Corbyn aide: spies out to stop Labour

SPIES and the “deep state” could be “working to block the election of a Labour government”, an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn has claimed.

Andrew Murray, chief of staff to Len Mccluskey, the Unite union leader, suggested the security services were behind a weekend report that he had been banned from Ukraine. He also questioned why his year-old application for a parliamentary pass had been met with a “stony silence”.

But Tory MPS criticised his remarks. Sir Desmond Swayne said: “It’s disgraceful that a member of Jeremy

Corbyn’s top team chooses to smear our security services with wild conspiracy theories. It’s a sad state of affairs when Labour are attacking them rather than backing them.”

Andrew Bridgen said: “Given Jeremy Corbyn’s often reported fondness for extremist and terror groups, the fact that his adviser cannot get security clearance to enter the Houses of Parliament and other European countries is not a surprise.”

It emerged at the weekend that Mr Murray had been banned from Ukraine for three years by that country’s security service on the grounds that he was part of Vladimir Putin’s “global propaganda network”.

Mr Murray said he was banned because of a speech in 2014 “protesting [against] the takeover of Ukraine by ultra-nationalists”. But he questioned why news of the ban, imposed in June, had just emerged in articles in the Mail on Sunday and The Sunday Times.

Writing in the New Statesman, Mr Murray said: “Someone else is doing the hard work – possibly someone being paid by the taxpayer. I doubt if their job description is preventing the election of a Corbyn government, but who knows? We are often told that the days of secret state political chicanery are long past and we must hope so. “But sometimes you have to wonder – this curiously timed episode seems

less rooted in a Kiev security scare than in a political stunt closer to home.”

Mr Murray, who was chairman of the Stop the War coalition between 2001 and 2011 and from 2015 to 2016, condemned reports he had made speeches criticising Nato, saying, “Pity the poor trainee spook trawling through decades of Stop the War rally videos” to provide the next newspaper article.

Mr Murray said: “The establishment at home and abroad deplore Labour’s approach to foreign policy more than anything else.

“They fear the popularity of Corbyn’s opposition to war, backing for global human rights and support for the Palestinian cause and their

loss of control over the international narrative.”

He confirmed that he had not been issued with a parliamentary security pass nearly a year after applying for one. “Not that such a pass has been denied either – the application has been met with stony silence from those who process such things.”

He added: “Now, I would like to go to the House of Commons more than I want to go to Ukraine, but the inconvenience is only that. My role in Jeremy Corbyn’s team is advisory, and advice can be tendered from almost anywhere.

“But the story of the pass-that-isn’t fits snugly into the endless agenda of attacks on the Labour leadership.”