This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

The chief of staff of Unite’s leader, Len McCluskey, has left the Communist party to become a Labour member.



Andrew Murray, who last year said communism represented “a society worth working towards”, joined Labour’s ranks recently, a Unite spokesman said.

Murray, a former Morning Star journalist and longtime chair of Stop the War, said in a Guardian interview last year that his adherence to communism prevented him from joining Labour.

“All my children are in the Labour party,” he said. “One has been in the Labour party a long time; the other three are all there as a result of Jeremy’s surge. But no, I’m a member of the Communist party. That’s where I am. Communism still represents, in my view, a society worth working towards – albeit not by the methods of the 20th century, which failed.”

He added: “But you can be sure of one thing. If I joined the Labour party, what do you think would appear in the Mail or the Telegraph or the Times … or even the Guardian?”

Last week Murray’s daughter, Laura, claimed that members of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and other Troyskyist groups were seeking to take control of Momentum, the grassroots organisation that supports the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, from its founder, Jon Lansman.

“Jeremy Corbyn will inevitably make one compromise or concession that isn’t ideologically pure enough for them, and they will abandon him and Labour altogether to turn Momentum into a rival leftwing party,” she wrote.

In her blog she further claimed that a row over the form of an internal voting structure at a meeting of Momentum’s national committee had ended in bullying and intimidation. She accused AWL members of bullying those whom they suspected of being “rightwing” or “alt-Stalinist” members.

Richard Angell, director of Progress, the centre-left pressure group, said that with or without the AWL, Momentum – due to its intention to move Labour from the mainstream and deselect current MPs – remained a threat to Labour’s election hopes.

“The argument that is being propagated by Lansman – and his media supporters Owen Jones and Paul Mason – is that Momentum minus the AWL would be totally fine. This is not true,” he wrote on his blog.

Angell added of Murray Sr’s conversion: “It’s more than regretful that Labour’s ability to attract previously staunch communists has not been able to counterbalance the loss of support in Sleaford, Richmond and national opinion polls.”