Ed Miliband
Edward Samuel Miliband is a British politician who has served as Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero since July 2024. He has been Member of Parliament for Doncaster North since 2005. Miliband was Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition from 2010 to 2015. Alongside his brother, David Miliband, he served in the Cabinet from 2007 to 2010 under Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Miliband was born in the Fitzrovia district of Central London to Marion Kozak and Ralph Miliband, Polish Jewish immigrants. His father was a Marxist intellectual and native of Brussels who fled Belgium during the Second World War. He graduated from Corpus Christi College, Oxford and later from the London School of Economics. Miliband became first a television journalist, then a Labour Party researcher and a visiting scholar at Harvard University, before rising to become one of Chancellor Gordon Brown's confidants and chairman of HM Treasury's Council of Economic Advisers. He was elected to the House of Commons in 2005 and Prime Minister Tony Blair made him Minister for the Third Sector in May 2006. When Brown became Prime Minister in 2007, he appointed Miliband Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Miliband was subsequently promoted to the new post of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, a position he held from 2008 to 2010.
After the Labour Party was defeated at the 2010 general election, Brown resigned as Leader of the Labour Party; in September 2010, Miliband was elected to replace him. His tenure as Labour leader was characterised by a leftward shift in his party's policies under the "One Nation Labour" branding, and by opposition to the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government's cuts to the public sector. Miliband also abolished the electoral college system to elect the leader and deputy leader of the Labour Party, and replaced it with a "one member, one vote" system in 2014. He led his party into several elections, including the 2014 European Parliament election.
Following Labour's defeat by the Conservative Party at the 2015 general election, Miliband resigned as leader on 8 May 2015. He was succeeded following a leadership election by Jeremy Corbyn, and returned to the backbenches. In 2020, Keir Starmer appointed Miliband Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and later Shadow Secretary of State for Climate Change and Net Zero in 2021. Following Labour's victory in the 2024 general election, Miliband returned to government after being appointed Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero by Starmer.
Early life and education
Ed Miliband was born on 24 December 1969 in University College Hospital in Fitzrovia, London. He is the son of immigrant parents, Belgian-born Marxist sociologist Ralph Miliband and Polish-born Marion Kozak, both from Polish Jewish families. His mother, a human rights campaigner and early CND member, survived the Holocaust thanks to being protected by Catholic Poles, but her father, Ed's maternal grandfather, did not. His father Ralph was a Marxist academic whose father fled with him to England during the Second World War. The family lived on Edis Street in Primrose Hill, London. His elder brother, David Miliband, still owns the house as of 2010.Ralph Miliband left his academic post at the London School of Economics in 1972 to take up a chair at the University of Leeds as a professor of politics. His family moved to Leeds with him in 1973; Miliband attended Featherbank Infant School in Horsforth between 1974 and 1977, during which time he became a fan of Leeds United.
Owing to his father's later employment as a roving teacher, Miliband spent two spells living in Boston, Massachusetts, one year when he was seven and one middle school term when he was twelve. Miliband remembered his time in the US as some of his happiest, during which he became a fan of American culture, watching Dallas and following the Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots.
Between 1978 and 1981, Ed Miliband attended Primrose Hill Primary School, near Primrose Hill in Camden, and then from 1981 to 1989 at Haverstock Comprehensive School in Chalk Farm. He learned to play the violin while at school, and as a teenager he reviewed films and plays on LBC Radio's Young London programme as one of its fortnightly "Three O'Clock Reviewers". After completing his O-levels, he worked as an intern to family friend Tony Benn, the MP for Chesterfield.
In 1989, Miliband gained four A Levels—in Mathematics, English, Further Mathematics and Physics —and then read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In his first year, he was elected JCR President, leading a student campaign against a rise in rent charges. In his second year he dropped philosophy and was awarded an upper-second-class Bachelor of Arts degree. He went on to graduate from the London School of Economics as a Master of Science in Economics.
Political career
Special adviser
In 1992, after graduating from the University of Oxford, Miliband began his working career in the media as a researcher to co-presenter Andrew Rawnsley in the Channel 4 show A Week in Politics. In 1993, Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury Harriet Harman approached Rawnsley to recruit Miliband as her policy researcher and speechwriter. At the time, Yvette Cooper also worked for Harman as part of Labour's Shadow Treasury team.In 1994, when Harriet Harman was moved by the newly elected Labour Leader Tony Blair to become Shadow Secretary of State for Employment, Miliband stayed on in the Shadow Treasury team and was promoted to work for Shadow Chancellor Gordon Brown. In 1995, with encouragement from Gordon Brown, Miliband took time out from his job to study at the London School of Economics, where he obtained a master's degree in economics. Following Labour's 1997 landslide victory, Miliband was appointed as a special adviser to Chancellor Gordon Brown from 1997 to 2002.
Harvard
On 25 July 2002, it was announced that Miliband would take a 12-month unpaid sabbatical from HM Treasury to be a visiting scholar at the Center for European Studies of Harvard University for two semesters. He spent his time at Harvard teaching economics, and stayed there after September 2003 for an additional semester teaching a course titled "What's Left? The Politics of Social Justice". During this time, he was granted "access" to Senator John Kerry and reported to Brown on the presidential hopeful's progress. After Miliband returned to the UK in January 2004 Gordon Brown appointed him Chairman of HM Treasury's Council of Economic Advisers as a replacement for Ed Balls, with specific responsibility for directing the UK's long-term economic planning.Parliamentary career
In early 2005, Miliband resigned his advisory role to HM Treasury to stand for election. Kevin Hughes, then the Labour MP for Doncaster North, announced in February of that year that he would be standing down at the next election due to being diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Miliband applied for selection to be the candidate in the safe Labour seat and won, beating off a close challenge from Michael Dugher, then a SPAD to Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon.Gordon Brown visited Doncaster North during the general election campaign to support his former adviser. Miliband was elected on 5 May 2005, with 55.5% of the vote and a majority of 12,656. He made his maiden speech in the House of Commons on 23 May, responding to comments made by future Speaker John Bercow. In Blair's frontbench reshuffle in May 2006, he was made Minister for the Third Sector, with responsibility for voluntary and charity organisations.
Cabinet
On 28 June 2007, the day after Brown became Prime Minister, Miliband was sworn of the Privy Council and appointed Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, being promoted to the cabinet. This meant that he and his brother, Foreign Secretary David Miliband, became the first brothers to serve in a British cabinet since Edward and Oliver Stanley in 1938. He was additionally given the task of drafting Labour's manifesto for the 2010 general election.On 3 October 2008, Miliband was promoted to become Secretary of State for the newly created Department of Energy and Climate Change in a cabinet reshuffle. On 16 October, Miliband announced that the British government would legislate to oblige itself to cut greenhouse emissions by 80% by 2050, rather than the 60% cut in carbon dioxide emissions previously announced.
In March 2009, while Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Miliband attended the UK premiere of climate change film The Age of Stupid, where he was ambushed by actor Pete Postlethwaite, who threatened to return his OBE and vote for any party other than Labour if the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station were to be given the go-ahead by the government. A month later, Miliband announced to the House of Commons a change to the government's policy on coal-fired power stations, saying that any potential new coal-fired power stations would be unable to receive government consent unless they could demonstrate that they would be able to effectively capture and bury 25% of the emissions they produce immediately, with a view to seeing that rise to 100% of emissions by 2025. This, a government source told the Guardian, effectively represented "a complete rewrite of UK energy policy for the future".
Miliband represented the UK at the 2009 Copenhagen Summit, from which emerged a global commitment to provide an additional US$10 billion a year to fight the effects of climate change, with an additional $100 billion a year provided by 2020. The conference was not able to achieve a legally binding agreement. Miliband accused China of deliberately foiling attempts at a binding agreement; China explicitly denied this, accusing British politicians of engaging in a "political scheme".
During the 2009 parliamentary expenses scandal, Miliband was named by the Daily Telegraph as one of the "saints" of the scandal, due to his claiming one of the lowest amounts of expenses in the House of Commons and submitting no claims that later had to be paid back.