I had a few download issues with the book and by the time it was sorted, the file had unfortunately been achieved. Happy to re-review if it becomes available again.

Go Big is Ed Miliband's view on the world. It is based on his podcast Reasons to be Cheerful, and it is an optimistic set of ideas. Whether you agree with Miliband's politics or not, it is a well set out book, and it is accessible for people who don't necessarily always enjoy political books.

Thanks to Ed Miliband, NetGalley, and Randomhouse for this copy.

The big questions that society is asking itself are tackled here. Across the world, increasing numbers of people are seeing inequality and climate concerns as problems that need to be tackled on local, national and international scales. Former Opposition Leader Ed Miliband has been presenting a podcast asking the big questions of leaders and here the ideas are distilled into a book. I was surprised as I don't listen to the podcast and my impression of Miliband was not overly positive based on his political persona but this book is very personable. Obviously it is extremely well-researched and, whilst there is a little left-wing bias, it is not overtly preachy, rather it gives balanced arguments and considered examples.

Do you remember Ed Miliband? As recently as six years ago, he came within a hair's breadth of becoming this nation's Prime Minister. Now he's mostly on the radio and has put many of his ideas for the future in this thoughtful, intelligent book.
Perhaps you are a died in the wool Tory? Perhaps you don't think climate change is important or think that everything was better in the past? If so, perhaps you might want to avoid this and certainly should avoid writing about it on Netgalley.
But everyone else find this a good inspiring read.

At a time when the Labour party is barely functioning, Ed Miliband wants to save the world. 
“Go Big – How To Fix Our World”, the title of Ed Miliband’s new book, has an unfortunate double meaning. He means THE world, of course, but he could just as well be speaking about his 9-5 job. Ed wants to come across as your typical “ruddy nice bloke” and jokes in the introduction about people who asked “where was this personality in 2015?”. On the basis of this book, it wouldn’t have made any difference. This book is not badly written per se, just deluded.
Inspired by the podcast Ed does with Geoff Lloyd, “Reasons To Be Cheerful” (I’ve never listened to it and probably never will), this book sets out twenty or so “radical” ideas about how to solve society’s problems. Sadly, most of them display an ignorance of the everyday problems of real people; a common trait amongst those who share Miliband’s privileged background. Not a short book by any stretch, he goes to great lengths in the very lengthy introduction to assure us that this is not a political manifesto. Of course, it is really. There is no way a book written by a career politician could be anything else. Written during the Covid crisis (such publications are one of the more regrettable consequences of lockdown) and I daresay the crisis in his own party, this book is a progressive almost-rant against the inequalities of society. And climate change. LOTS of climate change. 
Ed mentions climate change a lot throughout the book - 64 times, in fact. It seems every social problem he highlights is not bad enough on its own; he always feels the need to add a sentence like “and this problem is made even worse by climate change.” Oddly, while he admits that China was a problem during the Copenhagen Climate Crisis conference in 2009, the country is only mentioned three times in the book. On the other hand, Ed does give us the image of him in his pants in his hotel room during the conference. Thanks, Ed. He paints organisations like Extinction Rebellion as the heroes of the “war” against climate change, while neglecting to mention the villains. This makes Miliband appear utterly sycophantic and toothless.
Ed trots out the tired old clichés – Brexit bad! Trump bad! Biden awesome! – as if we should all think the same thing, or we should not be reading his book. There are many facts he chooses to either downplay or completely ignore – the role of immigration in the job market for example. But Ed is a modern politician, and it is simply not done to appear to be discriminating against a section of society, even if it means discriminating against the truth. Ed writes of the creation of the social contract in the aftermath of the Second World War when jobs were plentiful and often “for “life” but warns of the dangers of “romanticising” the era, because women, people of colour and those who were LGBT faced “enormous prejudice”. Yes Ed, they did – but the problem is, there is nothing we can do about it now as it was over 70 years ago. It is a failing of people like Ed that they insist on forcing modern thinking onto the past as if they can change it retroactively. For a lot of people, life WAS much better then, and some sections of society suffered, but there’s no point dragging it back up just to make Ed’s perfect, equal society look better. We can only learn from the past, not change it.
Hot on the heels of Ed’s opus will soon come Gordon Brown’s own book, imaginatively titled “Seven Ways To Change The World”. I am not even joking, it is literally called that, but at least Gordon has the guts to use the word “manifesto” in the subtitle. So at least we get to enjoy the “Battle of the Books” as the two former colleagues duke it out in the bestseller charts while their party disintegrates around them. I find it hard to believe that they both came up with the idea for their books in isolation, so what’s next - will Margaret Beckett knock a book out? Maybe the denizens of the Labour Party benches should train their focus a bit closer to home first. Don’t run before you can walk.