[19] According to Peter Wilby in an April 2016 New Statesman profile of Milne, his most controversial decision among The Guardian staff was to print a 2004 article by Osama bin Laden, assembled from recordings of one of his speeches.
[14] Milne's period in this role was described by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine as having turned The Guardian's comment section into a "truly global debating forum.
"[25] Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan asserted that Milne's greatest achievement "was to take full advantage of the expansion of The Guardian's comment pages ... making them the most thought-provoking opinion section in Britain.
[14] Milne has reported for The Guardian from the Middle East, Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe and South Asia,[28] and has also written for Le Monde diplomatique[29] and the London Review of Books.
"[32] In October 2015, Kate Godfrey, who has worked as an aid worker in conflict zones such as Libya and Syria,[33] described Milne as "an apologist for terror" in The Daily Telegraph, adding: "I think that he never met a truth he didn't dismiss as an orthodoxy and that nowhere in his far-Left polemic are actual people represented.
"[34] The attacks on Milne struck James Kirkup in the same publication nearly a year later as being "a little silly, since part of the point of this columnising lark is to say things that get attention and provoke argument: by that measure, he was pretty good at the job.
In The Guardian, he wrote "the claim that the other leadership candidates – steeped as they are in the triangulating 'pro-business' politics of the 1990s – can offer a winning electoral alternative to Corbyn's commitment to what are in fact mostly mainstream public views, looks increasingly implausible.
[40][41] In a soon-deleted tweet, Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore expressed her dislike of "public school leftists" in reference to the news of Milne's new role[23] and speculated that his appointment meant goodbye to Labour.
[42] According to Tom Harris, a former Scottish Labour MP writing for The Daily Telegraph, Corbyn could have chosen for the Comms post "someone whose skills in media management were better known than his personal political views.
"[44][45] John Jewell, an academic at Cardiff School of Journalism, criticised the articles by Harris and others which mention Milne's response to the murder of Lee Rigby.
[4] In a July 2016 Guardian column, Owen Jones defended Milne as "a deeply insightful and thoroughly decent man who has been wronged by his media portrayal as a soulless Stalinist apparatchik.
"[48] In early October 2015, a few weeks before his appointment was announced, Milne was interviewed by the Russian government-funded RT television network[49] while the Labour Party conference was in progress.
"[54][55] Isabel Hardman, assistant editor of The Spectator, cast doubt on this interpretation when speaking on This Week, giving credence to a view that it was other people who claim to be close to Corbyn who were briefing journalists.
[57] Milne made an official complaint to the BBC about the 6 January on-air announcement on the Daily Politics programme by Stephen Doughty that he had resigned as a shadow Foreign Office minister.
[58] On 21 January 2016, Milne was reported by Andrew Grice of The Independent to be aligned with Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell in a power struggle between two factions in Corbyn's team.
[62] Following the unexpected victory of the "Leave" campaign in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, Milne's role as Labour strategist came under scrutiny within the party.
He argues there is a tendency 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.
"[71] He has written that crimes of communist states "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.
"[72] In a 2006 Guardian article, Milne 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.
It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment ... Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the west, boosted the anticolonial movement and provided a powerful counterweight to western global domination.
"[73] Milne contributed a foreword to Stasi State or Socialist Paradise (2015), a book by John Green and Bruni de la Motte about East Germany.
Milne asserted that the former communist state delivered "social and women's equality well ahead of its times, and greater freedom in the workplace than most employees enjoy in today's Germany.
"[76] In 2009, Milne told George Galloway on the latter's The Mother of All Talk Shows, at that time broadcast on Talksport, that "East Berlin was absolutely at the front line of the cold war.
"[84] Milne argued following the 7 July 2005 London bombings that it was "an insult to the dead" and a "piece of disinformation long peddled by champions of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan" to claim that al-Qaeda and its followers were motivated by "a hatred of western freedoms and way of life" and "that their Islamist ideology aims at global domination", rather than "the withdrawal of US and other western forces from the Arab and Muslim world" and an end to support for Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and despotic regimes in the region.
"[87] Writing about Milne's articles on Muslim extremism, Andrew Anthony asserted that "whereas Milne can instantly detect the relationship between far right rhetoric and the recent murder of Ahmed Hassan, a Muslim teenager in Dewsbury, he dismisses the idea that such hatred as was captured in the Dispatches programme "Undercover Mosque" [in 2007] might contribute to the kind of mentality that resulted in the carnage of the July 2005 bombs and the many terror plots that the authorities have successfully prevented.
"[97] Cross-checking with the leak of 4,000 Russian emails, believed to originate from Putin's senior adviser Vladislav Surkov, the Conservative MP Bob Seely, and the Ukrainian specialist Alya Shandra, have found that several of Milne's articles on the Russo-Ukrainian War appear to parallel the Kremlin's agenda at the time.