David Miliband

Profile

David Wright Miliband (born 15 July 1965) is a British Labour Party politician, who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for South Shields since 2001, the Shadow Foreign Secretary since 2010 and was the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs from 2007 to 2010. He is the son of the late Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband.

He and his younger brother Ed Miliband were the first siblings to sit in the Cabinet simultaneously since Edward, Lord Stanley, and Oliver Stanley in 1938. He is currently standing in the leadership election to determine the next Leader of the Labour Party following the resignation of Gordon Brown.

Born in London, Miliband studied at Oxford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and started his career at the Institute for Public Policy Research. At 29, Miliband became Tony Blair’s Head of Policy whilst the Labour Party was then in opposition and was a major contributor to Labour’s manifesto for the 1997 general election which brought the party to power.

Blair made him head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit from 1997 to 2001, following which Miliband was elected to parliament for the North East England seat of South Shields.

Miliband spent the next several years in various junior ministerial posts in the British Government, including at the Department for Education and Skills, before becoming Environment Secretary. His tenure in this post saw climate change consolidated as a priority for UK policymakers. On the succession of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, Miliband was promoted to Foreign Secretary, at 41, the youngest person to hold the position in 30 years.

Early Life

Born in London, Miliband is the son of Jewish immigrants, Belgian-born Marxist Ralph Miliband and Marion Kozak from Poland. He has said “I am the child of Jewish immigrants and that is a very important part of my identity.” Both his Polish Jewish paternal grandparents lived in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw.

His paternal grandfather, Samuel, a trained leather worker, fought for the Red Army in the Polish–Soviet War of 1919-1921 before moving to Belgium.His paternal grandmother, Renia (later known as Renée), also moved to Belgium, where she first met Sam, and the couple married in 1923. The German invasion of Belgium in May 1940 split the Miliband family in half: Ralph and father Samuel fled to England, while Ralph’s mother Renée and baby sister Nan stayed behind for the duration of the war.

They were not reunited until 1950. During his visit to Poland in June 2009, Miliband went to his family tomb in the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw. He said of Poland, ‘My mother was born here, her life was saved by those who risked theirs sheltering her from Nazi oppression,’ and that he is ‘one of the million Britons who have Polish blood’.

Education

David Miliband was educated at Haverstock School, Camden in London, followed by the state Benton Park School in the village of Rawdon near Leeds and in Boston, Massachusetts, before being educated at Haverstock Comprehensive School in North London from 1978 to 1983.He obtained four A-levels, three Bs and a D, and won admission to the University of Oxford with the assistance of an Inner London Education Authority scheme intended to enable comprehensive school pupils to attend the university.

Miliband studied at Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford and obtained a first class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. From 1988 to 1989 he took an S.M. degree in Political Science at MIT, where he was a Kennedy Scholar.

Source: Wikipedia

Labour Leadership Contest

David Miliband is one of five candidates to succeed Gordon Brown as leader of the Labour Party:

1. David Miliband
2. Ed Miliband
3. Diane Abbott
4. Ed Balls
5. Andy Burnham

Further Information:

• Guardian Summary
• BBC Summary