Though Cowards Flinch

I’ve just read this post over at Max Atkinson’s blog, which admittedly I would have never encountered were it not for an eye-catching tweet containing the link, which insinuated that if elected, Ed Miliband would take the Labour Party back to the dark days of 80′s class warfare.

The main point being made in the post is best summed up in the following paragraph;

Now that Ed Miliband has won the backing of the big unions, whose support Ed Balls had been hoping for, the question is: can Labour afford to back Ed Miliband on his journey back to 1979 and the wonderful world of old Labour?

The implication, that Ed Miliband is some sort of militant figure one might expect to find on the hard left, wo is comparable to the likes of Michael Foot or Tony Benn, is simply laughable, and is something I’ve heard repeated several times recently.

After showing a 5 second long clip of Ed in which he says, “I’m standing because of my values, values my parents taught me” Max go’s on to say;

Although I know nothing at all about his mother’s values, I do know that his father, the late Ralph Miliband, was a militant Marxist and a highly influential member of a generation of sociological theorists who (in my opinion) contributed towards undermining the credibility of a once respectable discipline

Well Max, his mother said Jon Cruddas would be her preferred candidate in the contest if that helps at all…

Quality of Ralph Miliband’s work aside (which I would recommend by the way), there is nothing about Ed Miliband’s ideas on the practical approach to politics, which would lead one to believe he is following in his fathers ideological footsteps. Indeed quite the opposite is true. One of Ralph’s key works, Parliamentary Socialism: A study of the politics of Labour, he questioned the possibility of advancing the Socialist cause through parliamentary politics, as opposed to more militant mobilisation of the working class favoured by his father. So we can safely assume that in this regard Ed isn’t following in his fathers footsteps. Perhaps his mothers more centric, Crudassite tendencies balanced him out a bit!

This kind of lazy, sensationalist analysis bores me. The fact that anyone to the Left of Tony Blair is instantly labelled as deluded, unelectable etc. is a common knee jerk response from anyone who views center ground politics as the Holy Grail of modern political thought, the expression of which sometimes borders on McCarthyism.

So besides the fact that at least one half of his moral inspiration was a Marxist academic, is there any other evidence that Ed is the Revolutionary Class warrior some seem to view him as?

The main philosophical points of Ed’s campaign, that there is more to society than the market, that the state has a responsibility to protect the most vulnerable from the excesses this market produces, and that greater social equality leads to a more cohesive society. All pretty common amongst the left of center, Social Democratic lexicon. As Comrade Doran quite eloquently articulated it recently he is a ”Moderate Radical“.

Indeed, when the leadership candidates were asked at a recent hustings event, “are you a Socialist – and what does the word mean to you?”, Ed’s answer certainly seemed to confirm his commitment to Social Democratic Reformism;

“Being a socialist for me is about being willing to criticise capitalism – and saying capitalism produces many injustices, which politics must tackle. It is not about abolishing capitalism but it is about changing it”

It often annoys me how people who claim to want to see “change” in British politics are so wiling to denounce anything that appears to step even slightly outside the current status quo, and to do it with such half-baked observations as this is even worse.

The whole debate about center ground politics in Britain, and more specifically the urgent need to hold on to it, is often distorted by highly opinionated, stubborn points of view, that essentially end up with two sides who disagree shouting long-held, fiercely rigid dogmas at one another, bringing into question its right to even be called a debate anymore.

That in mind, I don’t have any desire to get into the “center ground debate” today, which Carl decided to start some discussion on last night. I just wanted to point out how bloody stupid it was to try to imply Ed Miliband might be the next Tony Benn.