Amol Rajan: Only fools will underestimate ‘weak’ Ed Miliband
And so we come at last to the witching hour of British politics, a year and a half from a general election, when mythical creatures are born and false narratives acquire a veneer of respectability. Sometimes, both happen at the same time, as in the case of Ed Miliband.
In the past few weeks, the attacks against the Labour leader have sharpened, and his enemies have alighted on three messages in particular. I know this because they told me as much. Between now and 2015 they will insist that Miliband is weak, a Marxist, and lacking policy. These assertions are, in no particular order, false, false and false.
The claim that Miliband is weak, or cowardly, is curious, given that his leadership has been defined by a desire to pick fights. He won the Labour leadership by picking a fight with his brother. His first year was dominated by the decision to pick a fight with Rupert Murdoch.
After the debacle of the Falkirk by-election, he picked a fight with his biggest clients and allies in public life, the trade unions. Since then, he has picked a fight with the Daily Mail.
Incidentally, he has picked fights largely at the instigation of a little understood but influential community organiser from the US called Arnie Graf. You don’t have to be Arnie Graf to know that David Miliband, Rupert Murdoch, Britain’s trade unions and the Daily Mail are formidable foes. And you don’t have to be Einstein to understand the Labour leader’s record is good.
Recently, the Prime Minister has taken to calling Miliband a Marxist. Doubtless David Cameron read Marx in great detail as an undergraduate but he left Oxford in 1988 and appears not to have revisited him since. Not many people who use the term “Marxist” these days know what it means. It is true that Miliband’s energy price freeze plan, which is smart politics and bad economics, is a Left-wing gesture; and it is true that one of his aims in life is to move the centre ground in British politics to the Left. But Miliband has committed, for goodness sake, to the Coalition’s spending plans.
He has no intention of reinstating Clause Four, and will not be the Prime Minister to renationalise the railways. He is a conventional social democrat, not a socialist — and still less a Marxist. He sets out not to destroy capitalism but use the state to temper its effects.
As to the claim that Miliband lacks policies, this sits uneasily with the condemnation of his price freeze, a policy if ever you’ve seen one. If anything, Miliband’s team have too many policies, not too few. Indeed, they have so many that what they lack is a clear narrative to unite them. The price-freeze policy is best understood as a popular retail offer designed to address that malady.
I am not a Labour member. But a passing interest in epistemology, and a deep belief in the virtue of journalism, compel me to remind you that there is such a thing as truth, and that our political class has a diminishing concern for it.
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Next time you hear one of them call Ed Miliband weak, a Marxist or lacking in policy, remember that what they’re really saying is they don’t like his face.
Amol Rajan is editor of The Independent
