Ralph Miliband: A Benefactor of Slander

The recent Daily Mail ‘essay’ (to use Daily Mail sketch writer Quentin Letts’ wonderful euphemism) on Professor Ralph Miliband has demonstrated once more, in no uncertain terms, the vicious and quite frankly lunatic nature of some elements of the British Press. They have, quite rightly, come under the strictest censure and condemnation for what can only be described as a hateful and fear-filled piece. On the other hand (this is not to defend ‘The Mail’ in any way) I could hardly describe the article as a ‘smear’.

That the article was written to vilify is in no doubt. The actual result has been, on the other hand, positive. After all the Mail has introduced us all (be honest, how many of you knew of Marxist academic Ralph Miliband last month?) to an erudite and redoubtable intellect. Some of the Mail’s statements sound like praise, at least to my ears, be it “Miliband was taught politics by Harold Laski, a giant of Labour’s Left” or “He was already on his way to becoming a heavyweight thinker”, and I positively envy both the position of his grave (just twelve yards from that of Karl Marx!) and the subdued eloquence of his epitaph ‘Writer Teacher Socialist’. The Mail’s argument does not make sense; first they attack Professor Miliband as a dangerous socialist espousing a ‘poisonous ideology’, then they criticise some dubious tax affairs (an issue that is genuinely concerning) as “hardly the behaviour of a tax-loving socialist.” This reminds me a little of Freud’s old broken kettle joke: I find that a kettle I had lent to a neighbour is now broken. They explain that: 1) they had returned the kettle undamaged; 2) the kettle was broken when they received it; and 3) they never borrowed the kettle off me anyway. The Mail’s argument lacks the sophistication for three excuses: you get the point.

More important than internal inconsistencies in the Mail, however, (or indeed the negative attitude behind the article itself, which is, let us be honest, simply business as usual for a rag) is the manner in which the Mail has been criticised. The first is the remarkable inanity of the criticism that “it’s unfair to attack a dead man”. This may be so, but I would suggest dead people do need vilifying, not least Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail. “Seventeen year olds write stupid things”. Yes, they do, but the excerpt quoted by the Mail seems reasonable – we must not forget that Britain still has the most disgraceful colonial record in history, despite the attempts of the Japanese, the Belgians, the Americans etc. Finally, who really cares whether someone hates ‘their’ country or not? The second would be the remarkable consensus across political parties about the incorrectness of the Mail.

There is evidence that The Conservative Party (despite Vince Cable’s warnings) are still human, perhaps a sign, even, that the entire political class is able to transcend the petty rivalries of partisan politics and achieve a ‘third way’ perspective on both matters of ‘national importance’ and basic human ‘decency’. It is when we arrive at this conclusion that alarm bells ring.

The first point of concern was made in an otherwise deeply stupid article by Tim Stanley in the Telegraph (an article that, relying only on ad hominem and tu quoque, compared the journalistic integrity of the Mail and the Guardian), noting that the Mail has given ample reason for the Government to push forward moves for press regulation. The point was brought home to me by Tory MP Grant Shapps, whose approach on question time left me musing that ‘‘the MP doth protest too much, methinks.’’

The second point was already being made by none other than Ralph Miliband in his 1977 book, Marxism and Politics: “In the liberal view of politics, conflict exists in terms of ‘problems’ to be ‘solved’. The hidden assumption is that conflict does not, or need not, run very deep.’’ This is always the assertion on a ruling, complacent class and it is with only a little exaggeration that I claim every ground-breaking political advance in history has been based on the notion of antagonism and committed struggle.

This is why I see the recent ‘polarisation’ of politics as a good thing; for all his faults (and they are many) Ed Miliband has finally started a movement away from that fictional ‘centre’. ‘Fictional’, I say because of Tariq Ali’s point about an ‘extreme centre’, extreme because this ‘centre’ unquestioningly accepts principles that good ‘centrists’ like Margaret Thatcher had to fight tooth and nail for. The recent anti-Blairite ‘witch-hunt’ is also a good thing by my book (if that is really what it is) and if accompanied by a change in face is an equivalent change in policy.

I mentioned earlier that it was to the credit of the Mail that they had revived Professor Miliband for another generation. He is perhaps the one subject whose actuality has been somewhat effaced in the whole discussion, appropriated as it has been for political purposes (not least by myself). It is therefore with great admiration that I close with the final lines Professor Miliband’s own short encomium to the aforementioned Harold Laski in New Left Review: ‘‘Philip Rieff has a nice phrase about Freud having ‘disturbed the sleep of mankind’. No such large claim can be made for Harold Laski. But he did greatly disturb the sleep of many people in Britain and the United States in the thirties and forties. He was an exemplary public intellectual. There is great need for more such intellectuals on the Left today”.