Ed Miliband and the use and abuse of history

Ed Miliband's speech to the Labour Party conference on Tuesday attracted some pretty hysterical reaction, especially in the right-wing press and among the denizens of the more unrepentantly free-market think tanks. For example, Miliband's warning to developers who own land but don't build on it that they should "use it or lose it" was described by Graeme Leach, chief economist at the Institute of Directors, as "a Stalinist attack on property rights". And according to the Daily Telegraph, "there was more than one reference [on Twitter] to Robert Mugabe too".

Strangely, I don't recall such comparisons being made earlier this year when, as Chris Giles points out in the FT, the International Monetary Fund recommended something very similar. But amid the squall of incontinent historicising that followed the speech, two historical analogies caught my eye. The first was drawn by Philip Collins in the Times (£). In a largely critical piece, Collins criticised Miliband for ushering Labour back into its comfort zone (it is an article of faith for Blairites like Collins that a leader should always use a conference speech to pick a fight with his own party). The "intellectually distinguished way" to defend what Miliband said about the need for government to intervene when markets fail, he wrote, "is to say that he is the inheritor of the trust-busting of early 20th-century US American progressivism. President Taft, in particular, broke up large corporations that which had become a conspiracy against the public interest."

That seems plausible to me. After all, a more sympathetic construal of what the Labour leader said, not just on land use but also on the utility price cap, is to see it not, as some rather excitable commentators have suggested, as an attack on the very idea of a market economy but rather an assault, in the best Labour traditions, on vested interests and concentrations of unaccountable economic power. (Collins conflates this "desire for a better market" with a "faith in regular State intervention", but the latter doesn't necessarily follow from the former at all; indeed, I take one of the implications of Miliband's "pre-distribution" doctrine to be that the role of government is to change the rules of the economic game rather than to seek to play the game itself, by "picking winners" and worse.)

So what of William Taft, the 27th president of the United States, a Republican who occupied the White House between 1909 and 1913? His predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, is well-known for his use of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 to wage war on business monopolies. Taft continued where Roosevelt left off, winning a notable case against the American Sugar Refining Company which was rigging prices and also taking on the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and US Steel.

None of which is to say that Taft was anti-business; on the contrary, he also created the US Chamber of Commerce in 1912. Having also presented himself this week as the champion of small business, as opposed to the big corporations, Miliband may want point to this notch on Taft's CV as well. (Incidentally, Taft's son Robert, who became a Republican senator for Ohio, was responsible, in 1947, for drafting union-busting legislation that Miliband presumably plans not to emulate.)

Miliband's promise to cut business rates for 1.5m small businesses prompted another historical comparison, this time in a leader in the Financial Times on Wednesday. "Ed Miliband plays the Poujadiste card" ran the headline. "There is a whiff of Poujadiste populism", the FT argued, in Miliband's proposed business rate cut and aggressive housing policy, drawing a comparison with Pierre Poujade, the shopkeeper who led a brief but powerful petit bourgeois insurgency in France in the mid-1950s rather like that currently being fomented in this country by Nigel Farage—hardly the Labour leader's political soulmate.

In a sequel to this post, I'll consider Ed Miliband's resemblance to, inter alia, Eduard Bernstein and Ludwig Erhard.