The Milibands, The BBC And The Proletariat
Last week, The Daily Mail’s exposé of "Ralph Militant"’s political views provoked strong reactions from the Miliband family, the Labour Party, The Guardian and the BBC.
The Mail article included a few quotes by Ralph Miliband, showing Miliband to be a radical cosmopolitan Marxist. So what else is new? Throughout his entire adult life Ralph had indeed been a radical cosmopolitan devoted to ‘progressive’ international working class politics and naturally opposed to any nationalism and local patriotism. However The Daily Mail was soon to learn, at its cost, that elaborating on the non-patriotic nature intrinsic to cosmopolitanism is practically forbidden in 2013 ‘free’ Britain.
The Mail revealed that in 1940, when Ralph was 17-year-old he wrote in his diary:
“The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world…you sometimes want them almost to lose (the war) to show them how things are. They have the greatest contempt for the Continent…To lose their empire would be the worst possible humiliation.”
Well, I’d guess that many 17 year old Marxists at that time could have expressed such views. But Miliband remained a devoted Marxist into adulthood and indeed for his whole life and maintained this cosmopolitan ideology into old age right up to his death. This may be unusual but it is not a crime.