Ed Miliband’s critics hate him for his success

On Murdoch, big business, Syria and Palestine, the Labour leader has changed the game. Some will never forgive him

Most political commentators consider Ed Miliband a useless leader. In a narrow sense they are right. He is not very good at getting a positive press or eliciting the support of important outside voices in the media and the business community. Even small stories of no consequence have the potential to turn into minor nightmares for Mr Miliband. The latest of these is his education spokesman Tristram Hunt’s innocuous remark about nuns, transformed by a voracious press into a minor scandal.

Mr Miliband’s bacon sandwich is a far more damaging example of the same phenomenon. But let us take a step backwards and avert our eyes from day to day headlines and political manoeuvres.

Suddenly, Mr Miliband becomes a far more interesting, significant and distinctive figure. Most politicians allow themselves to be shaped by the landscape in which they operate. Only in appearance are they independent figures. In practice they abide by the pieties of the age in which they live. There are certain exceptions to this rule. Enoch Powell — but he never got anywhere. Margaret Thatcher — indisputably.

Like them, Ed Miliband has been his own person, forged his own course and actually been consistent. It is easy to identify four defining phases of his leadership in which he has challenged the underlying structures which govern Westminster conduct.

The first of these came nine months into his leadership, when he confronted the power of the Rupert Murdoch and challenged his bid for the remaining shares in BSkyB. Up to that point every single political leader from Margaret Thatcher on had wooed Murdoch and considered that his support was an essential route to political power.

There is no question that he was effective in changing the terms of trade. We do not need to resort to conjecture to demonstrate this, as we know that the Prime Minister sent a message to Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International, in which he apologised for not being as loyal to her as she had been to him because ‘Ed Miliband had me on the run’.

Shortly afterwards, Mr Miliband made a well-judged speech on the abuse of corporate power. Once again he was defying the conventional wisdom, once again prevalent since the days of Margaret Thatcher, that the path to Downing Street involved flattering the business community.

Then came the vital parliamentary vote on Syria in 2013. According to the political textbook, oppositions always support government proposals on foreign policy, as Iain Duncan Smith did over Iraq. Mr Miliband’s action stopped Britain from making an armed intervention against the Assad regime, thus ending a very long period when British party leaders saw it as their duty to support American foreign policy objectives.

We now come to last year’s Commons vote on the recognition of the Palestinian state. It would have been easy and conventional for Ed Miliband to have allowed his MPs a free vote on such a controversial subject. Instead, he bravely led them into the ‘aye’ lobby. As over Syria, he won the decision in Parliament. He has not been given nearly enough credit for this. It is extremely unusual for opposition leaders to win votes in the House of Commons and Ed Miliband has made a habit of doing so.

Four brave interventions, each one taking on powerful establishment interests: the Murdoch newspaper empire, the corporate elite, the foreign policy establishment and pro-Israel lobby.

Most people will not agree with all these positions. But there is no doubting Mr Miliband’s integrity or his courage. And he needs these qualities because when you attack powerful interests they use all their influence to fight back.

The Murdoch press is now persecuting Mr Miliband. It is hyping up the attacks on him by big business, while mocking him in a personal way. Recently in a Westminster restaurant I saw a top News International henchman having lunch with David Cameron’s culture minister (and unofficial ambassador to the Murdoch press) Ed Vaizey. The alliance between the Murdoch press and the Tory party, knocked temporarily off course during the phone-hacking scandal, is back in business. Mr Murdoch has powerful allies in other newspaper groups who are desperate to avoid another brave commitment from Ed Miliband — his call for full implementation of Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendations on press regulation.

Meanwhile, corporate Britain is exacting its revenge on Mr Miliband because of his refusal to share the world view of big business. Donations to the Labour party have dried up, so much so that he will have difficulty financing his election campaign.

However, Tory coffers are full to bursting and much of this money is being used to vilify the Labour leader through questionable techniques of vile advertising imported from the United States.

Ed Miliband is paying his biggest price of all, however, for his bold stands on Syria and Palestine. Neoconservative opinion (still dominant in the Conservative party and the Blairite wing of Labour) dictates that Miliband should axiomatically have taken the side of Israel over Palestine and of armed intervention in the Syrian conflict.

The backlash hit him particularly hard because it split the Labour party. The allies of Tony Blair have struck back, with Blair himself having accidentally blurted out his doubts about Miliband to numerous journalists. It is notable that all the leading Blairite commentators in the media appear to support David Cameron over Ed Miliband.

During his four-year stint as Labour leader, Ed Miliband has shown courage and principle. His reward is to be trashed and ridiculed and he may yet be destroyed.

Opposition is an essential part of British public life. Oppositions have a duty to challenge government and to give the electorate a clear choice. Ed Miliband has done precisely this and yet he has been written off. Does this mean that no opposition dare offend the big vested interests that govern Britain? Is this really the politics we want?

But consider this: if Ed Miliband does become prime minister, he will have done so without owing anything to anybody.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9438172/ed-milibands-biggest-critics-dont-hate-him-for-how-hes-failed-they-hate-him-for-how-hes-succeeded/

Cameron is a coward in the thrall of Big Business and his chums, Ed stands up for what he believes in and to hell with the consequences. I know what I prefer in a leader.

Excellent article and from the Speccy as well - a traditional Tory supporting publication.

Yep, I had to look twice! Perfectly true though, he has stood up to people and not taken the easy path.

Please state what "successes" he has had, and what "successes" he might have in the future. Thank You.

nicko wrote:Please state what  "successes"   he has had, and what "successes" he might have in the future.   Thank You.

Morning Nicko

I certainly believe the Tories think Miliband will help hem more in the long run, because he has been far from successful. Lets face it, he is a very poor speaker on TV even though he was a former Television research. A substantial amount Labour supporters cringe at his TV performances, as they are so bad. To me he has no balls and the Tories, UKIP and the Liberals will capitalize on this in the debates they have.

risingsun wrote:Yep, I had to look twice!  Perfectly true though, he has stood up to people and not taken the easy path.

Others disagree with you from the left it seems especially on not standing up and being counted:










Forget the New Labour icons Tony Blair and Alan Milburn. Ignore the business bosses Stuart Rose and Stefano Pessina. If Ed Miliband isn't prime minister after the general election in May, he has only one person to blame: himself.
The Labour leader, contrary to the lazy conventional wisdom, has the potential to be a good, even great, premier. He has, his friends say, a "Thatcher-esque" ambition to transform the British political and economic scene and has proved to be one of the most influential leaders of the opposition in living memory, forcing issues such as phone-hacking, the cost of living and Palestinian statehood on to the political agenda. If he wins on 7 May, he will walk through the door of No 10 with more high-level government experience - as a former cabinet minister and an ex-Treasury adviser - than Tony Blair and David Cameron combined when they entered Downing Street.
Yet it isn't just his opponents who question whether Miliband will become prime minister. A growing number of his supporters do, too. Such is the right-wing reflex of much of our press that the only critique of the Labour leader which gets a hearing these days comes from either business bosses or Blairite ultras. There are, however, many centre-left MPs, peers and activists who backed Miliband's insurgent leadership candidacy in the summer of 2010 but who now have their own issues with the Labour leader and his failures. They gather in the pubs and tearooms of Westminster to moan and groan about their man, more in sorrow than in anger.
Consider the following five questions that disillusioned "Ed-ites" often obsess over - and that Miliband has yet to address, in public or in private. First, why has a former television researcher - yes, Miliband worked briefly on Channel 4's A Week in Politics in the early 1990s - failed to recognise how abjectly awful his performances on TV have been since 2010? Why hasn't he taken urgent steps to improve them? In 2011 David Cameron hired Craig Oliver, a former editor of the BBC's News at Ten, to be his director of communications. Miliband preferred to appoint three veteran lobby correspondents with zero experience in television, waiting until as late as September 2014 to recruit Matthew Laza, a former producer for the BBC of The One Show, to serve as his head of broadcasting.
Second, how did this son of Holocaust survivors allow his family's compelling story to be ignored so easily, despite high-profile attacks from the Daily Mail and the pro-Israeli actress Maureen Lipman (who announced that she would be abandoning Labour until it was "led by mensches" - the Yiddish word for people of integrity)? How many are aware that Miliband publicly challenged a Sudanese diplomat over his "disgusting" comparison of efforts to fight climate change with the Holocaust in 2009? A video of him receiving a standing ovation from UN delegates sits unwatched on an obscure BBC News web page and unused by Labour Party spinners. (Google "'Don't wreck conference' pleas Miliband [sic]" if you have three minutes to spare.)
Third, why is a former climate change secretary who launched a "clean coal" policy, who debated against the climate sceptic Nigel Lawson and helped - in the words of the science writer Fred Pearce - "save" the Copenhagen summit in 2009 shedding voters to a resurgent Green Party? Forget "Red Ed"; whatever happened to "Green Ed"?
Fourth, why isn't Miliband - whom the Daily Telegraph described in 2009 as one of the "saints" of the parliamentary expenses scandal - leading the assault on our sclerotic political establishment? Why has he ceded this fertile terrain to a former City trader named Nigel Farage, who once boasted he'd claimed up to £2million in expenses and allowances from the European Parliament?
Fifth, why has one of today's few front-line Labour politicians who opposed the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq kept so quiet about his anti-war record? Why hasn't he led the charge against the inexcusable delay in the publication of the Chilcot report? Labour is haemorrhaging voters to a range of anti-Iraq-war parties, from the Greens and the SNP to the Lib Dems. And yet, speaking at Prime Minister's Questions on 21 January, Miliband remarked, almost as an aside, "Frankly, my views on the Iraq war are well known." Sorry, Ed, they aren't.
The public doesn't have a clue that in early 2003 he phoned Gordon Brown - as I revealed in the New Statesman in 2010 - from the US, where he was on a sabbatical at Harvard, to urge the then chancellor to resist Tony Blair's march to war. (A former Downing Street aide told me how Brown "took Ed's phone call very seriously but, ultimately, other views prevailed".)
Yet on Iraq, as on MPs' expenses, Miliband has taken a vow of silence. Why? To avoid, I'm told, embarrassing or provoking front-bench colleagues who did abuse their expenses and did cheerlead for the war in Iraq - despite Labour's private polling showing how Miliband's record on these issues is of huge appeal to floating voters. "The price of unity has been radicalism," a friend of the Labour leader says. Another one told me that he "has to stop rewarding bad behaviour... He accommodates too much to others and isn't forceful enough."
Miliband is said privately to declaim that he is "strategically bold but tactically cautious". The inescapable problem for this wannabe prime minister is that, day after day, caution wins out. The Labour leader cannot afford to be his own worst enemy, as he approaches the closest general election in a generation. Cravenness doesn't win political battles. Courage does.


http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/ed-miliband-2015-election_b_6668658.html?utm_hp_ref=uk

Bye the way Rising Sun, Millibands family did a great deal of Tax evading when they sold their houses!

Surely you are more intelligent than to believe the rubbish in the DM Nicho! They have tried that one before:

Labour leader Ed Miliband has been accused of avoiding inheritance tax (IHT) by using a deed of variation to his father’s will that moved ownership of some of the family home into his and his brother’s names.

Miliband was forced to defend his own tax arrangements on Thursday, after accusing the Conservatives of accepting money from “dodgy donors” in the wake of the HSBC data leak, which revealed that the bank’s Swiss arm helped wealthy customers avoid taxes and conceal millions of dollars of assets, doling out bundles of untraceable cash and advising clients on how to circumvent domestic tax authorities.
The claim

This is not the first time that such claims have been made – in 2009 Miliband’s brother, David, who was then foreign secretary, was the subject of a story about property ownership that made the same suggestion and Ed took centre stage in a similar story in 2010.

Responding to the latest resurfacing of the claims, Ed Miliband said he had not avoided tax through the scheme. He told the BBC’s Nick Robinson:

Let me just say this: I paid tax as a result of that transaction. I’ve avoided no tax. No doubt the Conservative party wants to smear mud today. But, frankly, it’s not going to work. The story has been written before. And I’ve paid tax on that money.

The facts

The 2010 Daily Telegraph story reported Ed Miliband had paid a capital gains tax bill on his share of the property after selling it to his brother. This could be what he meant by saying he had paid tax on the money.

As things stand, that’s the only tax he has been due to pay related to the property.

Deeds of variation allow wills to be altered after someone has died, and can be made at any time within two years of their death. As well as correcting any mistakes that were made in the original will, they also allow an estate to be divided so that further down the line there is less tax to pay. They don’t reduce the tax bill at the time – IHT is paid on anything the deceased has left over a tax-free threshold.

There was no tax to pay on the family home when Ralph Miliband died, as his wife, Marion, was still alive and could have inherited the whole property without facing a bill. But had she died and left it to her sons, a tax bill was likely to have arisen.

Until 2007, every individual had an IHT allowance and anything they left over that would have been taxed at 40% (since then, couples have been able to transfer any unused allowance, and today a surviving partner could transfer up to £650,000 before facing a bill).

At the time of Miliband senior’s death in May 1994, any part of an estate worth over £150,000 left by his wife would have been taxed at 40%. By 1998, houses on the street were changing hands for £575,000, so some kind of bill was probably already looking likely four years years earlier.

A deed of variation reportedly changed his will so that Marion Miliband’s estate was reduced. Instead of leaving 100% of the house if she died, she got 60% while the brothers each received 20%.

Had she retained a 100% share, and her home had one day been sold for £575,000, the IHT bill would have been £170,000; after the deed of variation the same event would have triggered a bill of £78,000.
Verdict

This kind of deed was often used to reduce tax bills before the new transfer rule came into effect in 2007.

However, the changes in 2007 mean that a surviving spouse now inherits the tax-free sum that their partner did not use. Without the deed of variation, the beneficiaries of Marion’s estate would benefit from any of Ralph’s unused allowance as well as her allowance; with it, they will only get anything that wasn’t used. So there is no tax advantage.

Frank Nash, tax partner at accountants Blick Rothenberg, says the effect of the deed is no different to that which would have been achieved if there had been a well-written will in the first place. “What the deed seems to have done is to pass the £150,000 tax-free allowance from the father directly to the children,” he says. “If the father had sat down a month earlier and written the will to do that there would have been no issue.”

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/12/did-ed-miliband-avoid-inheritance-tax-parents-home-deed-of-variation?CMP=share_btn_tw

That shows you did not read the article by Medhi did you Stassi. Who is right to give out a clear warning that Labour will not win in the present form of Miliband, he is too poor in public speaking. Read all the points he made again on Miliband because they are valid in regards to the Labour party standing any chance in this election. I am being impartial here and actually thankful that by having Miliband as their leader in this election, they have scored an own goal. Miliband is less popular than Cameron and he is less popular than Labour. So how can you front a person less popular than your own party and the opposition? Its not like he has been PM before like others, he has no track record as PM and his popularity is way lower than Cameron

That is Labour through and through and I think many Labour MP's also know he should go if Labour stand a chance of winning the election. Where the Polls are neck and neck for Tory and Labour. Clearly Miliband is falling flat on the population in support. It is a tactical blunder on the part of Labour and even I can admit they would do far better with someone more dynamic and bold. Hence why I am very happy. As the public debates will  leave Miliband coming off poorly and you will see further support dwindle for Labour. So all plus points for the Tories who maybe bad, but are the best of a very bad bunch to choose from.
Strategically Labour have blundered.

Happy Days