Investigation/Not Born Yesterday
As and when New Labour loses the next election, most of the shrewd money expects David Miliband to succeed his current boss without too much trouble. There are a lot of banana skins David could slip on during that period, but the odds are against this happening: Mr Miliband is a careful technocrat who rarely falters. For this and many other reasons, it might be a blessing for all of us if Labour were to be out of power for as long as possible after 2010.
The first thing to say about our current Foreign Secretary is that he is not a crook. He is devoted to his violinist wife Louise Shackleton, and his expenses as an MP are well below average. Although his often rather stupidly extended vowels suggest a privileged background, this is an affectation: Miliband comes from a partly Jewish immigrant left-intellectual background, but was educated at a Comprehensive. He undoubtedly perfected the drawl while getting a First in PPE at Corpus Christi. Although dubbed 'brains' by many in New Labour, David Miliband is more idiot savant than Renaissance Man: he didn't get any A grades at A-Level, and in his fourth subject - Physics - he got a D. But like many in today's political class, he excels at the academic profession of politics, in which he obtained an impressive second degree while a Kennedy scholar at MIT.
In a nutshell, Miliband is narrow rather than Harrow. He is classic New Labour: the calculating, cautious technocrat devoid of any commercial experience. This blinkered view of the world is, I think, a large part of the reason why most senior politicians these days have not the remotest clue how much damage their technocracy is doing to our culture, our liberties, and the standing of Parliamentary democracy.
David is of the Cameroon generation: he is forty-one years old, and spent only the last seven of them as an MP. Ted Heath became Prime Minister when he was two, and Margaret Thatcher when he was eight. He has never seen a Labour Government achieve anything, and he has no experience of when Britain was a calmer, more balanced country. He probably does believe that the only worthwhile achievement is mastering the technical process of staying in power: but either way, Mr Miliband is convinced that everything is just fine in Cool Britannia.
The Foreign Secretary gave this away rather clumsily in an interview with Andrew Marr two weeks ago. Answering a question about British decline, he spoke as follows:
"Look, everyone knows that Britain is no longer a nation in decline. That hasn't been true of the UK for decades, and it certainly isn't what people abroad think".
It's not hard to ridicule this observation. Under Brown, the Pound has been caned by the Euro. Our military budget is (literally) empty - our armed forces live in prefab Holiday Camps, are paid very poorly, and often go into battle equipped with lowest-cost weaponry and protection. Fifty per cent of the population share one per cent of the wealth among them. There is virtually no subsidised dentistry any more. Standards, discipline and caring staff are almost absent from the NHS, itself riddled with killer bugs and bankrupt Trusts. Tiny renegade countries insult Britain on a casually regular basis. Thanks to a ludicrous Iraq invasion (which Miliband strongly supported) almost every Middle East Arab hates us, and 34% of Muslims living here do too. Despite the Prime Minister's repeatedly gabbled lies on the subject, there are now over twice as many people living in poverty as there were ten years ago. A million and a half are unemployed. Personal debt stands at three times the level in real terms than ever before in history. Stagflation lies ahead. Prisons are stuffed to the gills (although crime is 'going down'). Social violence, public urination, attacks on the police and criminal gun ownership are spiralling out of control.
Most Americans, Dutch, French and Germans I know think Britain is a basket-case whose banks are unstable and whose Treasury is near to insolvency.
But like the Prime Minister, David sees only our G8 league table position as the measure of 'not being in decline'. As Foreign Secretary, he is never more absurd than when handing out dire warnings to foreign leaders in China, Dafur, Zimbabwe, Iran and Burma - all of whom have in turn (and in public) laughed off this tin-soldier Ruritanian gunboat nonsense.
David Miliband has not become The Man Most Likely To by accident. He is the leading player (in fact, pretty much the founder) of a young reformers' group based in North London, currently referred to by wags in the Party as 'Brownites for Blair'. This is hardly Young Turk ginger-group stuff: it is in fact an almost exact reflection of the Cameroon's 'middle way' thing, Majorites for Thatcher. But then, the group isn't meant to shake things up: on the contrary, it is a carefully created banality designed to ensure that all its adherents (including the Magic Strip-In James Purnell, and a dozen or so others of the nakedly ambitious persuasion) retain the mainstream of power as New Labour moves onto become New Young Labour.
Power and control seem to be central to The Miliband - as it would, I think, be appropriate to start calling all those in his camp. The two brothers and their coterie have been quietly licking movers and shakers in the Parliamentary Party ever since the Gordian Knot began to unravel. He may choose to give the standard 'I do not recognise these descriptions as the man I work with day in and day out' as a predictable support-effort on telly for his ailing boss, but there is little doubt now (and it's been this way for a fortnight at least) that in private David Miliband would like to be given the maximum time to stabilise things - and persuade the electorate by 2010 that his Government would be cleaner, less accident-prone and better at communicating than the current one.
To be fair to the bloke, it probably would be. But with Mr Milliband at the helm, the chances are also that it will be even more anti-libertarian, and just as controlling. The website Theyworkforyou.com is the best source I know for information about what politicians say on the one hand, but do on the other. As regards Miliband's Parliamentary voting behaviour, the record is revealing.
The Foreign Secretary has always abstained on issues of a more transparent Parliament. He voted very strongly for the Iraq War, very strongly against an investigation into that war, very strongly for the introduction of ID cards, very strongly for extensions of period without trial under the anti-terrorism laws, and very strongly for the fox-hunting ban.
These are not exactly the votes of a man keen to restore freedoms of speech and support individual liberty. Even less so when one considers the enthusiasm of his support for the insane Racial & Religious Hatred Bill, the last attempt (before 7/7 thankfully scotched it) by illiberal Islam in the UK to make criticism of religious minorities a crime even if the criticisms were true.
So Miliband is not only at the Hobbesian end of social engineering, he is also frequently wrong. But then, he wouldn't see those votes as 'wrong': he'd use another word - shrewd perhaps, or tactical. David is, as we established earlier, straight and in no way crooked - he is a man with no convictions to his name - in every sense of the phrase.