Britain's Labour Vote Pits Brother Against Brother

LONDON (Sept. 4) -- Just a few months ago, many Brits struggled to tell David Miliband, 44, apart from his 40-year-old brother Ed. It was an understandable mistake: The siblings both held senior posts in former Prime Minister Gordon Brown's cabinet, and -- with their boyish looks, awkward smiles and mops of dark hair -- were almost indistinguishable from each other.

But now that these young political stars are racing against each other to succeed Brown as leader of the center-left Labour Party, people are suddenly waking up to the differences between the Milibands. Differences that, some Labour figures worry, could split the party and consign it to years on the opposition benches.

Labour is currently puzzling over how to win back public support after losing May's general election to the opposition Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, a defeat that led Brown to quit as party leader. There are now five senior Labour figures battling to take over from the dour Scot, but the North London brothers are seen as the most talented contenders. David has the support of 36 percent of party members, according to polling by the Left Foot Forward blog, while Ed has 31 percent.

Given their highly political upbringing, it was almost inevitable that David and Ed would end up battling for the leadership of the left-leaning party. Their late father, Ralph, was a famed Marxist thinker, while their Polish emigre mother Marion Kozak, now 75, was an activist and academic. She hasn't revealed which son she's backing.

Although they've shared much in life -- they both studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University, and rapidly climbed the Labour ranks -- the brothers somehow ended up on opposite wings of the party. David -- nicknamed "Brains" for his geeky looks and wonkish skills -- served as a top adviser to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and dreamed up many of the policies that helped Labour move beyond its working-class roots and appeal to big business and Britain's traditionally conservative middle class.

And he's made it clear that he'll stick to that vision of "New Labour" if elected leader. (Voting started this week, and the winner will be announced Sept. 25.) "You just can't craft an election majority out of a minority," the former foreign secretary declared in a speech late last month. "It is dangerous to pretend we don't need the middle classes, just as it would be to suggest Labour does not need to win back the hope and trust of working-class voters."

In contrast, the more charismatic Ed (David is sometimes viewed as distant and lacking a common touch) is a committed Brown fan. When Labour won its first landslide election in 1997 -- ending 18 years of Conservative rule -- he worked as a speechwriter for then Finance Minister Brown, who wanted the government to move away from the center ground and focus more on ending inequality. Ed has reached out to Brown's largely left-wing supporters and stated that he wants to end New Labour's drift toward "brutish" and "unjust" U.S.-style capitalism.

"It is plain wrong to think that we can build a stronger society when we are relaxed about bankers paid 200 times that of their cleaner," the former energy secretary wrote in an opinion piece for the Observer newspaper. "We need a different approach. Britain's big question of the next decade is whether we head towards an increasingly U.S.-style capitalism -- more unequal, more brutish, more unjust -- or can we build a different model."

The British media have claimed that this ideological split is an indication that Labour is returning to the dark days when the party was paralyzed by battles and conspiracies between Blairites and Brownites. As Blair revealed in his recently published memoirs, the enmity became so extreme toward the end of his decade in power that members of rival camps would barely talk to each other. That made the process of government almost impossible and was a factor forcing Blair to surrender power to Brown in 2007.

During those difficult years, the two brothers remained close and refused to speak against each other. However, several of Blair's key allies have now started sniping at Ed, seemingly on David's behalf.

"I think that if [Ed] or anyone else wants to create a pre-New Labour future for the party, then he and the rest of them will quickly find that that is an electoral cul-de-sac," Lord Mandelson, one of the architects of New Labour, told the London Times earlier this week. That led former Brown backer and Ed supporter Lord Kinnock to open fire on Mandelson, describing him as "sadly out of date" if he thought the party couldn't move past Blair's agenda.

Another leadership candidate -- former Health Minister Andy Burnham -- has cautioned that the leadership contest is now in danger of falling into the "grip of the warring elites trying to control our party."

Both brothers have tried to play down claims of a rift. "Party members, including me, are sick and tired of the old battles of the past being rerun," David Miliband said after Mandelson's intervention. "It's time to move on."

Ed echoed his sibling. "We've got to move on from the politicians of a previous generation," he said to the BBC. "We honor the contribution that they have made to our country and our party, but we don't live in the past."

And although the British media have speculated that the Miliband clan might be torn apart by the leadership race, the brothers have dismissed any suggestions of a family feud. When Ed launched his election campaign in May, he declared he would "absolutely" serve under his older brother if he lost the election.

"I'm in it to win it, but win or lose, we will remain the best of friends, and I will still love him dearly," he insisted.

David Miliband has been slower to say whether he'd work under Ed, but finally admitted during a TV interview Tuesday that he was prepared to play a junior role to his younger brother. He also insisted that the election was "a warm, comradely contest, a fraternal contest and ... a contest that I think will bring credit to the Labour Party and will certainly not come in the way of our family."