Leading Lights

Ed Miliband is described by Peter Hain as "everyone's second choice". Assuming that he is not therefore eliminated in the first round (a serious problem with AV and STV), he should therefore stand a very good chance of winning this AV election.

Miliband is accused of "moving left", as if that were a bad thing, because he wants the 50p tax to be made permanent, because he wants a bonus tax, and because he would keep parts of the banking system in public ownership for the foreseeable future. The first and third of those, at least, are manifestly in line with Conservative Party policy.

Based on his interview in today's Telegraph, this scourge of lap-dancing clubs, 24-hour drinking and the proliferation of betting shops, doubtless also a Eurosceptic of the Brownite "can't see the point of the EU" variety, is one of those people who are on the Left strictly because they believe in using the machinery of government to bring about social justice, often for thoroughly conservative social and cultural reasons.

Miliband explicitly refers to town centres that run from lap-dancing club, through 24-hour pub, to prolific betting shop, as "the market running riot in people's streets" against the democratic will and the common good. He clearly has the wit to recognise that you cannot have a "free" market in general but not in alcohol, gambling, drugs, prostitution and pornography; you can have capitalism or conservatism, but not both.

Likewise, you cannot have the European or global "free" movement of goods, services and capital but not of labour; again, you can have capitalism or conservatism, but not both. Does Miliband recognise this, as Ed Balls seems to be beginning to? I hope so. Indeed, I fully expect so.

There is also a lot of this in Diane Abbott. Any anti-monarchist sentiment that she may have expressed will have been a long time ago, when rather a lot of people were saying rather a lot of outlandish things. She has dropped hints in her time that she is now as Bernie Grant was, the standard voice of Afro-Caribbean opinion on this subject: monarchist on Commonwealth grounds.

She is also the voice of that community on immigration by people who cannot speak English or who come from countries with no historic ties to Britain. She has consistently opposed European federalism. She favours action against such things as not giving up seats to elderly people on public transport, but not the ineffective heavy-handedness of the New Labour assault on civil liberties. She is a supporter of the hospice movement, including explicitly as an expression of Christian faith.

And she has expressed her sympathy for the 11-plus, for single-sex schools, for Oxbridge as academically elitist, and for universities' flexible approach to entry grades if they see potential in the applicant. She is on record that the way to prevent social rather than academic elitism is to improve the schools attended by the poor, to raise the poor pupils' aspirations so that they actually apply to the top universities, and to reinstate full grants so that they can afford to go.

All in all, no wonder that she hated both Thatcherism and Blairism so much. Neither she nor Ed Miliband may entirely stand in, but to a considerable extent both are at least aware of, do at least understand, do at least value, and do at least draw on the Radical Liberal, Tory populist, trade union, co-operative, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and other roots of the Labour Movement.

Accordingly, he is against the like-for-like replacement of Trident and has recanted his previous support for the Iraq War, while she, closer to those roots, is as entirely opposed to nuclear weapons as she always was to the invasion of Iraq.

It remains to be seen whether or not these things can be said of Andy Burnham. They cannot be said at all of David Miliband or Ed Balls.