Ed Miliband was never going to become prime minister of Britain. But somehow he’s won.
Miliband is the most consequential member of Keir Starmer’s cabinet. The others are flailing around; the energy secretary is making his agenda reality. Miliband says he has “absolute faith” that Net Zero will do “great things for our country and the world”.
The operative phrase here is “absolute faith”. Britain’s carbon emissions are around 1 percent of the world’s; eliminating them will make no difference to climate change.
Miliband talks a lot about Britain’s “global leadership” on this issue. The idea is that countries like China will see Britain decarbonise electricity generation by 2030, think of it as an example then do the same. The flaw in the logic is that countries like China don’t care what Britain does because Britain is no longer an important country.
The UK already has by far the most expensive energy of all countries in the International Energy Agency — some 80 percent above the median. It should expect a further cost increase of at least 75 percent due to Miliband’s policies, according to research by UnHerd and Gordon Hughes at Washington’s National Center for Energy Analytics. There’s no way Britain will revivify its moribund economy with those energy prices.
Prophet in the wilderness
Even during his wilderness years, he exerted huge influence through the theft of his policies. Then Tory governments adopted much of his political economy.
Miliband was in a bind when he started out as Labour leader. Britain’s yearly budget deficit surpassed 10 percent of GDP in 2010 and steep budget cuts were inevitable despite a sluggish rebound from the Great Recession. Quaint as it may seem now, David Cameron and his chancellor George Osborne made political hay out of austerity. It made them seem august. They blamed the Treasury’s empty coffers on the fiscal incontinence of Miliband’s mentor Gordon Brown. But what was the point of the Labour Party if it couldn’t spend money to help the poor and struggling?
Ever the policy wonk, Miliband found his solution in a paper by Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker. The idea was “predistribution”. Instead of spending money to help the poor, the government would change laws. At the time, Miliband acknowledged this was the only option for the British left because “the next Labour government” would “not enjoy” the revenue Blair and Brown had while the economy boomed.
All this predistribution talk confirmed many voters’ perceptions that he was too left-wing and too weird. Miliband was derided as “Red Ed” and that was that.
But a year after the Conservatives’ victory seemed to cast Miliband into PhDs footnotes, David Cameron lost the Brexit referendum and Downing Street with it. Seeing anger over economic struggles as a key factor behind Brexit, Cameron’s successor Theresa May vowed to tackle “burning injustices” as she became the most economically left-wing Tory prime minister since Edward Heath.
May introduced an energy price cap in 2018 — the centrepiece of Miliband’s 2015 manifesto, previously derided by Cameron as from a “Marxist universe”. She also adopted Miliband’s predistribution policies by beefing up employees’ rights laws and curtailing high-interest loans. May even went more Miliband than Miliband when she proposed putting workers on company boards, although the consuming distraction of Brexit put paid to this idea.
Boris Johnson added his razzmatazz to May’s strategy of pivoting left on economics to win working-class Brexiteers in the North and Midlands — winning him in 2019 the electoral landslide that eluded her. Many of Johnson’s ideas to retain those voters came straight from Miliband. Most notably, the 2021 budget increased corporation tax gradually from 19 percent to 25 percent — mirroring Miliband’s proposals to largely eliminate the cuts his antagonist Cameron made before 2015. The same year, Johnson set up a national infrastructure bank — another of Miliband’s policies as Labour leader.
Labour’s kingmaker
It’s thanks to Miliband’s intervention that Keir Starmer became a Labour MP after his legal career. But even if it weren’t for this debt of gratitude, Starmer was always going to adopt Miliband’s predistribution strategy.
Covid and Liz Truss means there’s no cash to splash. Hence a steep minimum wage increase and the biggest tightening of labour laws in decades. Labour will resort to predistribution more and more as they stumble on. They don’t have money to pay for things their partisans yearn for — like an end to the child benefit cap — so they’ll have no choice but to change regulations to try and direct money to the poor.
Labour partisans didn’t wait 14 years for power to hear a Labour chancellor telling them there’s no money. Predistribution is thin gruel for the left. They will be primed to take over post-Starmer.
Miliband made it easy for them to do so. He changed the leadership rules so anyone who pays £3 to sign up to Labour gets a vote. Party members, especially new ones, tend to be far more left-wing than the electorate and even party MPs. The moderates in the Commons were cut out of the decision. This is the system that made Jeremy Corbyn leader. Even after Labour’s 2019 electoral disaster, Starmer had to pretend to be a raging socialist to attract all those Corbynistas. The left won’t be fooled twice.
Whether in power or opposition, Labour’s next leader will face a socio-economic landscape of abysses predistribution failed to cover, not to mention the eye-watering effects of Net Zero policies. They’ll be the purest product of Miliband’s Britain.