Labour MPs who want Wes Streeting to be their leader have, apparently, one great fear. If their man triggers a contest, they are terrified it will lead to Ed Miliband entering the race to stop the Health Secretary – and coming out top. A Miliband premiership would, they worry, be the death of Labour. I’ve got news for them: we are already governed by Ed Miliband. This is now his administration. And they, and the rest of us, had better get used to it.
Keir Starmer is no longer really in charge of this government – if he ever really was. He is Prime Minister in name only. His foreign policy, at this time of war, is Ed Miliband’s. His economic policy, Ed Miliband’s. His Chancellor, his political positioning, his very quest for meaning. All. Ed. Miliband. The country may have thought we’d moved on from him in 2015. But, like war in the Middle East, he’s back after a decade and badder than ever.
Indeed, Miliband’s ascendancy has been secured by the war. As our political editor, Tim Shipman, revealed last month in his reporting on the inner workings of the National Security Council, it was Miliband who commanded the majority around the table dictating British policy. And Starmer who took direction. Miliband insisted on the UK keeping Donald Trump at arm’s length and denying the US access to UK bases. He was backed by Rachel Reeves, one of the most energetic supporters of his 2010 leadership run. Starmer and Defence Secretary John Healey, who initially favoured closer alignment with the US, were overruled.
It was another reverse for a Prime Minister who had once set such store by his ability to maintain the integrity of our alliance with America. But it was yet another victory for Miliband. The Energy Secretary won the Labour leadership in 2010 on the back of his opposition to Blair’s Iraq War stance. His most consequential act as Labour leader was thwarting UK support for US strikes against Assad’s Syria in 2013. Labour’s most profound historic splits have always been over foreign and defence policy. Starmer’s aim in office was to re-establish Labour as the Bevinite party of Nato and forward action against dictators. But Miliband has out-manoeuvred him and managed once more to unite the party behind the peacenik position. Starmer now mouths the anti-war lines. But it’s Miliband’s hand up his back where a spine should be, controlling the ventriloquist’s dummy.
The ramifications of the war should, ironically, only weaken Miliband’s position in government. As energy prices rise, further crippling industry and spreading to the forecourts, his insistence on running down our native oil and gas supplies looks more and more quixotic, to put it at its politest. Miliband has banned further exploitation of our North Sea resources. His actions are devastating the economy of the north-east of Scotland in advance of the Holyrood elections, derailing Labour’s principal aim of bringing the cost of living down and destroying the manufacturing firms in steel, ceramics, refining and other sectors which still provide high-paying jobs in the Midlands and north.
It’s Miliband’s hand up Starmer’s back where a spine should be, controlling the ventriloquist’s dummy
Miliband’s policies make us more reliant on imported fossil fuels, at a time when their flow through the Strait of Hormuz has been choked. Other European nations with impeccable environmental credentials, such as Norway and Denmark, are now taking a much more permissive approach to the extraction of fossil fuels in their own sovereign waters. And this week the chief executive of RenewableUK, hitherto one of the staunchest allies of the Miliband drive towards wind and solar, argued that it made no sense to leave domestic oil and gas in the ground. Real energy security, she argued, meant the utilisation of all our available resources. But Miliband remains, literally, unmoved.
Starmer has been told repeatedly by those he once trusted that Miliband’s anti-fossil fuel fundamentalism is bad for growth, toxic for jobs and dangerous for our national security. That’s why he tried to move Miliband from the Energy Department at the last reshuffle. But Miliband point-blank refused to be shifted. And Starmer folded, conscious that Miliband’s popularity among party members, as the soft left’s champion, made it too risky to earn his enmity. And Miliband, having reminded Starmer then where real power lies, continues to determine the Prime Minister’s position. So earlier this week, when challenged on how to respond to rising energy costs, Starmer dutifully recited all Miliband’s talking points.
Starmer knows that Miliband’s energy policy, and the associated punitive costs, renders Britain a black hole for investment, particularly in the data centres which are indispensable to the development of Artificial Intelligence. In her Mais lecture this week, the Chancellor pinned her hopes for future growth on Britain’s edge in AI technology. Those who have worked for Starmer recognise this is, perhaps, the one area, apart from land-use planning, where this government can help resolve Britain’s chronic productivity problems. But any chance of making progress in the technology which will define all our lives for the rest of this century is blocked by the insanely high cost of energy in the UK, which means the next generation of data centres will be built anywhere but here.
Those most responsible for Starmer’s victory in 2024 have now departed Downing Street. They knew that, for Labour to win, it had to be serious about national security and economic growth. It had to resist the temptation to be both soft and left. It was not about countering Reform; it was about vanquishing the persistent fear among moderate voters that Labour could not be counted on to put hard-headed defence and market concerns above the comforting embrace of pressure group politics and the desire to make Britain a ‘world leader’ in some self-harming pursuit of utopian ideals. The men who knew what Labour needed are gone. Directing the government now is the man who embodies the dangers they feared. And we are all paying the price for that surrender.
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