Whoever invented the Daily Mail

One can only admire Ed Milliband for standing up to the gutter press. He must be the first British political leader since – who? – to do so.

Usually if I read the Mail it’s just for the Daily FeMail starlets and such.

Anyway, I don’t see what was wrong with the aforelinked article. I found it educative and intriguing. (I am now eager to learn more!) Also, I liked the pictures.

Am I missing some sort of massive badness?

S. Baron-Cohen, the headline firstly – I might disagree with the views of Ralph Milliband, as portrayed in the article, but am certainly not disturbed and ‘love’ Britain. Using the quote from when he was 17 seems especially unfair and to me doesn’t show that he hated Britain at all.

‘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.’

I also liked this bit as showing how he had a giant sized chip on his shoulder about his adopted country.

‘Also respectability, good taste, don’t rock the boat, there will always be an England, foreigners, Jews, natives etc are all right in their place and their place is outside . . .’

The article is exactly the type of thing he is criticising here but Levy shows no signs of recognising it, the whole thing seems to be caught in an infinite loop of irony. The article is suggesting that because he was an immigrant he has no right to criticise anything in the UK, and because he did he must hate the UK.

This was also a stand-out line.

Like all Left-wing thinkers, Ralph Miliband knew how to explain away awkward events.

The bit in the Mail’s editorial about “the jealous God of Deuteronomy” is a bit yucky too, isn’t it?

Some more links for you:

Ed Miliband’s reply
Geoffrey Levy responds to EdM: Ralph Miliband criticised the conditions of enlisted men in the Navy and therefore, um, he hated Britain (needs work – Ed.)
The Mail backs its man (“Ed Miliband, an evil legacy and why we won’t apologise”
Reactions from Nick Clegg, David Cameron and, er, Twitter

The reaction is reassuring – I haven’t seen anyone actually backing the Mail. Still, it is scary seeing such an open attempt to delegitimate the Left by running the old “Marxism = Communism = Stalinism = the Gulags = Pol Pot” line. Being a Marxist academic becomes “attempting to convert the impressionable young to his poisonous creed”. Nasty stuff, and unpleasantly familiar.

Love the Leon Rosselson reference. I never ate another fish finger after hearing that song.

Tabasco @2

Surprisingly, Stanley Baldwin stood up to Harold Harmsworth (Rothermere I) and Beaverbrook in 1930 and 31. Both press magnates had tried to dictate policy. Rothermere even wrote to Baldwin stating that he would only support the Conservatives if Baldwin adopted policies with which Rothermere agreed, and if Baldwin submitted to Rothermere the names of his principal Cabinet ministers for prior approval.

Baldwin declared at a Tory meeting: “… I will fight that attempt at domination to the end.”

In 1931, using phrases suggested by his cousin, Rudyard Kipling, Baldwin attacked the press lords for using “direct falsehood, misrepresentation, half-truths, the alteration of the speaker’s meaning … What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, but power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.”

(Reliable sources for these quotations are easily available on the web.)

Sasha – OK, it’s not unprecedented, but it’s quite striking, particularly after the attack on Murdoch (“There are no hard feelings between me and News International. They want me to lose the election, I want them to go to jail.”) I think at the very least Ed M is the first major party leader to stand up to the press since Harold Wilson, and that’s going back 37 years minimum. There will be people voting in 2015 whose parents weren’t born in 1976.

I agree Phil – and I love the Murdoch quote! :) I also think that, for all his flaws, Ed Miliband is much less cynical than Harold Wilson.

Layman, the Daily Mail makes no real difference between ‘news’ and ‘opinion’. It’s all the same to them.

Layman: the idea that opinion and news should be kept separate is very much a feature of US newspaper culture and not British. Of course, even in the NYT, news can be spun to the point where it resembles advocacy: but the NYT would angrily deny that it does this, whereas the Daily Telegraph (for example) does it pretty openly and unashamedly.

Chris – actually backing the Mail (“yes, Miliband Sr was an evil unpatriotic Commie!”) or just yelling about Damian McBride and sauce for the gander, and generally running interference? The latter’s contemptible, but the former might actually be beneath contempt (never thought I’d find a comparative use for that phrase).

This is quite interesting, and should remind anyone who’s curious just how much of a fire-breathing revolutionary Ralph M. was. (Short answer: not very much at all. Longer answer: although he didn’t believe in armed insurrection or anything like it, he did believe in the ultimate triumph of socialism, partly by electoral means. I can’t help feeling that the combination made him even more of a hate-figure to the Daily Mail than if he’d been a Citizen Smith rrrrevolutionary.)

Chris – actually backing the Mail (“yes, Miliband Sr was an evil unpatriotic Commie!”) or just yelling about Damian McBride and sauce for the gander, and generally running interference?

It’s a mixture. To give two of the most prominent examples:

Michael Gove (here) says it’s a matter of a free press, and the Mail has nothing to apologise for. This is currently one of the lead stories on the BBC website.

Dan Hodges (here) substantially defends the Mail article, saying “Levy’s criticisms of [Millband Sr.] are clearly political, rather than personal… examining the influence of Miliband Snr on Miliband Jnr is hardly gutter journalism… If Ed Miliband believes the values instilled in him by his parents have been relevant to shaping his politics, that’s fine. But others will too. And they will not feel obliged to draw the same rosy conclusions.” I believe this is the article that Chris Bertram referenced above.

Michael Gove is well known for being so deluded as to accuse teachers who resist his ‘reforms’ of being Marxists. Anything which bashes anyone at all connected to labour, left wing politics etc is fine by him.

It is of course quite mad to judge someone by your fantasy of their thoughts, rather than their actions and speeches, which indicate that Ed Milliband is an economically centrist and socially liberal sort of slightly to the left of centre fellow with no great ambitions to destroy capitalism.

The piece seems too mild to makes a fuss. Do you have anything like AM radio in the US?

I didn’t think there was anything Labour could do to get my vote next time out. But between the energy price freeze and the prospect of giving Dacre an aneurysm in 2015 I may just be sold.

I’d pretty much given up on Milliband as the weakest, most ineffectual Labour leader in history but he’s actually earned some respect this week.

It’s a dirty story of a dirty man
And his clinging wife doesn’t understand.
Their son is working for the Daily Mail,
It’s a steady job but he wants to be a paperback writer . . .

Gove is interesting in other ways too: he is a Scottish Conservative who wouldn’t have a hope of being elected in Scotland, but is given a safe Tory seat in England. There are others: Liam Fox, Sir Malcolm Rifkind etc.

I wonder what their citizenship status will be if Scotland secedes?

To be clear, what (to me) is so particularly vile about the Mail’s attack on Ralph M – and what makes Hodges’ column so unsatisfactory, to put it mildly – is what it doesn’t say: it doesn’t say that Miliband was a Marxist and as such believed in the following dangerous or undesirable things. That you could argue with. What it says is that Miliband was a Marxist which is unacceptable in and of itself; that, because he was a Marxist, his legacy to Ed M was (inherently) evil. That’s not critique, it’s delegitimation, and I’m happy to agree with Daragh: it stinks.

God knows we had enough earnest discussion of “are all Communists evil?” when Hobsbawm died: when we say evil, do we mean as evil as Nazis? slightly less? how much less? as evil as Nazis but in a different way? what about if they’ve condemned Stalin’s purges? should we ask them to repudiate the purges? and so on. To find ourselves being dragged into a round of “are all Marxists more or less Communists really, and therefore evil?” would just be a bad dream, or possibly a bad joke.

@39 Huh – I’m jealous – it took me ten! :(

But I’m pushing 60 and I do think that things were better in the old days – before Blair and Maggie and rampant crony capitalism.

@39, @40 — Six questions for me. Being gay helps. It also makes me reluctant to say things were better in the old days (even though I’m a few years over 60). They were better in some ways and quite a lot worse in others, from my vantage point.

Of course, I’m not British, so maybe I wasn’t meant to answer the questions in the first place.

[aeiou] I read the whole article, which was a bloody pain, and it seems pretty objective. Meaning, if he got a fact wrong, you could point that out and the whole thing might well collapse. But if he didn’t, it’s impervious on first survey. There is little or no speculation. Basically the whole argument consists of reasonably checkable facts, which at least in the body of the piece are presented in a non-judgemental tone.

Assuming the author didn’t make significant errors of fact, the only reason I can see for anyone to be excited about this is the sub-hed, which is provocative in various ways. Perhaps the most lurid accusation against the senior Miliband is that he was:

The man who hated Britain

Mm hmm. Is that a deal, or something? Because, as far as anyone ever told me, hating Britain is the primary social obligation of all bipeds on this or other planets, taken for granted from time immemorial. Saying a guy hates Britain is like saying he likes pizza. It’s not a thing.

When I was much younger, I did not understand this. I heard a woman speaking in an accent that I vaguely identified as being from the islands across the pond. I said, “Oh, you’re English!” She scowled and said she was Irish. So I said, “Oh well, British then.” She whipped out a stiletto, and to avoid injuring her, I had to jump out the window.

So I’m convinced. If any of you can offer any reason whatsoever not to hate Britain to your very last ounce of breath, I would like to hear it.

@musical mountaineer – if you are unaware of why Irish people would react with special fury to being described as ‘British’ after explicitly telling their interlocutor that they are Irish, you should probably read a bit more history. I say this as someone who has lectured more than my fair share of recently confused and now suddenly embarrassed foreigners about the many iniquities visited upon my people by perfidious Albion. Though you do get extra self-awareness points given CT’s authorship.

@Harry – Funnily enough, Mad Mel has gone so completely round the bend not even the Mail will publish her anymore.

Took me 10. Just one more example of how the world just ain’t fair to us straight white males.

It was the question “Michael Gove?” that tipped me over. The answer can only be No.

Gene: you know how Boris Johnson is a fairly serious hard right-winger who’s made a career out of pretending to be a buffoon, keeping up the appearance by working on a few good lines* which keep him in the spotlight? Gove is much the same deal, only he’s been pretending to be an intellectual, with a sideline as a professional hater. I don’t trust him an inch.

As for Dan Hodges, the Hodgester is now officially to the Right of Michael Heseltine, Boris Johnson, Charles Moore(!) and Lord Moore of Lower Marsh (no relation – he’s the politician FKA John Moore). It’s always the renegades.

*And they are good lines. But, as Caitlin Moran said a while back, this is not to his credit as a politician: writing material takes time, and writing good material takes a lot of time. No politician should have that much time spare – it’s not their job.

Even despite being a straight white male of christian heritage the Daily Mail hates me after only 7 questions
How the hell did they lose me?

@Phil – all too true.

I’m pleased to say that some few in the media actually did ask about Paul Dacre’s dad, who seems to have avoided conscription…

if you are unaware of why Irish people would react with special fury to being described as ‘British’ after explicitly telling their interlocutor that they are Irish, you should probably read a bit more history.

No need for that, the lady already told me. Irish ⊈ British. I was, like, thirteen.

Perhaps my confusion was due to the term “British Isles” which traditionally includes Ireland. Looking it up, I see the Irish aren’t so happy about this common usage and actively prefer other terms, even waging meme-war from their embassy on British soil. Which just goes to show that animosity towards Britain is perfectly acceptable, not least in Britain.

I get that it’s a provocation to have your hero called a Britain-hater (which makes you a Britain-lover, I suppose). But maybe there’s an historical element I’m missing here. Nowhere in the article does it say Ralph Miliband “had any sympathy with Britain’s enemies during WWII”. Where’d that come from? The quote about English nationalism is unsparing, but Miliband expressly stops short of wishing defeat on his adopted country. The article does not omit mention of Miliband’s military service, and it shows Miliband less radical than one of his fellows, on the right side of a major moral question that commies often get wrong.

I could go on. The article is sympathetic. It finishes up saying Ralph Miliband had “brilliance”. And, knowing nothing about the man other than this article, I’m inclined to agree. I really like his line about the dominant class.

This is a vicious hatchet job?

“Which just goes to show that animosity towards Britain is perfectly acceptable, not least in Britain.”

Actually it shows that formerly colonised people tend to object to people calling their lands by the names their former imperial masters. It’s why we don’t talk about ‘Rhodesians’ anymore. Yes, the situation is slightly more complex due to the six-counties, but your dismissal of an important, if symbolic, effort by the Irish government to change the terminology as a ‘meme-war’ and ‘animosity towards Britain’ makes me think the disemvowelling may have been justified.

Let’s see: lots of people – including right-wingers – say it was a vicious hatchet-job and shouldn’t have been printed. A few people say it was a vicious hatchet-job, but the paper had a right to print it anyway. A couple of people say it was strong and potentially offensive criticism, but within the bounds of robust political debate, and anyway Ed Miliband started it.

musical mountaineer says “The article is sympathetic.”

Either you’re trolling, mm, or you really need to work on your reading comprehension.

What do we mean by Britain? These days, most people mean, broadly, the island of Great Britain and its inhabitants. From that point of view, as they hate more of its population, the Daily Mail journalists seem to hate Britain more than most.

Ireland may technically be one of the British isles, but most of the people do not see their own identity as “British”. In fact the Celtic language spoken by their ancestors was Goidelic and not Brythonic.* To me, it seems that one real essence of fascism is imposing an identity upon people against their will. Unfortunately, many national identities are based upon untrue ancestry myths, but people should at least have the right to say who they are NOT.

Of course there are many sub-identities that make up a nation, and no doubt several are incompatible with each other. The “Ulster Scotch” regard themselves as “British”, but many of the more public manifestations of their culture are largely regarded with repugnance by residents of the mainland. If Scotland chooses independence, who will want them?

*The caveat is that most ancestors of the Irish arrived in Ireland long before the Celts arrived in Europe.

Living in brackets.

The Celts were one of a number of waves of “Caucasian” tribes speaking an Indo-Euoropean language who arrived in Europe via the Caucasus and Asia Minor.

The earliest evidence of Celtic culture in Europe dates to about 1200 BC long after the building of Stonehenge in Britain. There is genetic evidence linking the peoples of the western British Isles with indigenous Iberians, for example the Basques (who still speak a non Indo-European Language.) Around 100 CE, Tacitus speculated about the Iberian origins of the tribes living in what we now call Wales. Certainly there is a very ‘Iberian’ look about many of the Welsh even now.

The point is that perceived nationality is often based on romantic notions, and that few people, including the English, are quite what they think they are. What usually happened after invasions/migrations was assimilation rather than wholesale genocide, with perhaps a new language and culture grafted onto the old.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silures

Thanks for pointing us to this song.

[I] think it is very easy to underestimate the extent to which the wartime anti-fascist left, including the communists, felt that they were living through a life and death struggle – which of course they were.

For much of the war, of course, the Communists were not part of the anti-fascist left. They were part of the pro-fascist left. In Russia they fed the Wehrmacht the fuel and raw materials it needed to bomb and shell the capitals of Europe. In Britain they pushed for strikes to undermine the war effort in what they described as the Second Imperialist War.

It is a partial picture, but that’s because it’s a correction to another partial picture: that the communists were locked in a life-and-death struggle against the fascists. They were, but only for part of the time. For those 21 months – the period during which the eventual outcome of the war was actually most in doubt – the communists were either actively on the side of the fascists or, at best, acquiescing quietly against their better judgement, just like all those good Germans who tried not to think too hard about where the trains were going.