The Miliband that got away
The former foreign secretary talks to Gaby Hinsliff about feminism, brother Ed – and who he’s backing in the election…
it was in a rural African hut filled with women that David Miliband heard a story that has stayed with him.
The former British foreign secretary was on a trip to the Congo, a country long-ravaged by civil war and endemic sexual violence, when he met a group of women training to be community leaders.
‘You think, one bloke going into a meeting of 40 women, how comfortable are they going to be speaking ? Are they going to feel they don’t want to reveal details of their families, their trauma?’ admits Miliband, now chief executive of the refugee charity the International Rescue Committee (IRC). But the group’s leader stopped him in his tracks. ‘This woman said, “The IRC explained to me that rape was a word and a word that had meaning, and the meaning was that I was forced to have sex with my husband or with someone else, and that I had a right to say no.”’ Rape was so common in their lives, he explains, that these women hadn’t previously had words to describe something that seemed so everyday; the assumption was just ‘that’s what men do and that’s what women do. What you want doesn’t even come into the equation.’
Understanding that they were supposed to have a choice over what happened to them didn’t change everything overnight, he concedes. But it changed the way women thought about their futures; it changed what they told their daughters and, crucially, their sons. ‘The power that she embodied, the courage and resilience – it was inspiring.’
We’re talking in his London office, in the middle of a flying visit to Britain. After famously losing the 2010 Labour leadership contest to his younger brother Ed, David left Parliament and took the IRC job in New York, where he lives with his American-born violinist wife Louise and their two sons. His focus now, he says, is turning the IRC into a feminist organisation. The majority of refugees from war or humanitarian disaster are female, because men are more likely to die fighting or else have the means to escape; women and children are more likely to get
left behind, often in chaotic conditions or in countries where they were already vulnerable to sexual assault, domestic violence or forced marriage to start with. Yet only 0.12% of humanitarian budgets goes on tackling gender-based violence, which the IRC will argue (in a report published later this month) just isn’t enough.
What female refugees need, says Miliband, is not just emergency help like food or shelter or specialised support for sexual trauma, but a feminist approach to the underlying inequalities in their countries which make it harder for them to rebuild their lives. ‘Someone who has been sexually abused and given survivor support – you’d be foolish to assume they will never be subject to it again. If you can give them financial independence, you’re going to reduce the chances,’ he says. ‘To be a truly successful humanitarian organisation we have to be a feminist organisation.’
If he is unusually relaxed for a 54-yearold politician discussing feminism, that might well be down to the influence of his mother, Marion. ‘She taught my dad to be a feminist. He wasn’t anti-feminist but – well, fascism hit his country when he was 16, he fought in the war. In the ’50s she taught him that if you wanted to be a modern person, you had to be a feminist as well.’
And that’s not the only family connection to this job. Ralph and Marion Miliband were Jewish refugees who fled to Britain from Belgium and Poland respectively, although they spared their sons much detail of what they’d experienced under the Nazis. ‘Like many who were first generation after trauma, they wanted to protect their children from what they went through.’ He’s clearly dismayed by widespread allegations of anti-semitism inside Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, and has accused his party of becoming a magnet for some people with ‘absolutely repulsive views’. So, given he’s still registered to vote in British elections, in the Camden constituency held by Labour’s Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer, is he happy voting to make Corbyn Prime Minister in December?
‘I will vote for Sir Keir Starmer, I promise,’ he says. That’s not quite the same as saying he wants Corbyn in Number 10, I point out. ‘I think there will be a lot of tactical voting, because it looks like it’s going to be overlain with Brexit. There should be a [second] referendum to address Brexit separate from the question of who runs the country, including the question of which personalities run the country for five years.’ So does that mean he is or isn’t comfortable with Corbyn running the country? ‘I’m comfortable voting Labour, Keir Starmer.’ It’s not the most ringing endorsement by the man who might have led Labour into the 2015 election if things had turned out differently.
Earlier this month, the comedian-turnedCarpool Karaoke host, James Corden, tweeted: ‘I truly believe the day David Miliband left politics it all started to unravel’. Miliband bursts out laughing when asked about that, explaining they’ve met a couple of times. ‘He’s so talented and he’s such a nice bloke.’ He says his singing voice isn’t up to Carpool standards – ‘I’m married to a musician and I’m tone deaf, so she’d say: “Whatever you do, don’t sing”’ – but six years after he left the country and four years after his younger brother resigned as Labour leader, you get the feeling his resolve to stay out of politics is softening.
The brothers’ relationship was horribly strained by the leadership contest, but is clearly easier now (they haven’t met up on this visit, but David insists that’s only because Ed’s up in his Doncaster constituency and ‘we haven’t crossed over’.) He’s clearly following the ups and downs of Brexit closely, and, far from becoming Americanised, says he still feels ‘as British as fish and chips’. So is he ever coming home? ‘I hope so, at some point. But I don’t know when,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a job I’m very committed to… you can only make your professional choices according to where you think you can have the most impact, and once you’re clear on that you then have to try and resolve it with your family commitments.’
And for now, he says, he thinks he can have most impact at the IRC. Attitudes to immigration may seem to be hardening in Trump’s America and Brexit Britain, but he thinks the recent human tragedy involving 39 people freezing to death in the back of a lorry, having been smuggled illegally into Britain, may have reminded the public that people crossing continents are human beings first and foremost. Crack down on legal migration, he argues, and people will just risk their lives trying to reach the West illegally. ‘People smugglers don’t go away if there’s less legal immigration, they rub their hands in glee. I always say you can build the wall as high as you like, but people will do more to get over it, round it, under it, through it and more people will lose their lives doing it. Desperate people do desperate things.’ For now, at least, his job is trying to provide some of them with a place of safety.
‘what female refugees need is a feminist approach to inequalities’