Matthew Brown writes:
The Daily Mail has been in the news for
its attacks on Ralph Miliband as “the man who hated Britain”. This continues a long tradition
of smearing ‘Red’ Ed Miliband by association with his father’s politics (here, for instance, in 2010, they make a big deal of the
fact that his elderly cousin, who he may not even have met, had some vague
connection to Joseph Stalin half a century ago).
Was Miliband anti-British?
The sole piece of evidence presented by the Mail
of Miliband Sr’s “hatred of Britain” is a diary entry he wrote when he was 17. I
pity my son, if he ever becomes a public figure and the Mail finds
what I wrote in my diaries as a teenager… I would much rather trust his son’s
memories to know anything about what the mature man actually felt about the
land that gave him refuge when he fled genocide – and the land for which he
served in the armed forces.
Ralph Miliband fought for Britain in the war
against fascism. According to his Independent
obit:
“The three missing years to which he refers were
spent in service as a naval rating in the Belgian section of the Royal Navy.
Aware of the fact that many of his Belgian comrades were engaged in the war
against Fascism and traumatised by the absence of his mother and sister, he had
volunteered, using Laski’s influence to override the bureaucracy.
“He served on a number of destroyers and
warships, helping to intercept German radio messages. He rose to the rank of
Chief Petty Officer and was greatly amused on one occasion when his new
commanding officer informed him how he had been rated by a viscount who had
commanded the ship on which he had previously served: ‘Miliband is stupid, but
always remains cheerful.’”
However, I’m fairly sure that despite his lack of
British nationality at this point, he served in the mainstream Royal Navy and
not in the Section Belge (RNSB). The latter operated corvettes and
minesweepers, while Miliband served on destroyers and warships.
Was Miliband a Communist Fellow
Traveller?
The Mail article makes a good deal of
Harold Laski’s influence on Ralph Miliband:
“At the London School of Economics, he was taught
and heavily influenced by the extremist Left-winger Harold Laski, who said the
use of violence was legitimate in British elections.”
I see Laski, although far from “an extreme
Left-winger”, as a broadly pernicious figure in British political history, and
as something of a fellow traveller. But it is important to be clear about
timing. Laski was broadly committed to a liberal, reformist, parliamentary
social democracy until the early 1930s, and was close to the right-wing Labour
leader Ramsay MacDonald.
(Aside: MacDonald’s previous government in 1924 was
brought down partly as a result of the Mail’s publication of the
forged Zinoviev letter, alleging Soviet interference with British politics –
first in a long-line of dishonest anti-Communist smears directed at Labour from
the paper.)
Only in the 1930s, during the tumultuous years of
the Depression, did Laski start to flirt with a pro-Soviet position, and come
to believe that the overthrow of capitalism might not happen peacefully. Even
in this period, I am fairly certain, he never said “the use of violence was
legitimate in British elections”, as the Mail claims.
During 1931-1937 Laski was a key figure in the
Popular Frontist movement in British politics, influenced by Laski’s friend
Leon Blum in France.
This movement, including Stafford Cripps and focused
around the small middle-class Socialist League, as well as the more broad-based
Left Book Club, sought rapprochement between the Labour movement and Communism,
with the priority of defeating fascism.
This movement was largely rejected both
by the working class mainstream of the Labour Party and by the uncompromising
anti-Stalinists of the Independent Labour Party, and Laski skunked back to
Labour in 1937, increasingly settling in on the soft left of the party.
After the war, Laski did continue to argue for a
more positive attitude towards Britain’s war-time Soviet allies and against the
Atlanticist Cold War consensus in the Labour Party, but he no longer endorsed
Communism as a viable political movement in Britain.
It was this later Laski
who would influence the young Ralph Miliband, who studied under him at the LSE
briefly during the war and then again after his demobilisation. This more
mellow Laski encouraged Miliband to think for himself and question Marxist
orthodoxy.
Was Miliband a Communist?
Ralph Miliband has been described as a Stalinist,
which is a complete travesty considering his consistent opposition to the
Soviet model of socialism from above.
Back in Poland, Ralph Miliband’s father
had been a Bundist, a fiercely anti-Stalinist Jewish socialist movement. As a
youngster in Belgium he joined the Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair, which
was affiliated to the British Independent Labour Party, and again
anti-Stalinist.
He was never a member or supporter of the
Communist Party; he was sympathetic to Tito’s Yugoslavia in the immediate
post-war years, when it broke with the Stalinist bloc; and by the 1950s when
the New Left was starting to emerge from the shadow of orthodox Communism he
was a fully fledged anti-Stalinist.
The Soviet crushing of democratic socialism in
Hungary in 1956 and then in Czechoslovakia in 1968 repelled him deeply. In this
period, as the Mail notes, he was friendly with the Stalinist Eric
Hobsbawm, another refugee from fascism and ex-serviceman (in the Royal
Engineers and the Royal Army Educational Corps), but, as the Mail
passes over quickly, on this issue Miliband was sharply at odds with his
friend. Here he is in 1968:
“The invasion of Czechoslovakia show very well
that this oppressive and authoritarian Russian socialism has nothing in common
with the socialism that we demand, and we must state this very loudly, even at
the risk of seeming to be anti-soviet and to echo bourgeois propaganda … And
then, there is also this question of ‘bourgeois liberties’ … which, I am
persuaded, we must put at the top of our programme. Or rather, denounce them as
insufficient and to be extended by socialism. Nothing will work if it is
possible and plausible to suggest that we want to abolish them.
“And that is one of the reasons why the
democratization of ‘revolutionary’ parties is essential… The internal life of a
revolutionary party must prefigure the society which it wants to establish – by
its mode of existence, and its way of being and acting. While this is not the
case, I don’t see any reason to want to see the current parties take power:
they are quite simply not morally ready to assume the construction of a
socialist society.”
His anti-Stalinism was less robust than, for
example EP Thompson’s became or that of the International Socialists, and
there is a still a lingering presence of the Laski-ite fellow traveller in his
sense that “seeming to be anti-Soviet” might be a bad thing, but he was always
clear that ‘Soviet socialism’ was oppressive and cruel.
The only quotation the Mail comes up
with in relation to Miliband’s attitude to the Soviet Union was this:
“Mikhail Gorbachev’s dismantling of Soviet
socialism and the worker state should have shocked Miliband, but he managed to
find an argument welcoming it.
“He proclaimed that the Cold War had always been
a useful ‘bogey’ for the Right, and that, ‘the success of Mikhail Gorbachev in
democratising Soviet society … would deprive conservative forces of one of
their most effective weapons’.”
In fact, of course, that’s evidence of pretty
much nothing: Gorbachev’s reforms were heartily welcomed by all who thought
that the Soviet Union constituted ‘actually existing socialism’ while
condemning its authoritarianism. Here’s Miliband in 1990:
“In recent years, Mikhail Gorbachev has sought
with great eloquence to define the kind of internationalism which the world
requires today, and has done so in terms of universal values and aspirations,
beyond boundaries of nations, classes and creeds – values and aspirations
relating to peace, disarmament, the protection of the environment, and so on.
These are indeed universal values, and socialists obviously subscribe to them.
“…the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern
Europe (and its likely collapse elsewhere) clearly constitutes a great
strengthening of the hope nurtured by conservative forces that the world might
be shaped (or re-shaped) in an image acceptable to them. There is now a very
good chance that some Communist countries at least will move towards the restoration
of capitalism: some of them are already well advanced on that road…
“Such celebration and proclamation is, however,
rather premature. Soviet-type Communism, with the centrally planned command
economy and the monopolistic one-party political system, is out or on the way
out, and will not be resurrected. But the notion that this is the end of
socialist striving and eventual socialist advances leaves a vital fact out of
account. This is that, despite the current apotheosis of capitalism, it has resolved
none of the problems which give sustenance to socialist aspirations and
struggles. Given the inherent and ineradicable failings of capitalism, there is
no reason to doubt that the striving for radical alternatives will continue.”
Miliband was wrong to see that the Soviet regime
ever (except perhaps briefly in the last two months of 1917) represented any
kind of hopeful alternative to Western market capitalism, but he was always a
sharp critic of its oppressiveness.
And what about the Daily
Mail?
The Mail article mentions Miliband’s
‘immigrant’ status (they don’t use the more accurate word ‘refugee’) a few
times:
“This was the immigrant boy whose first act in
Britain was to discard his name Adolphe because of its associations with
Hitler, and become Ralph, and who helped his father earn a living rescuing
furniture from bombed houses in the Blitz.”
This will be no surprise for those of us familiar
with the Mail’s fiercely anti-immigrant – and arguably xenophobic –
politics. Only last year they said that the “only responsible vote” in the French
elections was not for the Thatcherite Sarkozy, but the fascist Marine Le Pen!
One of the by-products of this kerfuffle is to remind people that right up to
the war, the Mail (under the father of the current proprietor,
Viscount Rothermere), was consistently pro-fascist.
Lord Rothermere was a friend of Benito Mussolini
and Adolf Hitler, and directed the Mail’s editorial stance towards
them in the 1930s. Rothermere’s 1933 leader ‘Youth Triumphant’ praised the new
Nazi regime’s accomplishments, and was subsequently used as propaganda by
them. In it, Rothermere predicted that: “The minor misdeeds of individual
Nazis would be submerged by the immense benefits the new regime is already
bestowing upon Germany.”
Journalist John Simpson, in a book on journalism,
suggested that Rothermere was referring to the violence against Jews and
Communists rather than the detention of political prisoners.
Rothermere and the Mail were also
editorially sympathetic to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of
Fascists. Rothermere wrote an article entitled ‘Hurrah for
the Blackshirts’ in January 1934, praising Mosley for his “sound,
commonsense, Conservative doctrine”. This support ended after violence at a BUF
rally in Kensington Olympia later that year.
Rothermere, as late as 1939, wrote to Hilter congratulating him on
invading Prague, and urged him to march on Romania.
No comments:
Post a Comment