EX-LABOUR MINISTER: VOTE TORY

Corbyn General Election campaign suffers devastating blow as Scottish party veteran issues poll warning...

A FORMER Labour minister has revealed he is voting Tory – after branding Jeremy Corbyn a threat to the UK. Tom Harris, who was MP for Glasgow South, said that he would be backing Boris Johnson ‘in order to protect the country I love’.

In an extraordinary intervention, he condemned some Labour candidates who ‘continue to spout racist, anti-Semitic hatred’.

He also described Mr Corbyn as a threat to the Union and to national security who ‘never failed to offer comfort to Britain’s enemies’.

Mr Harris, who once ran for the party leadership in Scotland, is the latest Labour veteran to condemn his own party and urge supporters to switch their allegiance to the Conservatives.

Last night, Tory MSP Annie Wells said: ‘This is an important intervention from a highly respected former Labour MP. Labour voters don’t

have to agree with everything the Scottish Conservatives do or say.

‘But if they’re serious about keeping Scotland in the UK and finally moving on from a decade of chaos and division, there really is only one party for them.’

Writing in today’s Mail, Mr Harris said Mr Corbyn ‘cannot and must not be trusted with the security of our nation’.

He added: ‘Nor, frankly, can he be trusted with safeguarding the Union from further attempts to divide it, because it is clear that it means very little to him and his cohorts.’

Mr Harris, 55, was elected to the House of Commons at the 2001 General Election for the Glasgow seat of Cathcart following the retirement of the Labour MP John Maxton.

His seat was abolished following the creation of the Scottish parliament and the subsequent reduction in the number of Scottish seats at Westminster.

Mr Harris, a transport minister under Tony Blair, represented the new seat of Glasgow South from the 2005 General Election until losing to the SNP in 2015.

Explaining his decision to vote Conservative, Mr Harris said: ‘A man who has never failed to offer comfort to Britain’s enemies – whether the IRA, or the Islamist terrorists of Hamas, or Iran or Russia or Cuba or Venezuela – can hardly be expected to feel any affection for the UK.

‘When hundreds of Labour MPs representing English and Welsh constituencies made the journey to Glasgow one week before the independence referendum to help campaign for a No vote, Corbyn and his hard-Left allies found something, anything, more pressing to do in their own constituencies.

‘He understands that his own failures as a politician will prevent him from leading his party to an overall majority at the General Election, so he will need the SNP’s support to form a government. The

Nationalists will be only too happy to put Corbyn into No 10, provided he agrees to give them the authority to hold that second divisive and unnecessary Scexit referendum.

‘Corbyn and his closest ally, [shadow chancellor] John McDonnell, have said unequivocally that they will not stand in the way of such a request.’

Mr Harris spoke out amid growing fears the SNP would be prepared to prop up a minority Labour administration in the event of a hung parliament in order to secure another independence vote.

His comments also come amid concern over Labour’s failure to root out anti

Semitism. Last week, two former Labour frontbenchers also urged ‘patriotic’ voters to back Mr Johnson and save Britain from Mr Corbyn.

Ian Austin and John Woodcock said the party’s leader was ‘not fit to be Prime Minister’ and must be stopped from reaching Downing Street at all costs.

The pair, who both served as advisers to former Labour leader Gordon Brown in government, savaged Mr Corbyn’s record on security, the economy and antiSemitism – and even questioned his patriotism.

At the launch of the crossparty Mainstream campaign against extremism, they said they would vote Conservative next month and urged others to do the same.

Mr Corbyn faced a furious attack at the weekend by a survivor of the IRA’s Poppy Day massacre who said that, as a ‘sympathiser for terrorism’, the Labour leader should not be allowed to become Prime Minister.

Stephen Gault’s father was one of a dozen people murdered on Remembrance Sunday in 1987 in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh.

Mr Gault used the anniversary of the attack to condemn Mr Corbyn for signing a Commons motion after the bombing which claimed that the violence in Northern Ireland stemmed ‘primarily from the long-standing British occupation’.

Earlier this year, the former head of MI6 warned that Mr Corbyn’s closest aide would have to be sacked for reasons of national security should the Labour leader become Prime Minister.

Sir Richard Dearlove said that Mr Corbyn’s director of communications, Seumas Milne, had ‘no chance’ of getting security clearance to see classified documents because of his links to terrorists and political extremists going back decades.

‘Sympathiser for terrorism’