Former Foreign Secretary and current Member of Parliament of South Shields, United Kingdom, the Rt. Hon. David Miliband, visited SPPM on March 16^th, 2011 and delivered a lecture at a lunchtime seminar hosted by Dean Professor XUE Lan. Students representing the MID, IMPA, MM, and Ph.D. classes, along with Post-Doctorates and members from SPPM Research Centers attended. Both the distinguished speaker and his colleague Eric Beinhocker (author of The Origin of Wealth and a senior advisor to McKinsey & Company), acknowledged this diverse audience in attendance, as Mr. Miliband said he was “happy to see such a mix of students” and Mr. Beinhocker remarked, “how it impressive it is to see such an example of the global village” in SPPM Room 302.

 

Mr. Miliband delivered an engaging speech entitled, “The Politics of the Global Village,” in which he spoke about the breaking of the old economic and political equilibrium; the shift in the locus of political problem solving; and the shift from a resource-plenty to a resource-scarce world. Mr. Miliband called for an “inclusive globalization,” and to “align values to policies,” because in the end that is what politics should be about. Questions from participants touched upon topics such as the social market economy, how the UK manages its overseas NGOs, the integration of minority populations in the UK, and the EU as a model of sovereign nations cooperating in peace.

 

David Miliband has been a Member of Parliament for South Shields, UK, since June 2001. He studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University and his first job was in the voluntary sector, working for the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. From 1994 to 1997 Miliband worked as Head of Policy for Tony Blair, working on the policies that would help Labour into government. He was then Head of the Prime Minister's Policy Unit in Downing Street during Labour's first term in office from 1997 to 2001 and was Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs from 2007 to 2010. He helped found the Centre for European Reform, and has edited two books, Reinventing the Left, and Paying for Inequality.