Jeremy Corbyn has appointed a left-wing journalist who justified the armed resistance against British soldiers in Iraq to be his executive director of strategy and communications.
Seumas Milne joins the Labour leader’s office on leave from The Guardian, where he is a columnist and associate editor, suggesting that he is on temporary loan from the newspaper.
Mr Milne is a former comment editor and labour editor at the newspaper. He previously worked at The Economist and is the author of books about the miners’ strike, global politics and economic policy. He was an executive member of the National Union of Journalists for ten years.
Mr Milne is well known for his anti-war stance. In 2004, he wrote: “The anti-occupation guerrillas are routinely damned as terrorists . . . But it has become ever clearer that they are in fact a classic resistance movement, waging an increasingly successful guerrilla war against the occupying armies.”
After the July 7 bombings, he wrote that in the light of Tony Blair’s war on terrorism: “The only surprise was that the attacks were so long coming.”