The most curious thing about David Miliband’s article for the latest New Statesman — which is causing quite a stir this morning — is that it should appear now. After all, the Roy Hattersley essay that it purports to be responding to was published, so far as I can tell, last September. That’s five months ago. Which is fine, if it’s really taken MiliMajor that long to get around to it. But it certainly fuels the idea that he has chosen now, this moment, to make a political intervention — and Hattersley is just an excuse.
And the intervention itself? Basically, Miliband warns against what he calls ‘Reassurance Labour’, a strain within the party that has cosy ideas about a big, centralised state and its capacity to do good. That’s wrong, he says: the party should own up to the mistakes of its past, keep on devolving power and keep on reforming.
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