The Very English Mr Miliband

British politics has been going through another unexpected shift. First we had the general election in May, resulting in a coalition between the Tories and the LibDems. Now we have the opposition Labour party lurching to the left as outsider Ed Miliband unexpectedly won the leadership contest against elder brother and heir apparent David Miliband.

We should, however, expect the unexpected, for the UK is undergoing a Uranus opposition – a midlife crisis! – which has a couple more years to run. The last such opposition was in the late 1920s, and its outcome was also a coalition government, and there have been none since, until now.

The Uranus opposition is a time of weighing up the future, of reconsidering the values that have got you to this point. It is therefore a time when you don’t always know clearly what you want, expressed in political terms as a coalition government. With natal Uranus in Libra, the UK is particularly prone to indecision under a Uranus opposition. And with natal Uranus being Angular, the opposition is likely to be quite noticeable and telling.

There is nothing indecisive, however, about Ed Miliband. I have little doubt that he will eventually become Prime Minister, not because of the party he belongs to, but because of the type of leader he is. He is bold, decisive and optimistic, carries people with him, and is not afraid of controversy. You can tell that some people will become leaders as soon as they rise to prominence: Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher for example.

Nick Clegg, leader of the LibDems has it, but he’s in the wrong party. David Cameron doesn’t have it, which is why he didn’t get a clear victory in the election. This has nothing to do with which party I support (probably Labour, though I’ve never voted for them; I’ve only voted once, and that was LibDem for tactical reasons.)

It was exciting that Ed Miliband declared the Iraq War to have been a mistake within a couple of days of becoming leader. This was a very bold step that distances Labour from its recent past. It consigns Tony Blair to the dustbin. It is resonant of Tony Blair disposing of ‘Clause 4’, which committed Labour to shared ownership of businesses, shortly after he became leader. Blair’s step, however, was largely symbolic, and he remained essentially a people-pleaser right up to the Iraq War. Miliband’s step is anything but people-pleasing, for it is a direct challenge about a real event that remains raw and divides both the party and the country.

Again, this has nothing to do with whether I agree with Ed Miliband. I think much of the way we went about the war was wrong, and Tony Blair did lie, but overall I don’t know if it was a good or bad thing. I think it will remain imponderable.

We don’t have birth times for either Ed or his brother David, but you can still tell quite a lot. The fact that Ed has Pluto, Uranus, Jupiter and Saturn hard aspecting his Sun this year, whereas David doesn’t, always made me think Ed was in with a good chance. The Sun is associated with leadership.

Natally, Sun in hard aspect to one or more of the outer planets often seems to characterise successful political leaders. The outer planets are collective, and hard aspects give leadership (Sun) a dynamic relationship (hard aspect) to the collective (outer planet). Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher and Ed Miliband all have Sun square Pluto, while Angela Merkel and Obama have Sun square Neptune. None of Gordon Brown, David Cameron or David Miliband has such aspects. Astrologically, this is perhaps why Ed Miliband won and David Miliband lost. David Cameron’s Sun is unaspected and in its fall in Libra, which is not a fortunate place for a leader.

What is perhaps uncomfortable for Gordon Brown and David Miliband is that they both have the Moon in hard aspect to an outer planet – conjunct Pluto and square Neptune respectively – so there is an emotional need to be connected to the collective, but because of their Suns they lack the wherewithal to make that connection in public life. David Cameron, with his Moon-Jupiter conjunction in Leo, feels at ease in a position of leadership, but will perhaps find it less uncomfortable when the time comes for him to go.

Like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown before them, David and Ed Miliband represent the big divide in the Labour Party. Both sides look out for the underprivileged, and will therefore spend more than the Tories. But the Blair/David Miliband wing tends to be on the side of big business, whereas the Brown/Ed Miliband wing tends to be on the side of the ordinary worker (and, in recent decades, has been less electable.) In power, though, Brown was much more of an appeaser of capitalism than one might have expected.

The Cancer-Capricorn axis is sometimes said to be the political axis: you can see why, given Capricorn’s association with government, and Cancer’s association with homeland and therefore patriotism.

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Ed Miliband has Sun in Capricorn and Moon in Cancer, so not only is he a natural politician who can both govern (Capricorn) and connect with people (Cancer), but he is also very English, given that the UK also has Sun in Capricorn and Moon in Cancer! Not only that, but also like the UK, Ed Miliband’s Sun is square to Uranus in Libra! That is an incredibly strong and basic set of connections for the son of holocaust refugee parents!

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So not only is Ed Miliband attuned to English traditions and patriotism and its conservative, hierarchical streak, he is also attuned to the contradictory rebellious, innovative side of the English character (Uranus). The Labour movement is just as English as the Conservative party, embodying a feeling that probably goes all the way back to the Magna Carta via Cromwell and the Peasant’s Revolt! While the UK Uranus is strengthened by being Angular, Ed’s is also further strengthened by its square to his Moon. This man is both very traditional (Cancer-Capricorn) and very revolutionary. He can bring the country forward (Uranus) without people feeling they are being dragged away from what is important to them, from their roots.

Ed Miliband is very ambitious and tough (Sun in Cap square to Saturn/Pluto), though he may become authoritarian as time goes on. He certainly has no trouble taking the lead and saying so, but he will need to pay attention to his Moon in Cancer which, being square to Uranus and opposite his Sun, could become split off (Uranus) and put in the shadow (Sun). He could then lose sympathy for people, and they will lose sympathy for him. We could also read this into the English chart: the cold Englishman comes from the domination of the Sun in Capricorn over the Moon in Cancer, with its concern to maintain hierarchy and government and Empire and sending its young children off to boarding school to train them in running the Empire and its industries and so on. The UK Moon is in the 10th House, meaning that the people (Moon) are put at the service of the country’s place in the world, it’s ambitions (10th House.)

For Ed Miliband, his Capricorn rootedness in tradition also comes from his Jewishness (which is very noticeable in his features and intonation.). If you’ve ever done a reading for a Jewish person, you might have noticed just how rooted they are in ancient tradition, and how hard it can be for them to break free from its confining aspects, in a way that us Gentiles do not experience. Ed’s father was Ralph Miliband, a British Marxist intellectual who also had Sun in Capricorn in hard aspect (opposition) to Pluto. Ralph may have had Moon in Aquarius, giving him the revolutionary thinking, that desire to improve humanity, that was behind his Marxism, and connecting him to Ed’s Moon square Uranus (the ruler of Aquarius) and David’s Moon in Aquarius. At any rate, Ed is Ralph’s true political son, with those astrological connections.

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Ralph was born just after the New Moon with the Sun Capricorn, so he began something. Ed was born just after the Full Moon with the Sun also in Capricorn, so here we see the fruition of what his father began. (Even though, as a Marxist, some say he would be very saddened at what his sons have become.)

David Miliband’s chart is resonant with, but different to, his father’s and brother’s charts. He has his Sun in the opposite sign of Cancer, and it makes no hard aspects; rather, it is in a watery Grand Trine with Neptune and Saturn. This Grand Trine made him for a long time the golden boy, who rose seemingly effortlessly to become Foreign Secretary at a young age, and whose anointment as leader seemed until recently almost a formality. And it probably would have been if not for his younger brother, who has a lot more fight, and the ruthlessness to get to the top and stay there. David became known as a ‘bottler’ for not challenging Gordon Brown for the leadership when the party was sleepwalking to inevitable electoral defeat.

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It is Ed who shares their father’s Sun Sign, and David who probably has the Moon similarity with the father. David, as the eldest, probably had the heart (Moon) connection with their father, he was probably the favourite. But Ed has the outer connection more strongly. Between them they divided up the inheritance from their father, just as between them they led the 2 wings of the Labour Party. It is a tale of sibling rivalry, in which the younger, less-favoured son has to fight for his inheritance, for his rightful place, and in so doing surpasses the elder brother, who has never developed the qualities that struggle produces.

It is also a tale of the Gemini twins, one of whom is mortal, and the other immortal: Ed is now among the gods, while David has been cast out.

Romulus and Remus were another pair of twins, suckled by a wolf after their uncle left them out to die. They decided to found a new city, but fell out over where it should be, and Remus was killed. Romulus founded Rome, and began the festival of Lemuria to appease his brother’s resentful ghost. In later life, Romulus became increasingly autocratic.

The Miliband’s have a holocaust refugee background, which placed their family outside of the usual safety of civilisation, corresponding to Romulus and Remus being raised in the wild. Like the story, they are also political figures, trying to build not a city, but a fairer society through the Labour Party. They fall out over what type of party/where the city should be, and Remus is killed/David leaves front-line politics. What we have not yet seen is how Ed will appease David’s resentful ghost, which is not so much David himself as the Labour Party as it became under Blair. This is a very real consideration. So far, in condemning the Iraq War, Ed has attacked rather than appeased that side of the party. He will need to find ways of honouring it, of doing justice to its achievements, if he is to succeed as leader and become the unifying figure he claims to be.

Having mentioned Blair, now there was another rivalry! However, Gordon Brown did not cast himself out as David Miliband did, but remained to torment Blair for another 13 years. I expect there’s a myth there too!

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One fascinating piece of astrology with those two is that their composite chart shows a yod, with Mercury at the apex, and Neptune and Pluto at the base. (Also look at that treacherous Moon-Pluto!) It was like there was something fated (yod) about their communication (Mercury), that was wider than the two of them (Neptune and Pluto), and that could not be avoided or resolved: it had to be lived with (yod), and it is to do with the 2 tendencies within Labour living with each other, and which Ed Miliband will have to go through all over again, but from Brown’s (Neptune) rather than Blair’s (Pluto) side. Ideals and unelectability versus compromise and electability, getting into bed with Mammon so you can spend his money versus being poorer but being honest about who your friends are.