Seumas Milne

Seumas Milne
Born	1958 (age 55–56)
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford Birkbeck, University of London
Occupation	Journalist and writer
Employer	The Guardian
Political party	Labour Party
Parents	Alasdair Milne (father)

Seumas Milne (born 1958) is a British journalist and writer known for his left-wing views.^[1][2][3] A columnist and associate editor at The Guardian newspaper, he is author of a best-selling book^[4] about the 1984–5 British miners' strike, The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners,^[5] which focuses on the role of MI5 and Special Branch in the dispute.

Early life

The younger son of the 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.^[6]

Career

Milne was the business manager of Straight Left, a monthly publication of an orthodox factional group within the Communist Party of Great Britain.^[7] Milne worked as a staff journalist for three years on The Economist before joining The Guardian, where he has been a news reporter, Labour Correspondent (Europe), Labour Editor, and Comment Editor (for six years, 2001-7).

Milne has reported for The Guardian from the Middle East, Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe and South Asia,^[8] and also written for Le Monde Diplomatique^[9] and the London Review of Books.^[10]

Milne has been described as a "staunch socialist" in the Evening Standard.^[3] 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".^[1] 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".^[1] Milne served on the executive committee of the National Union of Journalists for ten years.^[1][8] He was joint winner of the 1999 What the Papers Say Scoop of the Year award.^[11]

Views

On British politics

Milne has been a strong critic of New Labour, in particular over its support for foreign wars, privatisation and low taxes on the wealthy.^[12] He has argued that David Cameron's "makeover" of the Conservative Party is "skin deep"^[13] and attacked the party for its links with "rightwing fringe" parties in eastern Europe^[13] and support for "small state" public spending cuts.^[14]

On Muslims in Britain

Milne was involved in a Stop the War Coalition appeal to stop attacks on the Muslim community.^[15] He was one of the speakers in a public meeting titled "Kafa - Enough: Stop attacks on the Muslim community", which was held on 26 June 2009. In his speech, Milne argued that there is a basic process that can be seen across all of the British media:

A racist portrayal of Muslims and Islam in general, a tendency to hype all bogus terror plots into something utterly beyond the pale... A process which is verged on incitement, and has played a central role I think in isolating and intimidating the community, and as we seen in places like Luton and elsewhere, effectively fueling violence on the streets and attacks on Muslim institutions and mosques in particular.^[16]

On Capitalism and Communism

Capitalism

Milne has argued that the financial and economic crisis of 2007-9 has discredited the neoliberal model of capitalism "that dominated the world for a generation".^[17] He has argued for full public ownership of banks in Britain to support economic recovery and overcome the credit crisis.^[18]

Communism

Milne has attacked what he calls "the creeping historical revisionism that tries to equate Nazism and communism",^[19] 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".^[20] 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".^[21]

Milne has argued:

For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment... Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the west, boosted the anticolonial movement and provided a powerful counterweight to western global domination.^[22]

Milne has also criticised the Council of Europe and others for adopting "as fact the wildest estimates of those 'killed by communist regimes'".^[22] He has argued that, while "the numbers remain a focus of huge academic controversy",^[20] 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".^[22]

Al-Qaeda attacks and the response

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".^[23] On 13 September 2001, Milne wrote^[24] 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."^[24] He wrote that the US was "reaping a dragon's teeth harvest" it had itself sowed in Afghanistan in the 1980s.^[24]

Afghanistan and Iraq wars

Seumas Milne has been a vocal critic of the "war on terror"^[25] and the wars in Afghanistan^[26] and Iraq.^[27] Milne 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".^[28] In relation to Iraq, Milne has argued that:

Given that the invasion of Iraq was regarded as illegal by the majority of the UN security council, its secretary general, and the overwhelming weight of international legal opinion, it must by the same token be seen as a war crime: what the Nuremberg tribunal deemed the "supreme international crime" of aggression. If it weren't for the fact that there is not the remotest prospect of any mechanism to apply international law to powerful states, Bush and Blair would be in the dock at the Hague.^[27]

Milne has argued for a "negotiated withdrawal" from Afghanistan based on a "political settlement, including the Taliban and regional powers".^[26]

7/7 London bombings

A week after the 7 July 2005 London bombings Milne linked the attacks with the British involvement in the war in Iraq.^[29] Milne argued:

We can't of course be sure of the exact balance of motivations that drove four young suicide bombers to strike last Thursday, but we can be certain that the bloodbath unleashed by Bush and Blair in Iraq - where a 7/7 takes place every day - was at the very least one of them. What they did was not "home grown", but driven by a worldwide anger at US-led domination and occupation of Muslim countries.^[29]

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.^[29] 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".^[30] Seidler argued that contrary to Milne's claims, that they were at least partly motivated by "Islamist religious doctrine".^[31] 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."^[32]

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".^[33] 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.^[34] Milne wrote that "it's hard to believe that rigging alone could account for the 11 million-vote gap between the main contenders".^[34] Milne has described Ahmadinejad's "toying with Holocaust denial" as "morally repugnant and factually absurd".^[35] 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".^[34]

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".^[36] 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".^[37]

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."^[36] Milne claimed that ethnic cleansing of Palestinians had been orchestrated by Israel months before the end of the British Mandate for Palestine.^[36]

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".^[38] 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.^[38]

Gaza War

In the aftermath of the Gaza War (27 December 2008 – 18 January 2009) 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?"^[39]

Columnist Melanie Phillips,^[40] in an article titled "The Guardian Goes to Pallywood" on her Spectator blog, highly criticized the factual truth of the research and the anti-Israeli stance of the Guardian, describing it as "an evil newspaper".^[41] At the end of this long article Phillips criticized Milne's commentary as:

Lazy, malicious use of partisan, uncorroborated, thin, ambiguous and on occasion demonstrably absurd allegations, with the purpose and effect of demonising and delegitimising the Israeli victims of terrorism by painting them as the terrorists and their Palestinian attackers as their victims.^[41]

The allegations by Milne of Israeli war crimes appeared to have been proven to be true with the release of the UN report into Israel's invasion of Gaza which accused both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes.^[42] However, the lead author of the report, Richard Goldstone, later retracted his findings with regard to accusations of Israeli war crimes: on April 1, 2011, Goldstone published a piece in The Washington Post titled 'Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes'.^[43] Goldstone noted that the subsequent investigations by Israel and recognized in the U.N. committee's report "indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy" while noting "That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying."^[43] Goldstone wrote that "If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document."^[43] He said that the lack of Israeli cooperation had meant that no Israeli officers were interviewed during the writing of the report. In hindsight, incidents that had been interpreted as the deliberate targeting of civilians may have had other explanations, such as poor intelligence information.^[43] Goldstone also praised Israel for investigating claims of war crimes while faulting Hamas for its failure to launch any investigations of its own forces.^[43] Goldstone commended Israel for responding to his report by revising military procedures to e.g. limit the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas.^[43]

On Latin America

Milne has written in support of what he calls "the wave of progressive change in Latin America",^[36] which he has described as "the most hopeful development in global politics in the past two decades".^[36]

Milne described the restoration of the sight of Mario Terán, 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.^[36]

Milne has also argued that Hugo Chávez's presidency has been the target of "unfounded accusations of dictatorship" in the western media.^[36] Milne claimed that Chávez proposed referendum to eliminate term limits (which passed on 15 February 2009 after previously rejected on August 2007)^{[citation needed]} was "bring[ing] the country into line with the rules in France and Britain".^[36]

Reception

Praise

Milne 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".^[44]

Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan claimed that Milne's greatest achievement "was to take full advantage of the expansion of the Guardian’s comment pages, which he edited until last year, making them the most thought-provoking opinion section in Britain".^[2] Hannan also praised Milne as "a sincere, eloquent and uncomplicated Marxist".^[2]

Criticism

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".^[45] He was described by the novelist Robert Harris as "a Stalinist Rip van Winkle" in a September 2001 article supporting the war on terrorism.^[46] The journalist Melanie Phillips portrayed Milne as a "Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas mouthpiece".^[41]

Publications

• The Enemy Within: the Secret War Against the Miners, 1994, 1995 and 2004, ISBN 0-86091-461-5, Verso Books/Macmillan Publishers
• Beyond the Casino Economy, with Nicholas Costello and Jonathan Michie, 1989, ISBN 0-86091-967-6 Verso Books
• The Revenge of History: The Battle for the Twenty First Century^[47]

See also

• Straight Left

References

External links

• Guardian profile
• The Enemy Within at the Guardian bookshop

Video clips

• At a rally in Manchester in 2008

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Persondata
Name	Milne, Seumas
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1958
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death