It’s the summer of 2013 and evidence has emerged that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons against his own people, crossing what US President Barack Obama has set down as his “red line”. The US is ready to take military action against Assad’s tyrannical regime, and the UK stands ready to join with Obama in asserting what Prime Minister David Cameron calls the “international taboo” against the use of such weapons.
But when it comes to the vote by MPs which Cameron has pledged they should have, the plan collapses. Labour leader Ed Miliband has decided to whip his MPs to vote against military action, and the motion is lost. It is not only a day of shame for Britain; the consequences are global. Obama is scared into doing nothing, and Assad is given a de facto green light to commit more abuses and kill thousands more of his own people.
Ring any bells? This morning it emerged that the very same Ed Miliband has repeated the trick, intervening (this time in Cabinet) to stop British involvement in military action against another genocidal, terrorist-sponsoring tyranny.
According to Tim Shipman, the doyen of political reporters, Sir Keir Starmer did – contrary to reports – think from the start that there was a case for allowing the US to use the bases at Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford to launch the attacks on Iran. But he was blocked by an alliance of Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper, the Foreign Secretary. As Shipman writes, “security sources are clear that Miliband, in particular, took a ‘petulant, pacifist, legalistic and very political’ approach, questioning why the UK should support the US. ‘He fundamentally doesn’t like Trump, and he doesn’t like this Iran thing,’ one says. As Labour leader in 2013, Miliband thwarted attempts by David Cameron to bomb Syria after the Assad regime used chemical weapons; many in Westminster regard this as a shameful episode. ‘He probably thinks it was a success,’ the source adds.”
I have long held – since that shameful episode in 2013, to be specific – that Ed Miliband has been the most destructive force in British politics of the past ten-plus years. His influence is almost entirely malign; our country would be a safer, better place had he never entered politics.
The Syria episode speaks for itself. His actions led to the butchery of thousand more Syrians. But it is now clear that, far from learning any lessons from that vote, he is no less driven by the same ideology that considers the freedom and the lives of Syrians – and now Iranians – to be inconsequential. For 2013, read 2026.
That is far from the sum of his malign influence, however. As Energy Secretary, his fanatical pursuit of Net Zero is saddling the UK with some of the highest energy prices in the world – with no significant benefit to tackling climate change, given the tiny proportion of global carbon emissions for which the UK is responsible (according to Our World in Data, the UK generates a mere 0.8 per cent of global emissions). Last year no new exploratory oil or gas well was drilled in the North Sea for the first time since the 1960s because Miliband has banned it – even though his (bonkers) plan to decarbonise the National Grid by 2030 requires (even on Miliband’s own calculations) gas to supply five per cent of all power. Norway, meanwhile, took £50 billion in oil and gas revenue last year.
Then there is his attitude to trans issues. In 2017 he devoted an episode of his smugly self-satisfied podcast, Reasons To Be Cheerful to uncritically pushing all the mantras of the trans lobby and described opponents of self-identification as "bonkers”. Worst of all, he conducted a fawning “interview” with the now notorious Dr Helen Webberley, who ran a private clinic with her husband (now struck off the medical register) which prescribed hormones to children.
But in many ways even worse has been his role in the poisoning of public life and opening the floodgates to antisemitism by enabling the election of Jeremy Corbyn as his successor. Miliband replaced Labour’s traditional “electoral college” leadership election system with what was described as “one member, one vote” – except it wasn't only members who could vote. Anyone who wanted to take part could do so for a £3 fee. The hard left flooded in and elected Corbyn, under whose leadership an unprecedented brand of toxic politics and open Jew hate came to define Labour, with a torrent of antisemitism being unleashed on public life.
Corbyn may have departed for his new fringe group, but the poison that was unleashed under his leadership is getting ever worse. All because of Ed Miliband’s idiotic rule change.
And yet despite being so disastrously wrong so many times, Miliband maintains the air of smug superiority that he has had since he first became Labour leader. Now we learn of the latest example of his indifference to tyranny and terror, and his Cabinet role in barring the US from using British air bases. For shame, Ed Miliband, for shame.
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