of Lord Justice Leveson's lay assessors. We share some of the Mail's anxieties about the future shape of press regulation. Highly personalised attacks on those involved in searching for the right solution, far less their dead relatives, will win over no friends to the press's side of the argument – quite the opposite. The Mail's voice in the debate is important: but reasoned discussion is better than hatchet jobs.

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