Morning Star editor BEN CHACKO says assessing a Labour leader whose mission was to smash the left must involve addressing the delusions that fuelled his rise
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An explosive exposé of MI5’s unaccountable spying on communists and industrial militants
KEVAN NELSON reviews MI5, The Cold War and the Rule of Law by KD Ewing, Joan Mahoney and Andrew Moretta (Oxford University Press, £80)
Communist Party general secretaries Harry Pollitt (right) and John Gollan (left)
Rebuilding Labour’s working-class roots and organising power is essential if the party is to recover, says MERCEDES VILLALBA
ANDREW MURRAY looks back at a damaging career marked by dishonesty, incompetence and revolting complicity in war crimes
Britain’s historic vote to leave the EU was a rejection of the political Establishment and the strategic direction pursued by Britain’s ruling class since the second world war, writes ALEX GORDON
Over 1,000 hostile US sanctions remain in place on Venezuela, while Britain continues its colonial theft of gold, writes MATT WILLGRESS
MARY DAVIS says the centrality of the Jewish community and the Communist Party to anti-fascism in the 1930s is too often overlooked on the left
BACK in 1987 MI5 operative Peter Wright, famously revealed in Spycatcher — The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer that his MI5 special facilities team had “bugged and burgled our way across London at the state’s behest, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way.”
In deep-mining formerly secret documents released to the National Archives and a wide array of published sources, this study provides conclusive evidence of how in the immediate aftermath of the second world war the British state security services amassed to themselves immense operational powers despite having no statutory authority, no statutory powers and no statutory (and little otherwise) accountability. Thus creating the conditions for the civil liberties violations and criminal behaviour disclosed by Wright.
The book is the culmination of decades of academic research by Professor Keith Ewing, a frequent contributor to the Morning Star, together with co-authors Joan Mahoney and Andrew Moretta.
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