page_title: Ed Miliband
section_title: Cabinet
hierarchical_section_title: Ed Miliband / Early political career / Cabinet
caption_attribution_description: English: Ed Miliband, British politician and Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, speaking at the Confederation of British Industry's Climate Change Summit 2008 at The Royal Lancaster Hotel, London.
context_page_description: Edward Samuel Miliband is a British politician serving as Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy since 2020, and has served as Member of Parliament for Doncaster North since 2005. He was previously Leader of the Labour Party and the Leader of the Opposition between 2010 and 2015, resigning after Labour's defeat at the 2015 general election. Alongside his brother, Foreign Secretary David Miliband, he served in the Cabinet from 2007–2010 under Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
  Miliband was born in the Fitzrovia district of Central London to Polish Jewish immigrants Marion Kozak and Ralph Miliband, a Marxist intellectual and native of Brussels who fled Belgium during World War II. 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.
  Miliband was elected to the House of Commons in 2005.
context_section_description: On 28 June 2007, the day after Gordon 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.
caption: Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, at the Confederation of British Industry's Climate Change Summit 2008 at The Royal Lancaster Hotel, London.
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