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The younger son of the former BBC Director General Alasdair Milne, he attended Winchester College and read PPE at Balliol College, Oxford and Economics at Birkbeck College, London University.

He 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). In the latter role, Milne was described by the left-wing writer Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine as having turned the Guardian's comment section into a "truly global debating forum" and by the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan as having edited "the most thought-provoking opinion section in Britain".

Milne has reported for The Guardian from the Middle East, Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe and South Asia, and also written for Le Monde Diplomatique and the London Review of Books. He has been a member of the Labour Party and served on the executive committee of the National Union of Journalists for ten years. He was joint winner of the 1999 What the Papers Say Scoop of the Year award.

Seumas Milne has been a vocal critic of the "war on terror" and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Milne has written in support of what he calls "the wave of progressive change in Latin America", which he has described as "the most hopeful development in global politics in the past two decades". In the Middle East, Milne has argued that "commitment to Palestinian rights should first of all be a question of justice. But.. it is also a matter of obvious western self-interest". 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".

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". He has argued for full public ownership of banks in Britain to support economic recovery and overcome the credit crisis. Milne has been a strong critic of New Labour, in particular over its support for foreign wars, privatisation and low taxes on the wealthy. He has argued that David Cameron's "makeover" of the Conservative Party is "skin deep" and attacked the party for its links with "rightwing fringe" parties in eastern Europe and support for "small state" public spending cuts.

Views on Communism

Milne has attacked what he calls "the creeping historical revisionism that tries to equate Nazism and communism", 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". 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".

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. ...Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the west, boosted the anticolonial movement and provided a powerful counterweight to western global domination.

Milne has also criticised the Council of Europe and others for adopting "as fact the wildest estimates of those 'killed by communist regimes'". He has argued that, while "the numbers remain a focus of huge academic controversy", the "real records of repression now available from the Soviet archives are horrific enough.. without engaging in an ideologically-fuelled inflation game.

Views on the September 11 attacks

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

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

Novelist Robert Harris attacked Milne as "a Stalinist Rip van Winkle" in a September 2001 article supporting the war on terrorism. Melanie Phillips, in an article on her Spectator blog which described The Guardian as "an evil newspaper", denounced Milne as a "Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas mouthpiece".

• The Enemy Within: the secret war against the miners, 1994, 1995 & 2004, ISBN 0860914615, Verso Books/Macmillan Publishers
• Beyond the Casino Economy, with Nicholas Costello and Jonathan Michie, 1989, ISBN 0860919676 Verso Books

Video clips

• At a rally in Manchester in 2008