The row between the Baily Mail and Ed Millipede rumbles on. No question the Mail has been guilty of very bad taste, in certain apscts of its behaviour. One cannot condone sending a reporter to watch Red Ed attending a Millipede family funeral nor its picture of Ed's father's gravestone. What about the allegation that Ralph Millipede "hated Britain"? A quotation from his diary, written when he was 17 and newly arrived in Britain, suggests that he wasn't too impressed with out countrymen:- "The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world … you sometimes want them almost to lose [World War II] to show them how things are. They have the greatest contempt for the Continent … To lose their empire would be the worst possible humiliation.” Ed insists that to accuse him of hating Britain on the strength of this one diary entry is inaccurate, especially given his subsequent service in the Royal Navy. OK, perhaps he did change his mind later and come to see the good points of our country, but evidence that his political opinions improved for the better is distinctly lacking. Did he ever recant of his words to the 1955 Labour Party conference: "We want this party to state that it stands unequivocally behind the social ownership and control of the means of production, distribution and exchange"? It seems not.
All I knew about Ed's father before this recent controversy blew up was that he was a "Marxist academic." This initially makes one think of a man who didn't quite live in the real world, livng in some sort of ivory tower. However, if that was your perception too, dear reader, think again. The odious Frankfurt school, Marcuse, Adorno et al. were "Marxist academics" and their poisonous views seeped out from the academic world in the 1960s to give us political correctness, the nanny state and so on. A look at the Wikipedia entry for Ralph M. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Miliband) is quite scary. He was critical of Stalin and the Soviet Union, but so were the Frankfurt school - you can still be a rabid Marxist and be critical of Stalinism - indeed, the absence of the Soviet Union as an obvious "bogeyman" has allowed the new-look Marxism favoured by Miliband senior and the Frankfurters to creep in without its origins being recognised. He resigned from the Labour Party disillusioned that it wan't radical enough, and never seems to have repudiated his Marxism. Unless the Wikiepdia piece is biased (and any entries presenting an unbalabced picture are usually flagged up as such), then the Daily Mail was quite right Ed's father did truly espouse a "poisonous creed" which, the paper rightly asserts, has "underpinned incalculable human misery."
Red Ed has rushed ot hsi father's defence, and who can blame him? Any decent son would surely fight for his father's honour. However, his defence of his father rings some big warning bells. He may have been a good father; he may have been the reason why both Ed and his brother David entered politics, but I would be a bit less concerned if Ed has said something on the lines of, "Well, even though he was the reason why I entered politics, but his ideas were totally dotty." On the contrary, Ed M. has spoken about his debt he owes to his father for his "convictions and values". His speech at this year's Labour Party conference suggests that even if he and his father may have disagreed about the merits of nationalising the means of production, they share the delusion about the benefits of a big state. and it seems that Ed is equally oipposed to the foundatioour historic liberties - small government, individual property rights and so on - as his father.
One can only hope and pray that only a small minority of the electorate share this illusion, otherwise Britain will be heading back to the dark ages of the 1970s if ever this awful man ever becomes our Prime Minister.
All I knew about Ed's father before this recent controversy blew up was that he was a "Marxist academic." This initially makes one think of a man who didn't quite live in the real world, livng in some sort of ivory tower. However, if that was your perception too, dear reader, think again. The odious Frankfurt school, Marcuse, Adorno et al. were "Marxist academics" and their poisonous views seeped out from the academic world in the 1960s to give us political correctness, the nanny state and so on. A look at the Wikipedia entry for Ralph M. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Miliband) is quite scary. He was critical of Stalin and the Soviet Union, but so were the Frankfurt school - you can still be a rabid Marxist and be critical of Stalinism - indeed, the absence of the Soviet Union as an obvious "bogeyman" has allowed the new-look Marxism favoured by Miliband senior and the Frankfurters to creep in without its origins being recognised. He resigned from the Labour Party disillusioned that it wan't radical enough, and never seems to have repudiated his Marxism. Unless the Wikiepdia piece is biased (and any entries presenting an unbalabced picture are usually flagged up as such), then the Daily Mail was quite right Ed's father did truly espouse a "poisonous creed" which, the paper rightly asserts, has "underpinned incalculable human misery."
Red Ed has rushed ot hsi father's defence, and who can blame him? Any decent son would surely fight for his father's honour. However, his defence of his father rings some big warning bells. He may have been a good father; he may have been the reason why both Ed and his brother David entered politics, but I would be a bit less concerned if Ed has said something on the lines of, "Well, even though he was the reason why I entered politics, but his ideas were totally dotty." On the contrary, Ed M. has spoken about his debt he owes to his father for his "convictions and values". His speech at this year's Labour Party conference suggests that even if he and his father may have disagreed about the merits of nationalising the means of production, they share the delusion about the benefits of a big state. and it seems that Ed is equally oipposed to the foundatioour historic liberties - small government, individual property rights and so on - as his father.
One can only hope and pray that only a small minority of the electorate share this illusion, otherwise Britain will be heading back to the dark ages of the 1970s if ever this awful man ever becomes our Prime Minister.