Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

He may have taken stick for his symbolic policy book full of blank pages but for those who sought it their wait has not been in vain. Labour Party leader Ed Miliband has perhaps come closer to defining his party’s brand of socialism than any of his recent predecessors dared. In a lengthy interview and profile for The Guardian’s magazine, by Andy Beckett, the man who has so often been defined in terms of his relationships to others – son of Ralph, brother of David, heir to Gordon – quietly and without fanfare articulated Labour’s purpose as identifying and correcting “the injustices of capitalism”.

He told the magazine: “A lot of the faith that people had in markets has been shaken by what happened in 2008. The financial crisis has got to be this big moment of reassessment. Now, clearly you need markets…(but) if you’re Labour you believe that it’s just not good enough to say the outcome the market produces is a fair outcome.  You’ve got to find ways of intervening in that outcome.” New Labour was “about coming to terms with capitalism. It was hard to be a critic of capitalism. I’m not making excuses. But I’m trying to explain it – almost as a historian might explain it”. But Mr Miliband, who worked at a very City-friendly Treasury as advisor to Chancellor Gordon Brown until 2005 when he resigned to become an MP – the same year as Nick Clegg – is nevertheless pretty sanguine about the Labour Party leader being called a socialist. “Well, the Labour Party card says ‘democratic socialist’”, he told his interviewer.

*****

Honesty and principle are not always synonymous with political ambition, certainly at the start of a House of Commons career. True, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive but they can be inconvenient or come at a price. One thinks of former Education Secretary Estelle Morris’s overly harsh self-criticism that led to her resignation. Health minister Edwina Currie in the late 1980s whose resignation sparked a shake-up of hygiene and health standards in the egg industry also springs to mind. Now a new name might be added to that roll call of honour. Step forward Tory MP and GP Sarah Wollaston from Devon who this week probably torpedoed any ministerial ambitions she might once quietly have harboured by admitting the Government’s health policy may well destroy the NHS. Handing GPs control of the purse strings would change the health service “beyond recognition” – and not for the better. She also mentioned the inconvenient truth that her party campaigned in 2010 on a pledge of Nno “top-down reorganisation” of the NHS. The bill currently before MPs is no less than a “Trojan horse”, Dr Wollaston said. “No top-down reorganisation of the NHS promised on the outside, but perhaps the greatest upheaval in the organisation’s history on the inside.” Groups of GPs that ministers want to band together to make savings are “doomed to fail and will have to hand over their commissioning to the private sector. An organisation responsible for over £100 billion needs people who understand accountancy and, trust me, GPs do not.”

*****

Lord Saville’s lengthy and costly investigation into the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry attracted much criticism and pledges that never again will a judicial inquiry be given a blank cheque. Nevertheless, anyone watching the families in Derry last year as David Cameron addressed the Commons on its findings had to concede the inquiry did bring about a common good. This week over in Dublin another tribunal established in 1997 finally published its findings. The story could hardly be in greater contrast to Lord Saville’s efforts. The Moriarty Tribunal, set up by then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern to look into corrupt payments to some of Ireland’s senior politicians, delivered several thousand pages of findings. It commenced in October 1997, heard from its first witness in 1998 and hasn’t sat as a public tribunal since 2004. It cost the Irish taxpayer between 100 million euros and 150 million euros and made multi-millionaires of the three most senior barristers assigned to it. This week it concluded that  then communications minister Michael Lowry in John Bruton’s Fine Gael government – now an independent TD – received a payment from (then) small businessman Denis O’Brien who was seeking the license for Ireland’s second GSM mobile phone network for his company ESAT Digifone which he set up in 1995. Mr O’Brien won the franchise and sold it to BT in 2000 netting himself a personal profit of 317 million euros which he used to build up the Digicel network in the Caribbean. Mr O’Brien, who denies the tribunal’s finding, is now the second wealthiest person in Ireland, owns much of its media, and Forbes this month estimated his personal fortune at $4.2 billion, up by $700 million in the last year alone. The amount said to be paid to the corrupt minister – £147,000.