Seumas Milne's Blog
October 8, 2015
Italian intelligence lied about hostage rescue to hide ransom payment
Leaked document shows Italy made up story about 2012 rescue of Bruno Pelizzari and Debbie Calitz to hide ransom payment
Italy’s intelligence service helped concoct a false story about a rescue of hostages by security forces to hide a ransom payment, according to a leaked spy agency document.
The payment was made for the release of Bruno Pelizzari, an Italian, and South African Debbie Calitz, who were taken by Somali pirates in 2010 and released in 2012.
Related: Spies, lies and fantasies: leaked cables lift lid on work of intelligence agencies
Related: Spy cables: Greenpeace head targeted by intelligence agencies before Seoul G20
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October 7, 2015
Cameron isn’t colonising the centre. That’s fraudulent spin | Seumas Milne
Where once Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson were the sultans of spin, David Cameron and George Osborne have now seized their crowns. At the Conservative conference in Manchester – a city that boasts not a single Tory MP or councillor – the prime minister and chancellor spun themselves into the political stratosphere.
This is a world of positioning and posturing unbound. Liberated from the Liberal Democrats, the Tories have reinvented themselves as “progressives” and champions of “working people”, crusaders for “social justice” against the “scourge of poverty”. In their most surreal flights of fancy, they even boast of being what until last month no Labour leader for a generation would have dreamed of claiming to be: the “workers’ party”. Their media retinue are dazzled by the cleverness of it all. Imagine, posing as your opponents, who could have ever imagined such a thing?
This is the playbook pioneered by Tony Blair, whom Cameron and Osborne revere
Related: David Cameron’s conference speech – the Guardian writers’ verdict | The panel
Continue reading...October 1, 2015
Politics Weekly podcast - Labour's conference and nuclear disarmament
September 30, 2015
The Tories should not whoop too soon over Jeremy Corbyn | Seumas Milne
The timing was unforgiving. To go straight from the most dramatic insurgent party election in Britain’s political history into a traditional seaside party conference was always going to be a bit like jumping off a moving train. But despite the rocky first days of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and the dire warnings of disaster, Labour’s Brighton jamboree defied expectations.
There was no meltdown. The disinherited Blairites and their media cheerleaders continued to run around like headless chickens insisting what had happened was the most terrible mistake. But the caravan moved on regardless. Labour has emerged from its extraordinary upheaval as an unambiguously anti-austerity party. The breakdown of European politics triggered by the crash of 2008 has now reached the whole of Britain. There is, it turns out, an alternative after all.
On austerity and the economy at least, Corbyn and McDonnell have won majority support among their MPs
The risk of an early attempted coup has receded, but the gap between Corbyn and most of his MPs is stark
Continue reading...September 29, 2015
Jeremy Corbyn’s conference speech – the verdict | The panel
A spirited call to arms or a long-distance ramble? Our panellists give their views on the Labour leader’s speech
Related: Jeremy Corbyn restates Trident opposition in conference speech
Continue reading...September 23, 2015
It’s the British establishment that has a problem with democracy | Seumas Milne
If there were any doubts that the British establishment has a problem with democracy, the last few days should have put them to rest. First there was the drama of the spurned Tory donor and piggate. Unsurprisingly, Michael Ashcroft’s revelation that the prime minister simulated oral sex with a dead pig as part of a student initiation ceremony has been the centre of attention.
The question of whether David Cameron lied about when he knew of the former Conservative treasurer and donor’s continuing non-dom tax status – meaning Ashcroft paid no tax in Britain on his overseas earnings – was dutifully raised by Labour and SNP MPs. Both Ashcroft and the Tories had promised he would take up permanent UK residence when he was given a peerage in 2000.
Related: Revealed: the link between life peerages and party donations
It’s clear the problem unelected officials have goes far beyond the odd bilious general
Continue reading...September 16, 2015
Jeremy Corbyn’s victory has already transformed politics | Seumas Milne
It must have been the shortest political honeymoon ever. Barely had the landslide election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader been announced than the backlash began in earnest. The 100-1 outsider might have pulled off the most extraordinary democratic leadership victory. But when it came to the political and media establishment, the usual niceties were dispensed with entirely.
Within minutes, the first of a string of Blairite resignations from shadow cabinet jobs they had not yet been offered had begun. The Conservatives issued bloodcurdling warnings about the threat posed to the security of the country and every family in the land. And the media campaign was raised to new levels of hysteria – with Corbyn and his allies depicted as deranged terrorist sympathisers.
The anti-austerity revolt has found its voice in Britain in an entirely unexpected way
Corbyn has constructed a broad-based shadow cabinet that was widely predicted to be an impossibility
Related: If Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour is going to work, it has to communicate | Owen Jones
Continue reading...September 15, 2015
Living our Values 2015: The view from the NUJ
Unions play a crucial, and in some ways unusual, role at the Guardian and Observer. That’s especially true of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), which represents around 95% of the journalists. Here, Seumas Milne, chair of the Guardian and Observer NUJ chapel, looks at how the relationship with GNM management has fared over the last 12 months
The NUJ “chapel”, or workplace branch, at Guardian News & Media (GNM) not only negotiates the pay, terms and conditions of all those working on the editorial floors. It is also the collective democratic voice of the journalists on everything from threats to media freedom to how the company is run.
In an organization without shareholders, the journalists and wider workforce are – along with our readers – its most important stakeholders. As their representative, the chapel seeks to hold the company’s management to account, along with the trust that owns the Guardian and Observer. We have also tried to democratise these structures and make them more transparent. That’s still definitely work in progress.
Continue reading...Living our Values 2015: The view from the NUJ
Unions play a crucial, and in some ways unusual, role at the Guardian and Observer. That’s especially true of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), which represents around 95% of the journalists. Here, Seumas Milne, chair of the Guardian and Observer NUJ chapel, looks at how the relationship with GNM management has fared over the last 12 months
The NUJ “chapel”, or workplace branch, at Guardian News & Media (GNM) not only negotiates the pay, terms and conditions of all those working on the editorial floors. It is also the collective democratic voice of the journalists on everything from threats to media freedom to how the company is run.
In an organization without shareholders, the journalists and wider workforce are – along with our readers – its most important stakeholders. As their representative, the chapel seeks to hold the company’s management to account, along with the trust that owns the Guardian and Observer. We have also tried to democratise these structures and make them more transparent. That’s still definitely work in progress.
Continue reading...September 9, 2015
Western bombs won’t defeat Isis. Only a wider peace deal can draw its poison | Seumas Milne
There is no disaster in the Arab and Muslim world, it seems, for which the west’s answer is not to drop bombs on it. As the refugee crisis in Europe has driven home the horror of Syria’s civil war, that has been exactly the response of the leaders of Britain and France. David Cameron has long been pressing for a new vote in parliament to authorise a British bombing campaign against Islamic State in Syria.
Related: David Cameron says 'hard military force' needed to tackle Assad and Isis
Most bizarre is the insistence that the west hasn’t actually intervened in Syria
Continue reading...Seumas Milne's Blog
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