Spare us from Labour’s smug, shameless, unprincipled, ONE-MAN WALKING DISASTER ZONE
COMING through the radio was an unfortunate, adenoidal voice that all but shrunk my toothpaste back into its tube. For this distinctive drone was emanating from a man with a base layer of smugness and repeated high notes of condescension.
It was Ed Miliband, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State of Climate Change and Net Zero, being interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme last Thursday.
You might have thought he would have had the good grace to slink out of politics after having led the Labour Party to defeat in the 2015 General Election. No such luck.
His career was resuscitated by Sir Keir Starmer in 2020. So, if Labour wins the election, the man remembered mostly for gurning while eating a bacon sandwich would return to a Cabinet seat as one of the most powerful figures in the country.
While Miliband might be regarded as a figure of fun, he is anything but, with a track record that is variously shameless, unprincipled and dangerous.
Take his current role. He makes a great song and dance about his devotion to protecting the environment, parading himself as one of the country’s leading green advocates. When Labour committed itself in 2021 to an annual spending spree of £28 billion on green projects, Miliband was cock-a-hoop, having drawn up almost all the plans himself as his personal green policy wish-list.
This, though, was just the latest in a career-long record of disaster.
Many will never forget how the 2015 election campaign witnessed one of the most bizarre, patronising gimmicks any party has ever come up with – the so-called EdStone, an 8ft 6in-tall limestone tablet with six election pledges carved into it alongside the Labour logo and Miliband’s signature.
WIDELY mocked, Boris Johnson called it ‘some weird commie slab’, while Labour MP Michael Dugher described it as a ‘12ft, granite, marble cock-up’.
After this, there were those in Labour who were aghast that Starmer handed Miliband control over so vast an area of policy. But north London neighbour Starmer seemed in thrall to him and was happy to let him get on with it.
Miliband spent three years gleefully trumpeting that £28billion spending commitment. By one calculation, Labour and Miliband repeated it 311 times.
Yet, towards the end of last year, it seemed that Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves had convinced Starmer that the pledge was ludicrously expensive and Labour was about to dump it.
Miliband refused to accept the inevitable but, in February, Starmer humiliated the man who had originally groomed him into the party fold and oversaw his entrance to Parliament as MP for Holborn and St Pancras.
The protege binned his erstwhile master’s plans, slashing the £28billion pledge to £4.7billion.
If Miliband had a trace of political principle – or even self-respect – he would have resigned. He has, after all, built his entire public profile on green issues since his backbench wilderness. Moreover, it is hard to imagine a more public statement that Miliband’s boss had lost confidence in him than the brutal unravelling of almost all he stands for.
But there he remains in the job, further humiliated every time he appears in public to be questioned about Labour’s policies. All the questions on that gruesome interview on Thursday were about Labour’s ditched or shrivelled green agenda.
Miliband’s Mr Bean-like capacity for causing chaos and his lack of principle are nothing new. As Labour leader, he was responsible for two of the most shameful episodes in the party’s history – and that doesn’t include his unforgivable knifing of his older brother David when the Labour leadership became vacant in 2010.
In 2013, it emerged that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against his own people, crossing what US President Barack Obama had called a ‘red line’. Britain was ready to join the US in taking military action against Assad, to maintain what then PM David Cameron called the ‘international taboo’ against the use of heinous weapons.
If we did nothing, it would give Assad a green light to commit more abuses. But Miliband whipped Labour to oppose action and the Commons vote was lost.
It was bad enough opposing military action; the Commons vote then scared Obama into doing nothing himself, and the butchery of the Syrian people continued.
Red Ed’s most disastrous legacy involved the election of his successor, Jeremy Corbyn. Miliband replaced the party’s traditional, trusted ‘electoral college’ system by which to vote in a new leader, with what was described as ‘one member, one vote’ – except it wasn’t only members who could vote. Anyone was allowed to take part if they paid a £3 fee.
The result was that people who had never set foot in a party meeting were able to decide who should lead it – allowing thousands from the hard-Left to hijack the vote and saddle Labour with Jeremy Corbyn. His leadership introduced a brand of toxic politics into Britain and unleashed a torrent of antiSemitism – all of which was a result of Miliband’s idiotic rule change.
NONETHELESS, Miliband continues to exude an air of smug superiority, as if he has somehow divined the answers to all the great issues of the age – of which, he has decided, climate change is the only one that matters. The rest of us mere mortals must do as he thinks best. But the reality is that he is an unthinking archetypal ‘progressive’ – hence his fixation on the environment.
That’s illustrated by his attitude to trans issues, to which, in 2017, he devoted an episode of the insufferably self-satisfied podcast, Reasons To Be Cheerful, which he set up after resigning as Labour leader. On it, he uncritically pushed all the now-discredited mantras of the trans lobby, describing opponents of self-identification as ‘bonkers’ and inviting on his show the now notorious Dr Helen Webberley, who ran a private clinic with her husband (since struck off the medical register) which prescribed hormones to children. Now we can look forward to Miliband returning to office if Labour wins the election. Despite his £28billion pratfall, he still claims that Labour would implement ‘a world-leading plan to get to clean power by 2030’. All electricity would supposedly be generated by a combination of wind, solar and nuclear.
Now, that really is ‘bonkers’. At its most basic, experts say the necessary cable infrastructure cannot be laid until 2030 at the optimistic earliest. Labour – and Miliband – must know this, but they continue spouting this drivel. It is a worrying foretaste of what lies in store if Labour’s own walking disaster zone returns to power.