My take on Miliband’s speech: very nicely crafted, charmingly delivered, good structure to it, but raises more questions than answers. Effecting a synthesis between the statist and libertarian wings of the left, as Miliband calls for, would be quite a feat – but the speech doesn’t propose how that would be done. Similarly, we’re left none the wiser at the end as to what Miliband proposes to do on tough issues like nuclear proliferation or climate change, other than that we’ll need a range of multilateral institutions to deal with them and equity considerations will be important. Well, yes…
But this is where Miliband’s so engaging. Boffin that he is, you can just tell that he’s thinking all this stuff through from first principles, probably referring to Kant, Habermas, Thomas Aquinas and Thucyidides on the way; and that though he may not have figured the answers out yet, they just might be in the post.
Not sure I’m convinced by this ‘civilian surge’ malarkey, though. The underlying idea, yes. The strapline, hmm.
