As the Labour leader reacts angrily to our critique of his Marxist father... We repeat: This man did hate Britain

One hot summer day in 1940, Ralph Miliband made his way to Karl Marx’s grave at Highgate Cemetery, in North London, and made a pledge.

In his own words: ‘The cemetery was utterly deserted . . . I remember standing in front of the grave, fists clenched, and swearing my own private oath that I would be faithful to the workers’ cause.’



It was a lifelong cause the 16-year-old immigrant, who fled here with his father from Belgium to escape the Nazis, never deserted.



Ralph’s Marxism was uncompromising. ‘We want this party to state that it stands unequivocally behind the social ownership and control of the means of production, distribution and exchange,’ he declared to the 1955 Labour Party conference as the delegate from Hampstead. ‘We are a Socialist party engaged on a great adventure.’

Family values: Ed with Ralph in 1989

Of course, he could only embark on this ‘adventure’ because of the protection, the education and, crucially, the political freedom, that this country gave him.



So how did he view this country? As an already politically aware 17-year-old, he wrote in his diary: ‘The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world . . . you sometimes want them almost to lose [the war] to show them how things are. They have the greatest contempt for the Continent. To lose their empire would be the worst possible humiliation.’



To help defeat Hitler, Ralph Miliband volunteered and served three years in the Royal Navy. When Labour, under Clement Attlee, swept to power after the war in 1945, he joyfully described the victory as ‘the country’s capture from its traditional rulers’.

Miliband relished what he called the ‘genuine sense of outrage . . . of bourgeois England,’ adding that ‘the nationalisation proposals of the Government were designed to achieve the sole purpose of improving the efficiency of a capitalist economy’.

Saturday's article in the Daily Mail

In later years he chose to ignore the lamentable performance of nationalisation, which proved to be anything but efficient.



But how passionately he would have approved today of his son’s sinister policies, such as giving councils draconian new powers to seize into public ownership land held by developers who fail to build on it.



In his explosive memoirs, Gordon Brown’s spin doctor Damian McBride argued that Ed Miliband was obsessed with maintaining his father’s legacy.



Winning the leadership was Ed’s ultimate tribute to his father — an attempt to achieve his father’s vision and ensure David Miliband did not traduce it.



Ed’s victory over David, made possible only with the unions’ votes, was perfectly in step with his father’s fervent and undimmed conviction that ‘alliance with the trade unions is not only one of the party’s great strengths; it is by far its greatest strength’. As for Britain and the class war, Ralph Miliband had this to say:



‘Class success means the ability of a dominant class to maintain its position in society, and to contain and subdue any challenge to its power and privileges. Elite recruitment in these . . . societies has a distinctly hereditary character. Access from the working classes into the middle and upper classes is generally low. This is what has happened in Britain.’



In a letter to his old friend, the Left-winger C Wright Mills, Miliband made plain his disdain for the Establishment which was, to his mind, nothing less than the old boy network.



'Winning the leadership was Ed’s ultimate tribute to his father — an attempt to achieve his father’s vision and ensure David Miliband did not traduce it.'

This included, he wrote: ‘Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, the great Clubs, the Times, the Church, the Army, the respectable Sunday papers . . . It also means the values . . . of the ruling orders, keep the workers in their place, strengthen the House of Lords, maintain social hierarchies, God save the Queen, equality is bunk, democracy is dangerous, etc.



‘Also respectability, good taste, don’t rock the boat, there will always be an England, foreigners, Jews, natives etc are all right in their place, and their place is outside . . .’



The bitterness in these words — written not as a 17-year-old but as a mature intellectual aged around 45 — suggests a giant-sized social chip on his shoulder. A chip, incidentally, which did not stop both sons, David and Ed, from going to Oxford.



And in recent times there have been embarrassing allegations involving how the ownership of the family house was altered — albeit perfectly legally — which experts say enabled his sons to avoid death duties. Hardly the behaviour of tax-loving Socialists.



Ed Miliband speaking at the Labour Party Conference last week

Ralph Miliband opposed the Falklands War with such ferocity that he even swore — a rare occurrence — at the sight of Margaret Thatcher’s soaring popularity.



He said resentfully: ‘I won’t write about the f****** Falklands now. It’s a most depressing and bitter business and it seems to have turned Thatcher into a major political figure.



‘I mean that her brand of Toryism may now come to predominate. The Falklands has served her well . . . if she is returned at the next election England will look a very different country than even in 1979.’

The Labour Party had disappointed him. It remains ‘a party of modest social reform in a capitalist system within whose confines it is ever more firmly and, by now, irrevocably rooted’. No party existed that was ‘capable of posing an effective challenge’.

Just a few years later, Mikhail Gorbachev’s dismantling of Soviet Socialism should have shocked Miliband, but the intellectual Marxist managed to find an argument welcoming it. He proclaimed that the Cold War had always been a useful ‘bogey’ for the Right, but that now ‘the success of Mikhail Gorbachev in democratising the Soviet society . . . would deprive conservative forces of one of their most effective weapons’.



At his death aged 70, in 1994, Ralph Miliband had not given up the cause to which he, so passionately, had sworn an oath 54 years earlier.



‘I have not, from that day to this, departed from the view that this was the right cause and that I belonged to it,’ he wrote, even though son David had written to him saying that the Marxist cause had been ‘traduced’.



Despite everything, Miliband still saw ‘no reason for the resigned acceptance’ of defeat.



‘On the contrary,’ he wrote, ‘what it requires is to begin preparing the ground for the coming into being of such an alternative.’



He is buried in Highgate Cemetery, just a dozen yards from of his idol, Karl Marx.



Meanwhile, his son Red Ed — whose £1.6 million house is less than a mile away — talks of Socialism being a key word for the next Labour government. Perhaps the ground is indeed now being prepared.



Postscript One



Historian Eric Hobsbawm, the West’s biggest 20th-century apologist for Soviet Communism and excuser of its totalitarian evils, was a close friend of Ralph Miliband. They would talk for hours.



Miliband did not agree with his fellow Marxist’s refusal to condemn Stalinism’s 30 million dead or the brutal Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. But could their views have been closer than is generally accepted?

Historian Eric Hobsbawm, pictured, the West's biggest 20th-century apologist for Soviet Communism and excuser of its totalitarian evils, was a close friend of Ralph Miliband

For even then, Miliband could not bring himself to totally renounce the Soviet system.



Michael Newman, his biographer, says: ‘Thus, even after the intervention in Hungary, he vested some hopes in Khrushchev (the Soviet leader) as a reformer and believed that the Soviet bloc could develop in ways that were far more positive than capitalism.’



For his part, Hobsbawm, who died last year aged 95, refused to tear up his Communist Party card as Soviet tanks rumbled in to crush Hungary’s cry for freedom. He approved of it ‘with a heavy heart’.



Harold Laski, a professor at the London School of Economics, taught Ralph Miliband

To a television interviewer who asked if the ‘radiant tomorrow’ justified the tens of millions who died in the Soviet cause, his one word answer was ‘Yes’.



Postscript Two



Ralph Miliband’s teacher and mentor at the London School of Economics was Harold Laski, a giant of the Labour Left whom some Tories considered to be a dangerous Marxist revolutionary.



The young Miliband adored the man, and Laski viewed his Marxist student ‘almost as a son’. When the General Election took place at the end of the war in 1945, Laski was chairman of the Labour Party.



Speaking in Nottinghamshire, Laski declared: ‘If Labour did not obtain what it needed by general consent, we shall have to use violence even if it means revolution.’



When newspapers reported his words, he sued for libel, and lost. The jury took a mere 40 minutes to dismiss his case.



Postscript Three



Ed Miliband says that his father ‘loved how the Navy brought together people from all classes and all backgrounds’.



Miliband Snr’s own words suggest something rather more. According to his official biographer, Michael Newman, he was preoccupied with ‘class’ and furious at the different quality of life aboard Royal Navy ships between officers and the men, angrily describing it as like the difference between ‘a 300-bedroom country house and a Lambeth slum’.

