JOHN GULLIVER - Is Ed Miliband on the run when the big question is asked?

Published: 30 September, 2010
by JOHN GULLIVER

I MADE a mistake when I confronted Ed Miliband with the ­question: What do you mean by socialism?

For weeks he had described himself as a socialist without spelling out what he meant by that.

My mistake, in a  short interview recently at a hustings held at Haverstock School, Chalk Farm, was that I helped him out by far too quickly offering an answer to my own ­question.

Socialism, by definition, I said, implied some kind of social ownership of commerce and retail businesses – such as ownership by mutual bodies on the lines of John Lewis, for example, or by co-operative bodies.

That was my mistake.  Ed jumped in straight away and started talking in generalities about “mutuals”, and before I could ask him how he defined mutuals, his political chaperone, Holborn MP Frank  Dobson, steered the conversation away to calmer shores.

But in his speech on Tuesday at the Labour conference, Ed didn’t mention the word socialism, nor make any reference to alternative forms of company ownership.

Probably, he typifies  Labour members. At a reception held yesterday (Wednesday) at the Irish Centre in Camden Town in memory of the Labour councillor Dave Horan, a party woman, with a puzzled look, asked: “But what is socialism?” She didn’t have a clue.

Ed’s father Ralph, of course, wrote copiously on socialism, and argued it would not be reached through ­parliament.

If you unlock Ed’s mind would you find he had rebelled in his teens against his father’s ­philosophy. Ralph was, in some ways, a typical academic.

For most of his life he was never a joiner. Though he became a Labour Party member in Hampstead for a few years before leaving in 1965 in anger over the then Labour leader Harold Wilson’s (albeit lukewarm) support of the Vietnam war.

After that he stayed well away from any form of party membership.

Above all, Ralph could be said to be a moralist.

When Ed is faced with moral choices will he display his father’s courage?

If Ed finds himself facing a Robin Cook moment as leader – Cook clashed with Blair over the Iraq war in 2003 and resigned his senior cabinet post – which way will he move?

Mike has inside story...

JOURNALISTS are not welcome at the home of Marion Kozak  in Edis Street, Primrose Hill – if they are in pursuit of snippets about her two sons David and Ed Miliband.

Marion, a socialist intellectual, and apparently active in the organisation of Jews for Justice for Palestinians understandably wants to keep personal politics out of her life.

But Mike Newman, the only biographer of her Marxist husband, Ralph Miliband, got on so well with her that she gave him the keys to her home so that he could go straight to Ralph’s study and sift through his mountainous piles of letters.

“She is very pleasant and considerate,” Newman, an emeritus professor at Metropolitan University told me on Monday.

“Occasionally, we would have tea and sand­wiches.”

Mike, though, spent only two hours interviewing Ralph – and then that was for his biography on another great theorist, Harold Laski, who taught at the London School of Economics. 

Later, Newman wrote a ­biography of another leading Labour lefty, John Strachey.

Both biographies were published by big firms, Macmillan and Manchester University Press.

Political fashions had swung to the Right when Newman finished his Miliband biography so it was snapped up by the fringe publishers, Merlin.

It would not be the first time that publishers had turned away a golden offering by an author.  

Today, with Ralph’s son Ed as Labour’s new leader, Merlin would, naturally, be expected to plug the only biography of his famous Marxist father.

Sensibly, Merlin put it out as a paperback which should find a bigger market.

Tribute to Myra, the Blitz pianist 

THIS is the incompar­able pianist Myra Hess during one of her famous lunch-hour concerts performed at the National Gallery at the height of the Blitz.

Myra would play on to packed audiences – hundreds of office workers mingling with servicemen and women on leave – even though bombs would be dropping over the West End.

“I sometimes had to make forced crescendos to try and hide the noise of the flying bombs,” she wrote at the time.

On Tuesday, a special lunchhour concert will be performed at the National Gallery in ­honour of Myra, who lived in Hampstead, and also to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz.

Accompanying Misha Dacic on the piano will be the world virtuoso violinist Ida Haendel who actually played with Myra as a young girl.  

Ida, who is now in her 80s, has flown in from California for the ­concert and a European tour, with all costs ­covered by the Ernest Hecht Foundation – Mr Hecht is the founder of the ­successful publisher Souvenir Press, based in Bloomsbury.

Among those expected to be in the audience is 104-year-old Hetty Bower, who lives in Highgate. Hetty used to attend the famous Myra Hess concerts during the war.

‘Murky’ NHS

KIM Holt, a specialist at Great Ormond Street Hospital, is seeking £100,000 compensation for “personal injuries” arising out of the Baby P case.

Holt had been assigned to GOSH’s outpost at St Anne’s Hospital in Haringey. The mother of four had complained several times about shortages of medical staff at the community clinic where Baby P had been seen. She claimed his life could have been saved if anyone had taken notice.

Two years ago she was signed off with stress and then seconded back to GOSH to treat children with neuro-disabilities.

Whatever the strength of her case, the NHS has not been able to deal with whistle-blowers.

Far too often managers feign indifference to exposures of poor administration while medical consultants are sometimes known to squabble among themselves in the pursuit of careers.

I gather Holt feels her complaints “uncovered the murky world behind closed doors”.

I also understand GOSH, worried about the publicity fallout of a damages hearing, may seek an out-of-court ­settlement.