The frontrunner to become Britain's next foreign secretary has told the JC he is giving the likely next prime minister, Andy Burnham, “the time and space to make his own decisions”.
Speaking to the paper after delivering the annual Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks Memorial Lecture, David Miliband would not be drawn on whether he would join the Great Officers of State on Burnham's new front bench.
“Give him the time and space to make his own decisions,” Miliband said.
The former Labour MP for South Shields, who was brought up in a Jewish household in north London and whose brother, Ed, is a contender to become chancellor in Burnham's Cabinet, now leads the International Rescue Committee in New York.
Miliband served as foreign secretary under Gordon Brown between 2007 and 2010. Any return to the role would require him either to join the House of Lords or to be elected to Parliament.
In his wide-ranging 4,500-word lecture, Kings, Priests and Prophets: Power and its Missing Guardrails, Miliband, 60, backed the MP for Makerfield’s vision for the country.
He warned that “unchecked power, democratic backsliding and the erosion of the rule of law” had become more common around the world.
And he said the case for democracy was experiencing a “great reversal on a global scale”, describing it as a “full-blown democratic depression”.
“In the UK, we have so far been protected from the worst of these trends, but we should not kid ourselves that we are immune,” he went on.
“The UK is among the democracies with very high levels of democratic dissatisfaction. Ipsos reports that only 26 per cent of the public are satisfied with how democracy is working. Three in four are worried about the state of democracy, and only one in five say national government is doing a good job of protecting it.
“At home and abroad, we have... a dual task in the face of new and powerful forces of impunity. We must defend our inheritance of democratic institutions and the rule of law.”
To counter this, Miliband argued for a broader dispersal of power through major devolution, saying: “We need to take on the concentration of the UK's economic and political power in Westminster.
“The commitment last week by Andy Burnham, that he intends to give meaningful power to those who know and serve their communities, to invest in those communities, suggests that we are at long last on the verge of big change. And it's long overdue.”
He also made the case for strengthening international law and institutions, suggesting that the UN, “far from being too strong and overbearing”, was instead “too weak” to address global issues.
“This failure creates anger in countries like our own. Equally, the pre-eminence of Western democratic nations in international institutions, and their failure to reform them, has alienated rising countries of the so-called Global South. So there is frustration all round,” he continued.
Elsewhere, he backed major electoral reform, something Burnham has also said he supports.
Miliband argued for the Alternative Vote system while still an MP during a 2011 referendum on the subject, saying it “offers a way to better engage the public in politics without fuelling the fragmentation of society” as “the AV system ensures every one of the elected 650 MPs wins at least 50 per cent of the vote in their constituency”.
He expressed concern that only 15 per cent of MPs secured more than 50 per cent of the vote in their constituencies at the 2024 general election.
He said: “AV allows people to first vote with their heart, and then with their head… it means that when people vote, they feel their individual and intellectual choices count.”
And Miliband was critical of aspects of the American political system.
“Living in America, it becomes so clear why we have to defend an independent judiciary, fight for a non-political civil service, bolt down the independence of the Boundary Commission and the Electoral Commission, and preserve our democracy from outside foreign influence.”
He added that living in the United States had been the “best antidote for BBC-bashing,” stating “the benchmark it sets for scrutiny and accountability is second to none.”
He then turned to King Charles' address to the US Congress earlier this year, saying it was an “irony” that the king “reminded elected representatives of the most powerful republic the world has known not just about shared history but also about the need for checks and balances on the use of executive power”.
“You might call that chutzpah. But in fact, it was insight. And he was cheered for it.
“The King's address was timely and edgy because democracy and constitutional rule of law, the most advanced and elaborate checks on the abuse of power, are now contested terrain.”
Miliband said his address at the packed lecture theatre at the London School of Economics was “especially meaningful” because his parents met and fell in love at the university.
"My parents were refugees to the UK, as was Jonathan Sacks’ father. They shared with Jonathan, and with Einstein, a learned passion to fight the abuse of power.”
Miliband spoke at length of his relationship with the late chief rabbi, whom he said he met monthly while he worked as an advisor for then-Prime Minister Tony Blair.
“Tony couldn’t get enough of Jonathan’s insights, and certainly not enough from their occasional meetings, so I was deputed to visit the Chief Rabbi on a monthly basis to get further food for thought.
“We would talk about education policy, community, family… contracts and covenants, hopes and realities. I remember vividly Jonathan’s curiosity, patience and kindness. He was a patriot and an internationalist. He was rooted and cosmopolitan.”
Finally, he recalled Lord Sack’s “insistence that it is not hope that leads to action, as was often said, but instead action that leads to hope”.
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