Section:GDN 1J PaGe:1 Edition Date:190821 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 20/8/2019 18:30 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
I
n that moment you could feel British politics
lurching out of its rut. Labour was about to pick
its next leader – and instead of choosing the
favourite, the old Tony Blair tribute act, voters
were throwing a giant spanner in the works. They
wanted the slightly gawky left wing underdog.
They wanted a transformed party, a bigger
politics. They wanted Ed Miliband.
So much has changed this decade that it seems absurd
to consider how at its start, in 2010, a 40-year-old father
of two and whiz on a Rubik’s Cube was considered the
biggest threat to the British establishment. Did that
really happen? He was Red Ed, a “Marxoid creep” (the
Daily Mail, of course), the man with the sneaky plan to
turn the country into some socialist banana republic.
How laughably tinny such j ibes sound today. Seen in
the rearview mirror of a country hurtling towards a cliff -
edge, undeterred by Whitehall warnings of shortages in
medicine, fuel and food , the Miliband era looks enviable.
You could quarrel and quibble with the man, of course;
you could pick holes all day long. But knowing what
was to come, how the next couple of episodes were to
play out, would you still have gone for the chilla xing
blunderer who landed us in a historic mess then grabbed
the thick end of a million quid from some poor sap of apublisher to stick his trotters up in a £25,000 shed and
yawn out a memoir?
To put it in the argot of those times, which would you
prefer : chaos with Ed Miliband or stability and strong
government with David Cameron, Theresa May and
Boris Johnson? If ideologically you dress to the right,
which do you really consider poses a greater threat to the
economy: a modest tax on bankers’ bonuses or month
upon month of delays and disruption at our ports?
Who do you reckon really looks less of a leader: the one
who critics dubbed Wallace, or the lying blond clown
who styles himself as a latter day Winston Churchill?
I am no nostalgic, and consider counterfactual
history the academic discipline of snake-oil salesmen
in tweed jackets. But the Miliband period off ers serious
lessons for today, as we stand on the verge of the kind
of tumult few of us have seen in our lifetimes. Our
problems at the end of this decade are far larger than
they ever were at its start – yet there are echoes. Then as
now, we were in rarely visited political territory with a
coalition government using a global banking crisis to
make historic spending cuts. Just like now, the Tories
were hastily trying to paint their Labour
opponents as dangerous radicals posing
a threat to the British way of life. And thisTrump’s promises are hot air – his aim is Brexit chaos Michael H Fuchs, page 3
There’s more to lesbians than our sex lives Hannah Jane Parkinson, page 4
Youth protest is an age-old sign of failed politics Fiona Sturges, page 5
The Guardian Wednesday 21 August 2019
Can’t abide
Corbyn? Learn
from the moral
of Miliband
Opinion
and ideasG2
Daily
pullout
life &
arts
section
InsideAditya
Chakrabortty
Ed Miliband
and Jeremy
Corbyn at a
campaign rally
ahead of the EU
referendum
in 2016
PHOTOGRAPH:
STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PARELEASED BY "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws