Live from the Glaswegian Mists: : Ralph Miliband (Pére): "[Miliband pére's] essays are hard-headed, sober, nuanced....
...The problem I find with his writing is between the lines: a presence evoked, but absent. Ralph Miliband writes as if socialism... is... an always-available reference, a benchmark against which the real movement falls short, and culpably. It doesn't matter what you think the real movement is. The Labour right and the Labour left, the Communist Party, the small sects, and the international analogues and affiliates of all of these are weighed in the balance, and found wanting.... Their inadequacies would have been better weighed in a more relevant balance: of what they set out to do and what was possible for them to do. Ralph Miliband's criticisms of the Labour Party never give full measure to its real achievements, often different from what it promised and all the more solid and lasting for that....
Ralph Miliband found himself caught between two recognitions. One was that the Labour Party will never (if it has any sense, and it does) adopt what most socialists would deign to call a socialist programme. The other is that no group whose selling point is that it is more socialist than the Labour Party will ever get anywhere.... Ralph Miliband's response to this dilemma was to craft ever more elegant and eloquent expressions of it. There are some problems with that approach to politics. Perhaps it was recognition of them that set Ed Miliband on a path that diverged so far from his father's...
