A conversation in politics with Ed Miliband

Special Conference Edition of the Magazine 2025

Where can a conversation lead? Political discussions have felt ever more bracing in recent months. Yet, political conversation can also be the start of so much. They can be lifelong, stretching out across friendships and families, across the people and places that come to define us. When that kind of conversation starts, it never truly ends. You just have to be willing and able to continue listening and learning.

Ed Miliband is not only one of Britain’s most prominent politicians, but he is also renowned across party and ideological divisions for valuing these kinds of conversation. Across a thirty-year career, he’s never seen politics solely in terms of speeches or policy papers; it is the political conversation, with both allies and opponents, that he relishes.

“I think ideas remain the most underestimated or undervalued commodity of British politics,” he tells me as we sit in his Whitehall office just before party conference season. And, no doubt surprisingly to some, Miliband thinks that our national politics is alive with ideas like never before. We just need to listen and develop them.

“What defines governments is the motivating ideas, the analysis of the country, what needs to change about the country, and how you would change it. I think the moment we’re in is a moment for big ideas,” Miliband says.

The one-time Labour leader is now Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, with a brief to deliver on the government’s clean power mission. You get a sense that he is calling on us all to dig deep – to ‘think big’.

I am keen to understand if he believes the government is now ready for significant change, to help starta different national conversation. I’m reminded that More in Common recently surveyed what Brits thought had put the country on the wrong track; Brexit and COVID ranked top.

Do Britons a want big change? Are they ready to embrace a new big idea?

“I’m not sure it’s the public that is catching up,” he says, quick to stress their desire for change. “I think it's more that the public has had a deep sense for a long time that the country isn't working in the right way, and the financial crisis then crystallised it, and then the period since the financial crisis has rather sort of proved it to people.”

For Miliband, there is a pressing need to both diagnose what has gone wrong in the last few decades and understand how to fix it. X happened, and now we must do Y. He is eager for a constant evaluation of political possibilities, a weighing of the arguments for and against.

He pauses, looking long into his memory. “Part of the task to narrate a sense of why things have gone so wrong. It’s firstly narration of the problem, and then the supplying of the answers,” he says.

And that he offers me his version. “I personally think a lot of it lies in the experience of what happened in the 1980s and then what happened again in the 2010s – a combination of, you know, trickle-down economics and austerity led to a lot of the problems that people see in their own lives,” he says – gesturing as if to collect his thoughts for more discussion to come.

For Miliband, his life, both political and personal, has always been shaped by politics. His father, Ralph Miliband, fled to Britain in 1940 to escape the Nazi death machine, going on to serve in the Royal Navy and then developing an outstanding career as an academic and public intellectual. His mother and her family couldn’t get out, yet they were hidden from the Nazis, in one of those extraordinary acts of bravery and kindness, safely making it to Britain after the war.

How did both maintain their optimism and their hunger for ideas after going through so much? “My parents shaped me to believe that politics really matters and that lives can be changed and uprooted in bad ways by politics, in their experience. In evil ways,” he moves his tie and thinks on.

“For me, politics can change things for the better, and there's only one point in being in it if you stand up and be counted, if you believe that it can have a positive effect on people,” he says.

It’s then that he talks of his own political stamping of Doncaster North, in South Yorkshire – the constituency he’s represented since 2005.

“Doncaster shapes me because I think , it's a kind of really, really important reminder to people in government in particular of what the practical effects of what you're doing on the everyday struggles that people are facing.” Miliband continues, recounting a recent roundtable he’s had with local councillors on trying to build a park for children and families to play. “If anything is a reminder of the importance of the everyday struggles of people, it's a constituency MP, which keeps your feet on the ground”. The conversations there are just as important as any he’ll have in this grand office in Whitehall.

It's here where I begin to understand one of Miliband’s great political friendships, of which he has many, with his old speechwriter and my boss, the UCL Policy Lab Director, Marc Stears. Theirs is a conversation that started over 30 years ago and still hasn’t stopped.

Stears, whose academic work has always aimed to understand the transformative power of the ordinary – the small act that can go a long way -- argues intensely that the best politics is not grounded in scale but in compassion and care.

“Marc and I met on our first day at university, and he's been a lifelong friend,” as if to think back on those days. “Along with all the things he’s done – policymaker, public intellectual, speechwriter and forceful campaigner.” What Miliband says he’s learned most from Stears “is a sense that what you do, in politics, needs to be rooted deep in people's lives.” And in the clean power mission and the push to build new opportunities for growth and opportunity that Miliband now directs, he sees the chance to do this transformative yet ordinary, everyday work.

“Some people get excited, including me, talking about the gigatons and the carbon emissions, but actually, how this makes a difference to people's lives in practice is an everyday way.” He speaks of the move to install solar panels on schools and homes, but also of the importance of green space and clean streets.

I share with him the work we’ve been doing to understand how small community-based work is helping build both resilience and connection; not imposing beliefs but building the social infrastructure to support local change in the environment, energy, and clean energy. This includes the inspiring work at Willton Lode Community Eco Hub. Miliband is clear about the need to combine what he is leading nationally with the work of local places.

“I always say that the project I'm engaged in is about better lives today, not just disaster avoidance tomorrow,” he continues. “I was just engaged in a thing with Living Streets in my own constituency and, you know, part of their thing was we need more kids to walk to school and I was like yeah that's true – we also need to make sure that we have, you know, safe crossings and all those things. So efficient, very granular-level improvements in quality of life are a large part of what this is about, you know,” he says.

In a sense, this is the great conversation Miliband has been in his whole life – it is the productive tension between big national politics and small local places, between the dangers that come from imposed ideologies and the risks from small acts failing to meet the challenge and between him and his old friend, stretching out over decades.

More than anything, he has been working to prove the political pessimists wrong. His family have seen the worst of politics, yet he still believes the best in it.

As I put away my notebook and make my way to the door, formal interview over, but I notice Ed still thinking over something as he waits for our photographer to take the pictures. “Do you have everything? Did we really get at that idea, of what politics can do?” As always with Ed Miliband, the conversation continues.