In his essay on “Milibandism” in this week’s NS, Neil O’Brien describes the Labour leader as a man “deeply torn between pragmatism and radicalism”. On last night’s Newsnight, it was the radical on show. Asked by Kirsty Wark what his father, the late Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband (profiled in 2010 by our culture editor Jonathan Derbsyshire) would have made of the rate-rigging scandal, Miliband replied:
Gosh, what would my father think about it? I think he would think that the most important thing of all is that politicians speak truth to power wherever it lies. Whether it lies in the banking system, whether it lies in the press, whether it lies in our energy companies. And to that extent, I suppose, I’m my father’s son or at least I hope I am.
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