Seumas Milne

Early life

The younger son of former BBC Director General Alasdair Milne, Milne attended Winchester College and read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford, and Economics at Birkbeck College, London University. His sister Kirsty, who died in July 2013, was an academic and former journalist.

After graduating from Oxford University Milne became the business manager of Straight Left, a monthly publication of the faction within the Communist Party of Great Britain that according to Michael Mosbacher wanted the CPGB to remain "on a solidly Stalinist path".

Journalism

Milne then worked as a staff journalist on The Economist magazine from 1981 before joining The Guardian newspaper in 1984 on the recommendation of Andrew Knight, the magazine's editor at the time. Milne's responsibilities on The Guardian have included posts as news reporter, Labour Correspondent (Europe), Labour Editor, and Comment Editor (for six years from 2001 to 2007).

Milne has reported for The Guardian from the Middle East, Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe and South Asia, and has also written for Le Monde Diplomatique and the London Review of Books.

Milne has been described as a "staunch socialist" in the Evening Standard. Following an article he published in September 1995 in The Guardian, Milne "became characterised as a 'far-left activist' and member of the Socialist Workers Party". Peter Popham argued that connecting Milne to the SWP was a "smear", but "there is no mistaking that Seumas is on the far left of the Labour Party, of which he has been a member for 20 years". He was joint winner of the 1999 What the Papers Say Scoop of the Year award.

Milne's period as his newspaper's comment editor was described by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine as having turned the Guardian '​s comment section into a "truly global debating forum". Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan claimed that Milne's greatest achievement "was to take full advantage of the expansion of The Guardian’s comment pages ... making them the most thought-provoking opinion section in Britain". Hannan also praised him as "a sincere, eloquent and uncomplicated Marxist".

Milne served on the executive committee of the National Union of Journalists for ten years.

Labour's Director of Communications

It was announced on 20 October 2015 that Milne would become part of the team behind Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as the Labour Party's Executive Director of Strategy and Communications. He is "on leave" from his post at The Guardian and assumed his new role on 26 October.

According to Tom Harris, a former Scottish Labour MP writing in The Daily Telegraph, Corbyn could have chosen for the Comms post "someone whose skills in media management were better known than his personal political views. Instead he chose Seumas Milne, a hate figure for the right of the Labour Party and pretty much everyone else to the right of that." Lord Mandelson told the BBC that Corbyn had shown a lack of professionalism in appointing Milne, "whom I happen to know and like as it happens. But he’s completely unsuited to such a job, he has little connection with mainstream politics or mainstream media in this country."

John Jewell, an academic at Cardiff University's School of Journalism, criticised the articles by Harris and others which mention Milne's response to the murder of Lee Rigby. Jewell observes that "the article in which Milne wrote of Rigby not being a victim of terrorism 'in the normal sense' began with these words: 'The videoed butchery of Fusilier Lee Rigby outside Woolwich barracks last May was a horrific act and his killers’ murder conviction a foregone conclusion.'"

Patrick Wintour, the political Editor of The Guardian, wrote that Corbyn "has been struggling to ensure he receives an effective press since he became party leader, and Milne will be charged with ensuring there is an improvement ahead of the large round of local government elections in Scotland, Wales, London and England due in May next year". Peter Preston, Milne's first Guardian editor, asserted shortly after Milne's appointment: "The 'on leave' tag appears to make Seumas a once and continuing Guardian man, which won’t help relations with journalists from elsewhere and could hogtie former colleagues who aren’t on leave if they want to criticise Labour’s communications policies."

On British politics

Milne was a strong critic of New Labour, in particular over its support for foreign wars, privatisation and low taxes on the wealthy. He has argued that David Cameron's "makeover" of the Conservative Party is "skin deep" and attacked the party for its links with "rightwing fringe" parties in eastern Europe and support for "small state" public spending cuts.

Capitalism and democracy

Writing for The Guardian in September 2015, Milne put forward his view that that it's the establishment that has a problem with democracy:

Milne has argued that the financial and economic crisis of 2007–9 has discredited the neoliberal model of capitalism. He has argued for full public ownership of banks in Britain to support economic recovery and overcome the credit crisis. The rejection of a search for an alternative to capitalism, wrote Milne in 2006 "reflects a determination to prove there is no alternative to the new global capitalist order - and that any attempt to find one is bound to lead to suffering and bloodshed". Meanwhile, "[amid] international demands for social justice and ever greater doubts about whether the environmental crisis can be solved within the existing economic system, the pressure for political and social alternatives will increase."

"Liberal democracy, Mr Milne, is not a swindle", wrote Philip Collins of The Times in October 2015. "It’s the good life. Not the perfect life and not yet the good life for everyone, by any means, but a better life than any you find in the history books you so wish you could rewrite."

Communism

Milne has attacked what he calls "the creeping historical revisionism that tries to equate Nazism and communism", which he argues has tended to "relativise the unique crimes of Nazism, bury those of colonialism and feed the idea that any attempt at radical social change will always lead to suffering, killing and failure". He has written that communism's "crimes are now so well rehearsed that they are in danger of obliterating any understanding of its achievements, both of which have lessons for the future of progressive politics and the search for a social alternative to globalised capitalism". Stephen Pollard in The Times mocked Milne's sympathies: "The point is, you see, Uncle Joe was engaged in an honourable project, offering 'socialist political alternatives'. So it was just a pity, one supposes, that millions had to die. Never mind; all in a good cause."

Milne argued in 2006:

In the same 2006 article Milne criticised the Council of Europe and others for adopting "as fact the wildest estimates of those 'killed by communist regimes'". He has argued that, while the "number of victims of Stalin's terror" "remain[s] a focus of huge academic controversy", "the real records of repression now available from the Soviet archives are horrific enough (799,455 people were recorded as executed between 1921 and 1953 and the labour camp population reached 2.5 million at its peak) without engaging in an ideologically-fuelled inflation game". Oliver Bullough in the New Statesman wrote that Milne in "focussing only on the USSR’s executions ignores the millions it starved to death in Ukraine, or in the mass deportations from the Caucasus and Crimea, [in addition to] the way it used rape as a weapon."

11 September attacks

Milne argued that the 11 September 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington were the product of "longstanding grievances" over US intervention in the Middle East: "not only western indulgence of Israeli military occupation, but decades of oil-lubricated support for despots from Iran to Oman, Egypt to Saudi Arabia and routine military interventions to maintain US control". On 13 September 2001 he wrote that "most Americans simply don't get.. why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world". Milne argued that in the aftermath of "such atrocities", only a minority were likely to "make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world. But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated." He wrote that the US was "reaping a dragon's teeth harvest" it had itself sowed in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Afghanistan and Iraq wars

Seumas Milne has been a vocal critic of the "war on terror" and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He argued in 2001 that war in Afghanistan would fail to "stamp out anti-western terrorism" and if the US invaded Iraq, "it risks a catastrophe". Milne was singled out by Tony Blair in a December 2001 dossier as one of ten media critics of the war in Afghanistan and the US-British response to the 9/11 attacks whose views he claimed had "proved to be wrong".

In relation to Iraq, Milne argued in March 2008:

According to Milne in July 2004, "the anti-occupation guerrillas" were "a classic resistance movement with widespread support waging an increasingly successful guerrilla war against the occupying armies". According to Michael Weiss, for Milne's approved "resistance", "read: mosque bombers and head-loppers" Milne has argued for a "negotiated withdrawal" from Afghanistan based on a "political settlement, including the Taliban and regional powers".

7/7 London bombings

A week after the 7 July 2005 London bombings Milne linked the attacks with British involvement in the war in Iraq. He argued:

Motivations of al-Qaeda

Milne argued after the London bombings that it was "an insult to the dead" and a "piece of disinformation long peddled by champions of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan" to claim that al-Qaeda and its followers were motivated by "a hatred of western freedoms and way of life" and "that their Islamist ideology aims at global domination", rather than "the withdrawal of US and other western forces from the Arab and Muslim world" and an end to support for Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and despotic regimes in the region. Victor J. Seidler, a Professor of Social Theory from the University of London, argued in relation to Milne's article that we have to be careful "not to dismiss an Islamist rejection of the freedoms of Western urban cultures, in relation to consumerism and sexualities". Seidler argued that, contrary to Milne's claims, they were at least partly motivated by "Islamist religious doctrine". Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the London bombers, stated that they launched the attack because "Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible."

Andrew Anthony, writing about the columnist's articles on Muslim extremism, asserted that "whereas Milne can instantly detect the relationship between far right rhetoric and the recent murder of Ahmed Hassan, a Muslim teenager in Dewsbury, he dismisses the idea that such hatred as was captured in" the Dispatches programme "Undercover Mosque" (2007) "might contribute to the kind of mentality that resulted in the carnage of the July 2005 bombs and the many terror plots that the authorities have successfully prevented."

On Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran

Milne has stated that since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, "Iran and its allies offer the only effective challenge to US domination of the Middle East and its resources". After the 2009 presidential election in Iran, Milne argued that the evidence suggested Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had in fact won the elections, despite allegations of fraud. Milne wrote that "it's hard to believe that rigging alone could account for the 11 million-vote gap between the main contenders". He has described Ahmadinejad's "toying with Holocaust denial" as "morally repugnant and factually absurd". But he argued that, while for the western media Ahmadinejad is "nothing but a Holocaust-denying fanatic... the other Ahmadinejad, who is seen to stand up for the country's independence, expose elite corruption on TV and use Iran's oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority is largely invisible".

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

In the Middle East, Milne has argued that "commitment to Palestinian rights should first of all be a question of justice. But, given the toxicity this conflict brings to the entire relationship with the Muslim world, it is also a matter of obvious western self-interest". He has written that "far from supporting the Palestinian national unity necessary to make any peace agreement stick", the US and its allies "are doing everything possible to deepen the split between Hamas and Abbas's Fatah movement".

1948 Arab–Israeli War

Milne has argued that "it is to Britain's historic shame that having played such a central role in the creation of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the dispossession of a people it had promised to protect, it has done so little to try to right those wrongs." Milne claimed that ethnic cleansing of Palestinians had been orchestrated by "the forces of the embryonic Israeli state" before the end of the British Mandate for Palestine.

Battle of Jenin

Milne described the Battle of Jenin (1–11 April 2002) during Operation Defensive Shield as an "unleashing of state terror" by the Israeli government whilst describing the fierce fighting of Palestinian militants as "desperate Palestinian resistance". Milne claimed during the fighting in Jenin that as "in other West Bank towns and camps, reports of beatings and executions of prisoners abound, and Israel appears to be preparing the ground for evidence of atrocities". Milne also stated that "Hundreds [of Palestinians] are reported killed, including many civilians."

Gaza Wars

In the aftermath of the Gaza War (27 December 2008 – 18 January 2009), also known as Operation Cast Lead, Milne cited allegations of Israeli war crimes to argue: "With such powerful evidence of violations of the rules of war now emerging from the rubble of Gaza, the test must be this: is the developing system of international accountability for war crimes only going to apply to the west's enemies – or can the western powers and their closest allies also be brought to book?"

Columnist Melanie Phillips termed Milne a "Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas mouthpiece" in 2009. At the end of her article, rejecting The Guardian and Milne's claims of Israeli war crimes during Operation Cast Lead, Phillips criticised Milne's commentary as a:

In a 2014 speech at an anti-Israel rally he said that "Israel has no right to defend itself from territory it illegally occupies" and, referring to the actions of Hamas against Israel, "It isn't terrorism to fight back. The terrorism is the killing of citizens by Israel on an industrial scale".

On Libya

Milne alleged NATO to be indirectly responsible for the killing of many civilians in the Libyan civil war of 2011 and wrote that global justice would demand a trial against NATO because of its support of the Libyan rebels. In an earlier article by Milne in late October 2011, according to Daniel Knowles in his Daily Telegraph blog, an assertion from Milne about the number of deaths in Libya was "ridiculous. Nato has only multiplied deaths if you assume, as Milne clearly does, that these rebels have no legitimate fight with Colonel Gaddafi – they are just pawns of Nato", and in making such claims "slips into apology for Gaddafi".

On Latin America

Milne has written in support of what he calls "the wave of progressive change in Latin America", which he has described as "the most hopeful development in global politics in the past two decades".

Milne described the restoration of the sight of Mario Teran, the former Bolivian sergeant who killed Che Guevara, by Cuban doctors "paid for by revolutionary Venezuela in the radicalised Bolivia of Evo Morales", one of "1.4 million free eye operations carried out by Cuban doctors in 33 countries across Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa", as "an emblem both of the humanity of Fidel Castro and Guevara's legacy" and the transformation of Latin America.

Milne has also argued that Hugo Chavez's presidency was the target of "unfounded accusations of dictatorship" in the western media. He asserted that Chavez's proposed referendum to eliminate term limits (which passed on 15 February 2009 after previously being rejected on August 2007) would "bring the country into line with the rules in France and Britain".

Private life

Milne married Cristina Montanari, an Italian-born director of an advertising firm, in 1992. The couple have two now-adult children, a son and daughter, who were educated at selective grammar schools in Kingston upon Thames.

Publications