The Sun runs a strong campaign against the European Union and finds that the next but one, David Miliband, has decided to defy them. What does young Miliband know that would have left his predecessors quaking in their boots? Has he calculated that the red-tops are in decline and that he has more to gain by pandering to the base and mocking Murdoch.
Miliband was quick to position himself within the hubristic pattern of Labour's second decade. Today he was at it again.
He said: “Yes it’s tempting to lower our sights. But in progressive politics we must always be restless for change. And that means we have to be restless about the future, not the past.
“Who says in ten years’ time we will not have turned back the inexorable rise in global emissions? Who says in ten years’ time every child in the world won’t be at school? Who says in ten years’ time, there can’t be a democratic and respected Iran, cooperating with us and the international community against global terrorism?”
Such a vision is rather disturbing when set against his wish to exploit party advantage and disown national interest. The case against a European referendum was nakedly set against a wish to avoid division within the Labour Party. The price of their political success is our national sovereignty. All arguments on honesty were dodged.
The Foreign Secretary also appealed to those Labour MPs, unions and activists who were pressing for a referendum of the European Union’s reform treaty not to risk creating party disunity as he again ruled out putting the treaty to a vote of the people. “Europe needs to look out, not in, to the problems beyond its borders that define insecurity within our borders,” he said.
“It doesn’t need institutional navel-gazing and that is why the reform treaty abandons fundamental constitutional reform and offers clear protections for national sovereignty. It should be studied and passed by Parliament.”
This argument requires honesty. Miliband tries to be too clever by half, a semantic swot whose prose creations do not hide the status quo, swathed in a swirl of ethical drivel and sanctimonious namechecks. A foreign secretary that namechecks half the world's dissidents without fail drives that feelgood factor for the Labour audience. Janus faced, he calls for Europe and America in the same breath, even traducing the Tories in a naked reversal of their stated policy: that they are anti-American.
He said: “Some want distance from America. Others want distance from Europe.
The Tories want divorce from both. But those are the wrong lessons.
Some of us want honesty and respect. You should not misrepresent the Opposition when you are unwilling to namecheck President Bush yourself. Come Murdoch, set your wolves on Miliband!