Ed Miliband has been getting a wretched press. While you would expect it from right-wing publications, left of centre newspapers have started "monstering" the Labour leader. Last week, Jason Cowley, editor of the New Statesman, accused Ed of being "an old-style Hampstead socialist".
In making this claim, Cowley could have been dishing out an ethnic slur, implying that someone of Jewish origins living in Hampstead would necessarily be out of touch with middling England. But the phrase "Hampstead socialist" is code within the Labour tribe for anyone with an excessively theoretical approach to politics and a remoteness from everyday folk.
Cowley went on to explain that Ed "doesn't really understand the lower-middle class or material aspiration". For him politics "must seem at times like an extended PPE [politics degree at Oxford] seminar".
Yet there is something odd about stigmatising Miliband in this way. None of the post 1945 Labour leaders have exactly been horny-handed sons of toil. Neil Kinnock is the only one to come from a working-class background. Clement Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell, and Harold Wilson were sons of comfortably off middle-class parents and all went to Oxford University. Before entering politics all three were academics. James Callaghan was the son of a naval petty officer and worked as a tax inspector. Michael Foot came from a well-to-do political family, attended Oxford, and worked as a journalist. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have solid middle-class backgrounds and were, respectively, a barrister and a lecturer.
Incidentally, Gaitskill and Foot lived in Hampstead along with such Labour luminaries as Anthony Crosland and Denis Healey. Not to mention George Orwell, who worked in a bookshop on Pond Street and rented a flat on Parliament Hill. If you dismiss "Hampstead socialists" and denigrate leaders with the social origins that typify Miliband, you might as well trash most of the post-war Labour vanguard.
The Miliband family history captures perfectly the 20th century
Odder still, Cowley moans that Ed "does not have a compelling personal story to tell the electorate". Really? He is the son of immigrants which is something rather a lot of people can relate to. More than that, his mother is a survivor of genocide. Marion Kozack was born into the Jewish community of Czestochowa and was hidden in a convent, along with her sister and mother, throughout the German occupation of Poland. Ed's father, Ralph, was born in Brussels though his parents were Polish Jews. When Belgium was invaded by the Germans, Ralph Miliband and his father escaped to Britain. His mother and sister were hidden by Belgians. So Ed and his brother David grew up in a milieu populated by former refugees and deracinated survivors of Nazi persecution, punctuated by stories of flight and loss. Not compelling?
It might be said that his family history captures the 20th century. It is the story of a persecuted minority, migration, Marxism and anti-fascism, the plight of refugees, the horror of genocide and the courage of rescuers, rebuilding lives in new countries.
This may not seem "compelling" to the NS editor but the editor of the Daily Mail can hardly leave it alone. The paper infamously sought to use Ralph Miliband's biography to suggest that Ed was the scion of a rootless cosmopolitan committed to the overthrow of British society. More recently, the Mail sought to link Ed to several notorious Soviet spies because declassified MI5 files show that a few of them knew Eric Hobsbawm who was friendly with his father. Get it?
To his credit, Ed has confronted these smears. His background may also explain his resistance to demonising immigration, his attachment to Europe, and his passion for civil liberties. He certainly could make more of his family history but given the threat of UKIP to the right and the need to woo Muslim voters to the left it might not be the quite the right story for the moment. Perhaps this is what Cowley means when he declares that Ed does not have a "compelling" tale for voters. If so, it is a miserable comment on the state of British society and politics.
