Milli-Band Of Brothers

As the Labour Party leadership contest starts in earnest over the next week or so the possible contest between the Milliband brothers Ed and David will be fascinating to watch. One of the key questions I guess people will ask is what's the difference between them. Surely they are just 2 sides of the same coin and yet there are enough differences between them to make it interesting.

Ed being the younger of the two has to some extent been in the shadow of his older sibling for a few years. Although he has held ministerial offices since 2007 the fact that David has been Foreign Secretary and has had a global platform on which to operate does overshadow Ed's own position as Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change. The Prestige of being Foreign Secretary often meant that David Milliband's meetings were high-profile and his achievements more obvious.

In spite of this Edward Milliband has suddenly been seen as the favourite of the two to take over leadership of the party. Many feel that David is too closely associated with the previous regimes of Tony Blair & Gordon Brown to gain a broad enough support from the grass-roots membership especially given that he was head of Blair's Policy Unit which formulated a lot of the policies of the New Labour project.

It is fair to say that both brothers have been influenced by the political views of their father Ralph who was a noted Marxist theorist and take a lot of their ideals from his New Left movement which through the New Reasoner and Socialist Register many hold responsible for the legacy of what they call "politically-correct multiculturalism" which was seen as a key focus of New Labour with some wondering whether New Labour was just a re-packaged and more successful version of the New Left movement.

Whatever the outcome whichever brother succeeds in succeeding Gordon Brown (assuming they can first defeat Ed Balls) the greatest challenge will not be winning the contest but integrating the New Left with Old Labour values to re-invigorate a Labour Party that many think has lost its way from its original ideal to represent the interests and needs of the urban proletariat rather than the "chattering classes" of Islington, Hampstead and Notting Hill.

If one of them does become the Leader of the Opposition will this Band of Brothers stay as unified as Easy Company in the TV series. By the end of the summer we will know