Ed vs Paul Dacre

I do not really like many politicians and Ed Miliband is no exception, but what the Daily Mail did was completely unjustifiable and inexcusable.

The Daily Mail described the late Marxist scientist, Ralph Miliband, as "The Man Who Hated Britain", in the Saturday pages of the Mail itself. The Labour leader had a column in the Mail in which he puts foward a robust defence of his dad, the renowned Marxist political scientist who passed away in 1994, and accuses the paper of a "character assassination".

The first two paragraphs are worth reading in full:

"It was June 1944 and the Allies were landing in Normandy. A 20-year old man, who had arrived in Britain as a refugee just four years earlier, was part of that fight. He was my father. Fighting the Nazis and fighting for his adopted country.
On Saturday, the Daily Mail chose to publish an article about him under the banner headline 'The Man Who Hated Britain.'

"It’s part of our job description as politicians to be criticised and attacked by newspapers, including the Daily Mail. It comes with the territory. The British people have great wisdom to sort the fair from the unfair. And I have other ways of answering back. But my Dad is a different matter."

And his last paragraph:

"There was a time when politicians stayed silent if this kind of thing happened, in the hope that it wouldn’t happen again. And fear that if they spoke out, it would make things worse. I will not do that. The stakes are too high for our country for politics to be conducted in this way. We owe it to Britain to have a debate which reflects the values of how we want the country run."

Despite all of this, the Daily Mail refuses to back down, which is extremely ironic, in my view because was it not this newspaper that described the public reaction of |Margret Thatcher death as a total "lack of respect for the dead" and described it as "a disturbing new low in British life", a bit hypocritical, don't you think?

After all of this, the Daily Mail stand by "every word" in their article. I'm quite sure Paul Dacre will regret his decision of digging a bit too deep into this...