PUTIN’S USEFUL IDIOTS
Warped, deluded, ignorant. Corbyn’s support for Russia shames his party and his country...
RUSSIA’S bombardment of Aleppo is one of the defining atrocities of our time. With at least 30,000 dead and the city in ruins, it is no wonder commentators have compared it to the Nazi bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in 1937, which killed hundreds of civilians and inspired Picasso to create the most famous antiwar painting in history.
So when Boris Johnson suggested antiwar campaigners should demonstrate outside Russia’s London embassy, protesting in the name of the men, women and children slaughtered by Vladimir Putin’s war in Syria, it was hard to imagine anybody who might disagree.
Anybody, that is, apart from the leader of the Labour Party and his hard-Left supporters.
According to Jeremy Corbyn’s official spokesman, the real tragedy is that Aleppo is ‘diverting attention’ from the true villains in Syria — Britain and the United States. People, he said, should be protesting outside the U.S. embassy, not the Russian one.
When I heard those words, I was shocked but not surprised. My mind went back ten years to February 16, 2006, when a truly extraordinary article appeared in the Guardian newspaper.
The author was a pale, intense man called Seumas Milne, and his mission was to rescue the reputation of the Soviet Union from its critics.
It was outrageous, he thought, that Western historians insisted on painting Stalin as a brutal tyrant and were always banging on about his unfortunate habit of murdering millions of peasants and throwing people into Siberian prison camps, instead of concentrating on his wonderful achievements.
In fact, he wrote, communist regimes such as those of Lenin and Stalin had encompassed ‘ genuine idealism and commitment . . . 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’.
Given that record, Milne yearned for the days when the world would learn from communism’s ‘ successes as well as its failures’. One day, he hoped, Russia and China would once again offer a genuine ‘ alternative to the new global capitalist order’.
Mad? Unforgivable? Almost unbelievably callous, ignorant, warped and deluded? Yes, yes and yes again.
But not, unfortunately, irrelevant. You see, the man who wrote those words is now Labour’s official spokesman, the same man who tried to excuse Russia’s bombing of Aleppo.
Today, Seumas Milne not only speaks for Jeremy Corbyn but reflects his world-view, shapes his reaction to world events and is the single most articulate and influential force inside the new hard- Left Labour Party.
Hatred
No wonder the Labour leadership refuse to condemn Russia’s murderous campaign in Syria. No wonder they try to divert attention instead to the supposed crimes of Britain and the U.S., battling the depraved murderers of Islamic State.
As the admirably independent-minded Labour MP John Woodcock remarked this week, Milne is a man ‘notorious for his pro- Russia views and hatred of America’.
Yet Mr Woodcock might as well have been talking about Jeremy Corbyn, who seems more than ever a mere mouthpiece for his vampiric press chief.
Almost incredibly, what Mr Milne wrote in 2006 is now the guiding principle of the Labour Party. No matter how many thousands are burned alive by Russian bombs, Milne, Jeremy Corbyn and the sinister Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell will always defend their friends in Moscow.
These are men for whom Mr Putin can do no wrong and the West can do no right.
Privileged
Mr Corbyn appeared on the Kremlin’s propaganda channel Russia Today, and never wastes an opportunity to defend Mr Putin from Western criticism. Mr McDonnell openly calls himself a Marxist and brandished Mao’s Little Red Book in the House of Commons.
As for Mr Milne, he has shared a platform with the Russian leader, interviewing him on stage in the Black Sea resort of Sochi at a conference designed to rehabilitate Mr Putin’s international image. His expenses, naturally, were paid by Russian businessmen.
For Mr Milne, that Russia had just invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea was entirely irrelevant. Russia, he insisted, was blameless, having intervened only to save itself from ‘Western aggression’.
Fifty years ago, men such as Mr Corbyn and Mr Milne were known as Stalin’s ‘ useful idiots’. They conform absolutely to the stereotype of all those privileged Marxist intellectuals in the Thirties who never had a bad word for the Soviet Union or a good one for democratic Britain.
The Animal Farm author George Orwell came across men like Mr Milne in the Thirties. They hated their own country, he thought, and took ‘ their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow’. All the time they were ‘chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British’.
So Orwell would immediately have recognised an organisation like the hard-Left group Stop The War, which Mr Corbyn once chaired and in which all three men have been active.
On Wednesday, a Stop The War spokesman told the BBC that he deplored criticism of Moscow over the bombing of Aleppo, because it only added to the ‘hysteria and the jingoism that is being whipped up at the moment against Russia’.
Not really anti-war, then. Just anti-Western.
A psychologist could spend years puzzling over the murky mental workings of men such as Mr Milne and Mr Corbyn.
My own view is that their constant emphasis on the wickedness of the West, coupled with the self-loathing implicit in their hatred of Britain, is a kind of narcissism — a constant obsession with themselves and their country’s supposed failings.
They cannot see any problem, anywhere on the planet, without believing it is the West’s fault. Even when Russian bombs are falling on Syrian children, it is somehow all about us.
But the disturbing thing about this type is that whereas their predecessors in the Fifties and Sixties, such as the Marxist academics Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband (father of Ed and David), were safely confined to their seminar rooms like monkeys in a zoo, these men are now in charge of Her Majesty’s Opposition.
They have reduced the Labour Party, the party that took us into Nato and built our nuclear deterrent, into a front organisation for Stop The War.
Worse, they are now planning — if, God forbid, they ever get anywhere near Downing Street — to scrap our nuclear weapons and run down our military, and this at a time when Mr Putin is rattling his sabre against our Nato allies in the Baltic states.
In Mr Corbyn’s case, I think the explanation for his views is blind stupidity. I think he genuinely cannot see beyond his ideological blinkers and simply fails to understand the damage he is doing to the Labour Party, the solidarity of the West and the security of this country.
But with Mr Milne I think there is a more sinister explanation. He is the personification of all the ills fostered by far-Left intellectualism in Britain in the past century, from his instinctive hatred of his own country to his slavish selfabasement before the despots of the East.
In his malignancy, mendacity and hypocrisy, in his narcissism and anti- patriotism, he is betraying not only the history of the Labour Party but the basic values of this country.
Disgrace
These may sound strong words, but I believe Mr Milne and his Stop The War friends are a cancer at the heart of our political and intellectual life. Every day their influence grows, the weaker our democracy becomes.
In the meantime, Aleppo burns. One of the oldest cities in the world, inhabited since at least 5,000 BC, it has been reduced to a smoking ruin. Every day, every hour, children are wounded and killed, their bodies broken by the bombs of Vladimir Putin and the bullets of his Syrian puppets.
But every day, even as the death toll mounts, the Russian president knows that his useful idiots, Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Seumas Milne, will be there to defend him at Westminster and on the airwaves of our publicly funded national broadcaster.
What a disgrace for our democracy. What dishonour for the Labour Party, what shame for Britain.
And what a tragedy, above all, for Syria.
FROM the moment he was appointed, Seumas Milne’s ability to grab the limelight — for all the wrong reasons — quickly became apparent. Back then, a year ago, the spin doctor accompanied his new boss to Labour Party headquarters for a television interview about the situation in Syria.
But Jeremy Corbyn’s efforts to appear statesmanlike were suddenly undermined by the distracting appearance of a man in the background.
Not once but twice he passed behind the Labour leader, the second time trying in vain to cover his face from the camera.
At the time, few viewers would have recognised the interloper — Milne. The same cannot be said today.
In recent weeks, his interventions have seen him making headlines, rather than shaping them, on an almost daily basis.
Turn the clock back to last month’s Labour conference. Who can forget the images of the thunderous face of Shadow Defence Secretary Clive Lewis as he prepared to address the hall. He was moments away from delivering his keynote speech when a yellow Post-it note informed him that part of what he was going to say had been scrapped.
He then discovered, as the edited speech on the autocue scrolled up, that because his view went against that of Jeremy Corbyn, he had been prevented from conveying his support for the renewal of Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent.
Mr Lewis was said to have been so unhappy at being censored that he punched a wall in anger. No prizes for guessing who was responsible for that last-minute tweak.
Then, on Wednesday, Seumas Milne was at it again. This time he faced calls for Corbyn to sack him after he suggested British and U.S. raids against Islamic State in Syria were as bad as the Russian bombing of Aleppo.
Asked if the UK was as culpable as Russia for the bloodshed in Syria, he said: ‘We are not in the business of allocating blame.’
The fact is that, like the master he serves, Milne’s core beliefs could hardly be more out of touch with popular opinion.
THIS is patently obvious from looking back at hundreds of articles he penned in his 30year career at the Guardian, prior to his appointment as Labour’s executive director of strategy and communications. In that time he spoke up for Stalin, refused to condemn Osama Bin Laden after 9/11, defended insurgents responsible for killing British soldiers in Iraq, and claimed Fusilier Lee Rigby’s murder in London wasn’t ‘terrorism in the normal sense’ because he was a member of the Armed Forces.
Whether it was the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet empire, or the riots that devastated parts of London in 2011, Milne attempted to defend the indefensible.
As for Vladimir Putin, Milne has long been a supporter, even appearing with him at a 2014 event in Sochi in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
So to say the promotion of ‘Shameless Milne’ to such a position of power by Jeremy Corbyn was greeted with astonishment would be something of an understatement — even among those on the Left.
Peter Mandelson accused Corbyn of a lack of professionalism in the appointment, saying Milne was ‘completely unsuited to such a job’, having ‘ little connection with mainstream politics’.
And Labour grandee Lord Soley, a long-term acquaintance of Milne’s, accused him of being a friend of tyrants and an enemy of democracy. ‘He was always overly sympathetic to authoritarian regimes and under-sympathetic to countries that enjoyed democracy and the rule of law,’ he said. ‘ He would be very critical of Britain or the U.S. but not of Russia or Iran, countries or regimes I would keep my distance from unless I was trying to change them.’
Even among his newspaper colleagues there were those who could not wait to stick the knife in.
Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore described him as ‘ c*** central’, adding: ‘I f*****g hate these public school leftists. Bye, bye Labour.’ Public school? Very much so. Millionaire Milne is a product of unalloyed privilege. The son of a former Director-General of the BBC forced to quit after a series of rows with the Thatcher government, he was raised in a grand six-bedroomed pile in London’s exclusive Holland Park — close to the home of that other oh- so privileged socialist, Tony Benn. Educated at £ 35,000- a- year Winchester College, he studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford — which seems obligatory for many wonk- like Left- wing politicos — before going into journalism.
Today he lives in a £2 million property in the leafy south-west London enclave of Richmond (bought without a mortgage, if you please) from where he and his Italian wife Cristina Montanari, a one-time director at an advertising company, managed to avoid sending their children to the local comprehensive and sent them instead to . . . grammar schools.
And not just any: two of the top selective state schools in the country, which is perhaps why both went on to study at Oxbridge.
This has not stopped Labour — whose policy Milne shapes — from campaigning furiously against Conservative proposals to introduce more grammars. Add in his love of Armani ties and fine dining, and is it any surprise that many find Milne nauseatingly hypocritical?
And as the distinguished novelist and Labour-backer Robert Harris has pointed out, these things do matter. Comparing his own background with Milne’s, he said: ‘[I’m] council-house born. Voted Foot, Kinnock. But not for private-school apologists for Stalin. Sorry.’
Given Corbyn’s widespread unpopularity and propensity for gaffes, it was clear he needed a capable and disciplined PR team. Step forward Milne, then 57.
Significantly, Labour officials mentioned that rather than quit his job as a Guardian columnist and associate editor, Milne would simply be ‘on leave’ from the paper.
Perhaps, some speculated, this was because the Labour post was shortterm and Milne would need a job and pension to fall back on. But the arrangement has created disquiet at the Guardian.
There is concern that Milne’s split loyalty could do severe damage to the much-valued independence of the paper — which is, in fact, a mishmash of received wisdom and Leftish views.
Controversially, too, there is suspicion that his leave was sanctioned because of his close friendship with the paper’s editor, Kath Viner — he is said to be far more in tune with her politically than with her predecessor, Alan Rusbridger, and canvassed tirelessly for her to get the job.
Those who know Milne say he can be charming and great company — full of the easy self-confidence a costly private education can bestow.
His father Alasdair Milne was also educated at Winchester and Oxford.
AND when Alasdair died in 2013, he left an estate worth almost £4 million (the family house sold last year for £3,778,000). It is estimated that after tax, Seumas Milne would have inherited about £800,000.
Alasdair Milne became BBC Director-General in 1982, and in his five years in the post there were rows with Margaret Thatcher’s Tories over what she regarded as biased BBC coverage of the miners’ strike, the U.S. bombing of Libya and a documentary featuring a long interview with Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness.
In his memoirs, John Birt, a BBC Director-General years later, wrote that Thatcher regarded Milne Snr as ‘ an arrogant public- school toff presiding over an unmanaged, outof-control institution’.
Friends say that in a family where political and philosophical discussion were the order of the day at the dinner table, young Seumas would have been heavily influenced by his father’s fulminations against the Tory party.
It was only natural that Milne attended Balliol, the Oxford college led for 13 years until 1978 by the Marxist historian Christopher Hill.
‘It was very, very Left-wing at the time,’ one contemporary told me. ‘People such as Seumas sat around endlessly debating procedural motions and sending telegrams to the likes of Leonid Brezhnev [the Soviet leader] congratulating them on their great achievements.
‘The politics of the Corbynistas are a resurrection of student politics from those days — and will no doubt prove to be just as ineffectual now as then.’
Indeed, a former aide of Ed Miliband told me that Milne is ‘one of those hardcore lefties who support policies that will never get Labour back into power’.
Indeed, it seems that if he keeps on the way he did this week, Milne might just guarantee that Mr Corbyn never does get anywhere near Downing Street.