All the time we're finding out more about what Jeremy Corbyn's like.
Today comes the announcement that he's appointed Seamus Milne as his press officer. Milne, for the uninitiated, is the son of the former BBC Director General Alasdair Milne, educated at Winchester and Oxford, writes for the Guardian from what you might generously call a post-Stalinist position. You might sum his views up by saying that pretty much everything the West does is bad, and the things other people do are not as bad as the Western capitalist media makes out.
Life is too short and Milne too contemptible a figure to spend the whole morning listing his views, which range from the barmy to the unpleasant. But I would like to mention something he said about the death of Fusilier Lee Rigby, hacked to death a couple of years ago outside Woolwich barracks by two Muslim extremists.
"Rigby was a British soldier who had taken part in multiple combat operations in Afghanistan", wrote Milne in December 2013. "So the attack wasn't terrorism in the normal sense of an indiscriminate attack on civilians". He went on to write that there'd be a lot more of this sort of thing "unless pressure grows to halt the terror war abroad". Funnily enough, that's rather like something one of the killers said at the scene of the crime. "Leave our lands and you can live in peace".
But Milne is wrong, and here's why. In a democracy the army is merely the military wing of the state. We elect the government. They decide the foreign policy imperatives and, so far as this involves the use of force, the army then carries them out. In other words the army is neutral, and its soldiers not responsible for the direction of policy. If the next government has different foreign policy objectives, the army will carry those out too. So in this sense Rigby really was a civilian, a small mute actor carrying out the policy of a democratically elected government. The mistakes of British foreign policy were not his fault.
Of course Rigby's killers did not understand this. You could hardly expect them to. Islam does not sit easily alongside democracy. For many Muslims, laws are God-made, not man-made. But Milne's expensive education (PPE at Balliol, no less) should have equipped him to understand adequately the nature of Rigby's position and the difference between the British army and that of a military state.
No-one who follows Milne's writing could be surprised to find him implying that an act of such barbarism was as much the fault of the British government as two madmen, but I found it interesting that he should be willing to put on one side for the moment one of his other characteristic positions.
As you would expect from an old Leftie like Milne, the working class are always right (although of course sometimes prone to false-consciousness when they vote Tory or oppose immigration). Not apparently on this occasion. The fact that opportunities for modestly-educated young men like Lee Rigby are few and far between did not wash with Milne. It elicited no sympathy.
I was reminded of Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello. "You could be in Palestine / or over the border on the Chinese line / with the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne / But there's no danger / it's a professional career / and it could be arranged / just a word in Mr Churchill's ear".
Where has Milne's compassion for the working class gone? Absent without leave. Pity for Rigby has been forgotten in the excitement of an opportunity to prove, once more, that the West is fundamentally to blame for even the worst atrocities.
I did once think about writing a Threnody for Lee Rigby. But some pieces are just too painful to contemplate.
And now Seamus Milne is Jeremy Corbyn's press officer. By their fruits shall ye know them.
