Jim Pickard at the FT’s excellent Westminster blog has been wondering whether David Miliband really has the common touch. “Will the public warm,” he wonders, “to the former policy wonk who – despite shedding the previous Mr Logic image – is still best known as an intellectual?”
In seeking to answer that question, he turns to Gideon Rachman’s profile of Miliband from earlier this year. “Here,” he proffers, “is one extract:”
“Amartya Sen is a brilliant man,” remarks Miliband. “I think his argument that there is a fusion tradition – a liberal tradition that is concerned with social justice – is right. And I admire his work on capabilities, and on freedom as capability.”
Hmm: is that really all that nerdy? It’s not as if Miliband is the only Cabinet member who’s into Sen: so are Gordon Brown, Douglas Alexander, and Hilary Benn (who quoted his views on freedom at length in his preface to DFID’s third White Paper). David Cameron turned out to be a fan too, when he made his first big speech on development back in 2006.
Here’s a profile of Sen from back in 2000 by Meghnad Desai in case you haven’t made the acquaintance of this excellent writer; his book Development as Freedom can’t be recommended highly enough.
