His “seven ways to change the world” imagine similar “cometh the hour” interventions, full of technocratic chutzpah. We would also like to use cookies (including from third-party providers like Google) to monitor site traffic so we can understand our audiences and provide personalised advertising for Book Festival events you may be interested in. Goes offers a thought-provoking perspective on how political parties develop their thinking and political blueprints that will appeal to scholars and students of British politics and ideologies and to anyone interested in contemporary debates about social democracy. It shows that no matter how small you think you voice is, if you utilise it in the right manner you can ‘go big’. If the politics of the past five years, or the past 50 years, has taught us anything, it might perhaps be that the wisdom of Dr Pangloss only gets you so far.

Ed's book maps out a vision of what such a future could look like and how we can become a functioning, happy, equal and sustainable society. The dust jacket offers endorsements from various left-liberal luminaries; Rutger Breman, Philip Pullman, Will Hutton et al – no trade union leaders or activists. I really liked the format of the book where Miliband defines a new social contract for the UK and then explains what we can do to achieve it. He served as Minister and Secretary of State in the governments of Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown, and became Leader of the Labour Party himself in 2010, a position he held until 2015. The heart lifts at the essay on GDP, “That Which Makes Life Worthwhile”, which begins with a long prefatory quote from Robert Kennedy, three months before his assassination: “Gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage… special locks for our doors and the jails for people who break them… the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl… napalm and… nuclear warheads and armoured cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities… Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play….

Femi’s exuberant words and talent saw him named as the first Young People’s Laureate for London in 2016, following his 2015 win at the Roundhouse Poetry Slam. The challenges we face are daunting, but in Go Big Ed Miliband shows that the scale of what is possible is far greater. My main criticism is that I would've liked to have seen more material refuting many of the things that have occurred in British politics in the last decade. By relying heavily on examples rather than theory, he describes how seemingly intractable problems of our times can and have been addressed through visionary and committed action, sometimes quite close to home.

When I became Labour leader in 2010 I bought a copy of The Spirit Level (2009) by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson for everyone in my office. The book needed more chapters to tell us his thoughts - which I suspect would have been well worth reading on matters like this - starting with the overall question of: What is Democracy and how does it function properly in a media-obsessed world? Meanwhile in Together, acclaimed Turkish political commentator Temelkuran shuns the dominant Anglo-American political perspective to offer a fresh and at times surprising approach to recalibrating inequalities.Since he stepped down, Miliband has watched as the Tories stole many of “Red Ed’s” policies: Theresa May talked of the “just about managing”, while more recently Rishi Sunak has raised corporation tax, proposed a national infrastructure bank and is using tax to incentivise corporate investment. As this book shows Ed has always been considered and able to see both sides, and this book is the perfect medium to show this. The class nature of society is not perfectly reducible to every single action ever taken by every single boss and every single worker. There’s all sort of characters in Boo Boo and Hee Hee, including a magician who is rather useless and spends all his time watching cricket.