Labour demands apology following Miliband's Daily Mail controversy

Labour wants the Daily Mail to apologise for the article they published claiming that Ed Miliband’s father Ralph “hated Britain”.

11:31 02 October 2013

Labour wants an apology from the Daily Mail for publishing an article claiming that the late Marxist academic Ralph Miliband and father of politician Ed Miliband “hated Britain”.

The Mail’s deputy editor Jon Steafel confirmed that Mr Miliband, the Labour leader complained to him and that a picture of his father’s grave was removed from its website since. 

However, he told the BBC’s Newsnight programme that he stood by the reporting which ran underneath a sensationalist headline of “The man who hated Britain... The answer should disturb everyone who loves this country”.

"[Ralph Miliband's] views on British institutions from our schools to our royal family, to our military to our universities, to the Church to our great newspapers ... what he said was that he felt that all of those things were bad aspects, were unfortunate aspects of British life...

"If you take those things together and you combine them with an espousing of a Marxist ideology, that in our view represented someone who hated British values," Mr Steafel said.

Meanwhile, Mr Miliband said that his father loved Britain and had served in the Royal Navy. Talking about the article written about his father, he said: "There is no credible argument in the article or evidence from his life which can remotely justify the lurid headline.”