In case you missed it, and I have done my best to miss it, there has been a puny but noisy row in the UK media over a piece in the Daily Mail that pointed out that Ed Miliband's father, Ralph Miliband, was a communist whose ideas - has they been implemented - would have destroyed this country.
Shock! Ralph M was a NICE PERSON! How dare the evil Daily Mail launch such a personal attack on the father of the leader of the opposition!
The Guardian weighed into this brawl on the side of all true progressive patriots who need to be protected in their right to hold insane collectivist opinions and impose them on the rest of us. But, being a smart paper that gets the Internet, it gave the Mail's Editor-in-Chief Paul Dacre the space to explain himself, and so he used it:
The genesis of that piece lay in Ed Miliband's conference speech. The Mail was deeply concerned that in 2013, after all the failures of socialism in the twentieth century, the leader of the Labour party was announcing its return, complete with land seizures and price fixing.
Surely, we reasoned, the public had the right to know what influence the Labour leader's Marxist father, to whom he constantly referred in his speeches, had on his thinking.
So it was that Levy's article examined the views held by Miliband senior over his lifetime, not just as a 17-year-old youth as has been alleged by our critics.
The picture that emerged was of a man who gave unqualified support to Russian totalitarianism until the mid-50s, who loathed the market economy, was in favour of a workers' revolution, denigrated British traditions and institutions such as the royal family, the church and the army and was overtly dismissive of western democracy.
Levy's article argued that the Marxism that inspired Ralph Miliband had provided the philosophical underpinning of one of history's most appalling regimes – a regime, incidentally, that totally crushed freedom of expression.
Nowhere did the Mail suggest that Ralph Miliband was evil – only that the political beliefs he espoused had resulted in evil. As for the headline "The Man Who Hated Britain", our point was simply this: Ralph Miliband was, as a Marxist, committed to smashing the institutions that make Britain distinctively British – and, with them, the liberties and democracy those institutions have fostered.
Yes, the Mail is happy to accept that in his personal life, Ralph Miliband was, as described by his son, a decent and kindly man – although we won't withdraw our view that he supported an ideology that caused untold misery in the world.
Seems reasonable to me.
Let's remember that the Other Miliband and former Foreign Secretary David Miliband actually used a full BBC programme to fawn over the absurd life of Joe Slovo, a die-hard communist who was a great mate of Ralph Miliband and would sit there scheming with assorted Milibands over their ideas to make the West more like the Soviet Union:
The BBC link to the interview coyly describes Joe Slovo as a 'leading member of the ANC and the first Housing Minister in Nelson Mandela's government'. The point, of course, is that Slovo was the leading South African communist and formal head of the 'military wing' of the ANC/SACP alliance. Slovo was at the heart of ANC/SACP policy-making for years, plus a close suck-up of Moscow and vigorous apologist for Communism anywhere he found it.
So here we have the ghoulish spectacle of British Foreign Secretary David Miliband extolling the merits of this dark character, a great friend of his own Marxist father Ralph Miliband.
Slovo by the usual standards of Communists was something of a moderate and pragmatist. He had to be. Years of exile forced him to grasp that the South African masses were not to be mobilised for a brisk, amazingly violent surge aimed at toppling apartheid. And he seems to have been avuncular in large doses, chatting over Marxist ideology with assorted Milibands. What a great life indeed!
Yet Slovo has to bear a significant responsibility for the carnage inflicted by the SACP/ANC in the townships in its drive for sole power as apartheid ended, and the calamitous crime-rate thereafter. Not an issue I suspect the Miliband family has given much thought to, such is the Labour Party's fevered admiration for the ANC/SACP.
Plus, while Slovo was devoted to the cause of freedom for South Africans, he was openly and shamefully against freedom for those trying to cast off communism.
See how the SACP urged Moscow to suppress the pro-freedom movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Slovo later claimed to have had personal doubts about this, but fealty to Moscow was a prerequisite for leadership in the anti-apartheid struggle. And that was what counted, not some higher principle of real empowerment and freedom for all.
His ideological writings were ghastly beyond description. His famous piece Has Socialism Failed written in 1990 is a cracker of the genre. It agonizes over the ruin which has come to the classic Communist project as the Berlin Wall crashed, and meanders in a jargonised pseudo-logical way towards a purported condemnation of the 'Stalinism' which Slovo had championed for most of his life.
And has anyone mentioned the fact that the grandfather or some other direct ancestor of Ed Miliband fought with the Red Army to try to export violent Bolshevik Revolution to Poland and then westwards into Germany? Not something D Miliband bothered to mention when he visited Poland and gave his awful speech.
In short, it is trivially reasonable if not essential to point out that the Milibands come from a dangerous Hard Left family tradition, the more so when they clamour for high office and threaten us with more idiotic collectivism. Well done the Daily Mail.
