Back in the USSR: Jeremy Corbyn hires Seumas Milne

You can’t say we weren’t warned. Jeremy Corbyn is nothing if not consistent. When he casts his baleful, weary, disappointed, eye around the world he knows what he sees: a world bought and sold by American gold, aided and abetted, as always, by its snivelling junior, British, partner. So Cuba is not an island gulag and Venezuela not an incompetent kleptocracy. Each is, rather, a defiant hold-out of revolutionary socialism sticking it to the Yankee man. If that means ignoring certain inconvenient truths then, well, these truths shall remain unexamined. If that means blaming Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine on Nato then so be it. Because Nato, as any Dave Spart knows, is the latest means by which American hegemony is established, justified and expanded. Remember that the root cause of any problem, anywhere in the world, is simultaneously always overlooked by the doltish mainstream and yet also, for them with eyes and a nose for the truth, remarkably easy to discover. Conveniently, it is always the same root cause. Which does simplify matters. Knowing all this and appreciating that there’s no good reason for supposing elevation to the Privy Council will cause Corbyn to rethink his long-term allegiances, preferences, and prejudices, why should anyone be surprised that he should want someone who, essentially, agrees with him about all of the above, to serve as his director of communications? It should be said that Seumas Milne, the inveterate leftist now handling Corbyn’s communications is only taking a leave of absence from the Guardian. How this will work in practice remains to be seen. One can envisage circumstances in which it causes modest problems for the Guardian’s political staff. Or perhaps Milne thinks it will all be over by Easter. But for the rest of us it is a moment of wondrous clarity. One of those times when you think, By Jove, he’s actually only gone and done it. Fair enough, perhaps. Nothing is too bonkers to be unthinkable these days. Life in Corbynvania will never be dull. At the same time, appointing as your chief spin doctor – your principal conduit to the admirable rotters who constitute the parliamentary lobby – someone whose views are, if anything, even more extreme than your own modestly outlandish prejudices is, well, interesting. Also brave. Undoubtedly bold too. Ordinarily, a political leader can say that the views held by his own spokesman in a former existence are of no relevance whatsoever. But that will not wash in this instance since the only plausible reason for hiring Milne is that his views are the same as Jeremy Corbyn’s. Now, you may say there’s nothing wrong with being an unreconstructed Marxist and not very much wrong with being the kind of columnist whose back catalogue features defences of, or explanations and occasional justifications for, inter alia, Joe Stalin, Slobodan Milosevic, Iraqi Baathists attacking British troops, and much else besides. It’s a point of view. Sarcastic wags on Twitter have already suggested that hiring Seumas Milne shows how much Corbyn loves The Guardian. He will do anything for it, even if that means improving the paper by removing Milne’s column from it. I consider that a harsh judgement. On the contrary, Milne is a fine columnist. As fluent as he is passionate, he knows for whom he writes. He has a worldview to promote. And, however much you might dislike his views, even his most controversial columns – the ones Tory HQ will be compiling in a, er, dossier even now – contain nuggets of gold. It is not as if western foreign policy has been an unalloyed success this century. But the problem for Milne, like the problem for Corbyn, is that even when he stumbles upon a correct or even a semi-plausible conclusion he does so from the wrong direction. That is, the wrong direction if their job is to seek to lead the United Kingdom. Because, invariably, they begin from the presumption that Britain is guilty. Thus, for instance, a United Ireland is inevitable and the question is only whether the UK government will help or hinder the process. This puts the cart before the horse; assuming an outcome and then deciding how to get there. With, in this instance, precious little need to listen to the people who actually live in Ireland, whether north or south of the border. Reviewing Martin Amis’s book Koba the Dread in 2002, Milne wrote:

It has become almost received wisdom to bracket Stalin and Hitler as twin monsters of the past century – Mao and Pol Pot are sometimes thrown in as an afterthought – and commonplace to equate communism and fascism as the two greatest evils of an unprecedentedly sanguinary era.

  Well, yes, I suppose it has. God knows why. Of course, most people are capable of appreciating that the differences between Hitler and Stalin, while important and vital, do not then require us to absolve or downplay or otherwise diminish the latter’s sins. In like fashion, to put it in a domestic manner, disliking Manchester United confers no requirement to like Liverpool. Milne’s consistency is complete, however. Thus:

Whatever people thought about the Soviet Union and its allies and what was going on in those countries, there was a sense throughout the twentieth century that there were alternatives – socialist political alternatives. The Soviet Union and other states of that type would devolve in different directions, but I don’t think most people expected that it would collapse into a form of feral capitalism and social disaster.

Well, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a disaster for some. But it was also – rather importantly – also a liberation for many others. Milne’s concern for those labouring in imperial captivity never extends to those held hostage by the Soviets. Instead his back catalogue is stuffed with articles downplaying the horrors of Sovietism and then, latterly, redefining Russian aggression as defensive manoeuvres designed to combat – of course – western neoliberalism. Which is always the greatest enemy.

Meanwhile, the idea – always pushed by those wishing to rehabilitate the Soviet Union – that say what you will about Lenin and Joe and the other guys in the gang but at least they were building something hopeful is a grotesque piece of history-rewriting. Mistakes were made. There were scenes.

All this matters little for a columnist who’s free to indulge himself as he sees fit. But it’s a remarkable worldview to find elevated to the Labour leader’s office. Or at least it would be but for the suspicion all this stuff is exactly the reason why Jeremy Corbyn has called for Seumas.

It tells you something.