Exclusive: the moment Ed Miliband said he’ll bring socialism back to Downing Street

What’s Ed Miliband about? In a word: socialism. You can think this a good or a bad thing, but there ought to be no doubt about where he stands. At a Q&A in the Labour conference last night, he was challenged by an activist: When will you bring back socialism?’ ‘That’s what we are doing, sir’ Miliband replied, quick as a flash. ‘That’s what we are doing. It says on our party card: democratic socialism’. It was being filmed, and your baristas at Coffee House have tracked down the clip as an exclusive. This little exchange will perhaps tell you more about Ed Miliband and his agenda than much of the over-wrought character-spinning stunts you can expect to see this week.

It was no slip of the tongue. Miliband’s fidelity to socialism is explained by his definition of it – as he says on the clip. He seems to regard ‘socialism’ as synonymous with justice, and ‘capitalism’ with injustice. When interviewed in the Daily Telegraph by Charles Moore this time last year, he put it thusly:

Miliband’s father, Ralph, was made famous by his book Parliamentary Socialism. His 1993 book, Socialism for a Sceptical Age, was about the continued relevance of socialism in a post-communist world.

The one thing you have to give credit to socialists for is that they never give up. They’re always dreaming about that wonderful, socialist paradise where everybody is perfectly equal and there are no rich people with their huge homes, cars, jet airplanes to lord it over the proletariat. Actually, I’m convinced that socialists would hate the day perfect equality would occur. There would be no purpose in their lives. They need a cause to exist. Without the cause, their lives are meaningless.

A little explanation here. The term "socialist" doesnt have the same history and therefore the same connotations in the UK as it does in the US. Many British politicians say they are socialist, but very few of them really mean it. Most of those who do only mean it in the sense that they mean it for other people, not themselves. Kind of like congress and Obamacare really.

Britain was only really big on the socialist experiment for the three decades after World War II, and predictably it failed big time, causing massive debt, huge public subsidising of inefficient industries that would not modernise, lots of strikes and shortages, runaway inflation and massive civil disorder. Socialism became pretty much synonymous with failure, and so the socialist parties in Britain successively ditched both the term and the philosophy from about the middle of the 1980's onwards, because it was a massive vote loser.

Today British elitist intellectuals, and a large section of the British working class too, retain a kind of fond hankering for socialism. Time, like distance, has lent it enchantment. They hold to socialism's vast promises, and remember fondly its few successes, but close their minds to the appalling failures that went along with it. Modern British labour politicians know how to tap into this cosy unrealistic nostalgia. They will always say they are socialists if asked; they will always extol how wonderful socialism is if pressed, but none of them would ever actually institute socialism if they had the power, because they know it doesn't work.

IOW, this statement from Ed Milliband is nowhere near as worrying as it might sound.

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