Behold the wisdom of London’s gilded opinionistas!
Francis Sedgemore, Friday 19 June 2009
Regular visitors will be aware that in this web lodge there has been a steady decline in the amount of serious political comment (or textual wank, as I prefer to call it). It can be dull to write, and is no doubt tedious to read, even where you agree with the sentiments expressed.
This would explain my reluctance to give voice to opinions on the great issues of the day. My opinions are seldom informed, as like most others I rely for information on broadcast and print media news reports. But journalism proper is no longer seen as cost-effective, and what we are presented with instead are newspaper editorials and op-eds by the bucketload.
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When it comes to the political crisis in Iran, there is no shortage of comment issued from the furiously tapping fingers of over-caffeinated western pundits. And much of it is, to use the current language of the street, “meh”. The usual tropes are displayed in abundance, with on one extreme a fashionable cynicism which sees the drama unfolding in Tehran as little more than a power struggle between supposedly liberal former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and reactionary Supreme Leader Ali Hoseini Khamenei.
Extend this theme with an anti-imperialist narrative, and you get the wisdom of the British left’s chief Stalin apologist, Seumas Milne, who in the Grauniad yesterday dismissed the legions of Iranians protesting a stolen election as “Tehran’s gilded youth”. Haughty, maybe, but a distinct improvement on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “scum”: an offhand comment for which the sitting president got a ticking off from his masters in the Guardian Council.
We can put this down to good breeding, for Seumas Milne is, as Norman Geras helpfully reminds us, the progeny of former BBC Director General Alasdair Milne. He is a graduate of leading public school Winchester College, and Balliol College Oxford. I know of Milne as one of a faction of Leninists known as Straight Left, which in the 1980s resisted the Communist Party of Great Britain’s attempt to transform itself into a democratic socialist organisation. It may have taken them a while, but the ‘tankies’ ended up winning the political battle. They then proceeded to take over the remainder of the non-libertarian British left, including its Trotskyite fringe.
The fluffy-bunny eurocommunist majority in the Communist Party, which went on to form the intellectual backbone of New Labour, included such luminaries as journalist and academic Beatrix Campbell, who recently accepted an Order of the British Empire for services to, like, whatever. I imagine she was hoping for a seat in the House of Lords, complete with fetching ermine stole.
Twenty-five years is an eternity in politics.
Feed the writer! 
Friday 19 June 2009 at 13:53 GMT
Thank you for enlightening me as to Milne’s true identity. I’d always imagined him as a Fenian and therefore probably an unconscious and innocent inheritor of extreme leftist opinions. Sadly, it turns out he’s the usual Wykehamist pseudo-aggrieved bully.
Friday 19 June 2009 at 13:59 GMT
“[P]seudo-aggrieved bully” describes Seumas Milne to a tee! As for Winchester, there is something about the place that leads it to produce bastards in abundance.
Friday 19 June 2009 at 14:40 GMT
“Twenty-five years is an eternity in politics.”
How long before it’s “Arise, Sir Seumas!”?
Saturday 20 June 2009 at 07:23 GMT
The chapter on Richard Crossman in Ralph Glasser’s ‘Gorbal’s Boy at Oxford’ dissects the type brilliantly.
Saturday 20 June 2009 at 14:27 GMT
I guess that putting in that post a mug shot of that excrementhead who is so high on my personal shitlist was a deliberate exercise to increase the commenting you complain about. I can tell you it (the mug) works for me anytime. Even a mention will be sufficient to bring out the worst in your humble here.
Yeah, I am aware of his pedigree. What I am not sure about is why no Londoner found it in him/her to give the creep a good hearty beating.
Are we men or mice, for crissake?
Saturday 20 June 2009 at 18:34 GMT
Did Milne’s daddy not black-ball Mike Rosen’s daddy?
And Campbell is an awful, dreadful, terrible woman.
Sunday 21 June 2009 at 15:55 GMT
As someone who once tried to read a copy of “Straight Left” and failed despite the fact that it only had about 8 pages and was tabloid, the thought that a “serious” newspaper employed someone connected with it as a journalist never fails to make me laugh rather hysterically.
Sunday 21 June 2009 at 18:58 GMT
At least Straight Left wasn’t as bad as “The Leninist”, which was, if I remember correctly, a broadsheet set in 4pt type, with no graphics whatsoever.
Monday 22 June 2009 at 07:12 GMT
Wasn’t The Leninist actually written in its entirity by an exiled hard line faction of the Turkish CP?
I actually found it more interesting, more lively and certainly better written than Straight Left. OK, make that “as readable as….”
Monday 22 June 2009 at 18:23 GMT
“I know of Milne as one of a faction of Leninists known as Straight Left, which in the 1980s resisted the Communist Party of Great Britain’s attempt to transform itself into a democratic socialist organisation”
I noticed this information has been edited out of Milne’s Wikipedia entry – to be fair, there is nothing to back it up. Does anyone have any references so it can be re-inserted?
P.
Monday 22 June 2009 at 19:08 GMT
I have my memories of being a CPGB member during the 1980s, and a delegate to a party congress that was charged with purging (!) tankies who violated party rules and procedures. Internal documents at the time discussed such issues as the Morning Star and Straight Left (and named names), and it was known to all that Seumas Milne was business manager for Straight Left. It’s not as if they were particularly secretive.
If Milne’s Wikipedia entry has been, er, redacted to cover up his past, then I imagine this was done as part of the political makeover to which I implicitly refer above. Wikipedia entries on controversial political subjects can never be take seriously, and I have no interest whatsoever in re-editing Milne’s.
Friday 10 July 2009 at 01:27 GMT
[...] are their votes? And where is the solidarity from the British left toward their “gilded” brothers and sisters fighting for freedom and democracy in [...]