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The Daily Mail has expanded its assault on Ed Miliband, accusing the Labour leader of disingenuously presenting his complaint about its controversial profile of his late father. |
The newspaper yesterday appeared unrepentant - in the face of broad criticism - in a fresh editorial that repeated its claim about Ralph Miliband’s “disdain for Britain”. Yesterday’s Mail reprinted an abridged version of Tuesday’s editorial, which said readers would be “truly disturbed if they understood about Miliband’s father’s views”.
It widened the attack on the Labour leader’s deceased father with a double-page spread taking aim at his late friend - the historian Eric Hobsbawm and tutor, Harold Laski, whom it labelled “intellectual apologists for Stalin”.
The third wave of scrutiny by the Daily Mail came as sources close to Miliband said the MP had received more than 10,000 supportive e-mails over the row since the controversial profile was published, on Saturday.
The Press Complaints Commission is understood to have received more than 50 complaints from the public about the Mail’s articles on Miliband, but it has not yet decided whether to launch a formal inquiry over the episode.
In an unapologetic editorial yesterday, the paper conceded that the Labour leader had struck a chord with many readers by leaping to the defence of his deceased father. However, it added: “But while it is certainly astute PR for the Labour leader to present his complaint against the Daily Mail in purely personal and emotional terms, it is also a mite disingenuous.
“For as he is aware, this is not just a personal issue. It is a fundamental question of ideology and enormous public interest. Indeed, his father cannot be portrayed as an innocent private figure, irrelevantly dragged into the public arena.
“On the contrary, he was one of the foremost Marxist thinkers of his generation, an academic and author who devoted his life to preaching one of history’s most poisonous dogmas.”
The editorial argued that it was fair game to scrutinise the views of Ralph Miliband, a prominent Marxist historian who died in 1994, because he had been cited as an influence by a politician who hopes to be prime minister. It quoted extracts, apparently from a 45-year-old Ralph Miliband, saying his “disdain for Britain” included “Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, the great Clubs, the Times, the Church, the Army, the respectable Sunday papers”.
The editorial continued: “What is so disturbing is that Miliband Jnr, with his plans for state seizures of builders’ land and fixing prices by government diktat, appears to have absorbed so many of his father’s ideas.
“Now he leads the charge for political control of the Press, calling for a national debate on how newspapers should conduct themselves. Very well. But the Mail would also welcome a dispassionate and honest debate on the views of his father and their influence on Britain’s would-be prime minister.”