Andrew Murray (campaigner and journalist)

Andrew Murray (born 1958) is a British campaigner and journalist who was Chair of the Stop the War Coalition from its formation in 2001 until September 2011, and again from September 2015.

Murray has been a senior official for several trade unions over a couple of decades.

Career

A former Morning Star journalist, a publication to which he still contributes, Murray was appointed as a parliamentary lobby correspondent at the age of 19. From 1986 to 1987, he worked for the Soviet Novosti news agency.^[1] Later he became an official for the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF).

At the Transport and General Workers Union, an organisation for which he worked from 1987 to 1998 and again from 2003,^[2] he was heavily involved in the conduct of the British Airways cabin crew strike of 1997, and in the successful general secretary election campaigns of Bill Morris (1991 and 1995) and Tony Woodley (2003) and, after the formation of Unite as a merger of the T&G and Amicus, of Len McCluskey in 2010.

He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1976 and was later associated with its Straight Left faction. Following the dissolution of the CPGB in 1991 he was a leader of the Communist Liaison group, which itself dissolved in 1995 with its members joining the Communist Party of Britain, of which he remains a member.^[3] He served on the Party's leadership from 2000 to 2004, and was an advocate of the Communist Party supporting the Respect Coalition in the European and municipal elections that year. He served once more on the party's executive from 2008 until 2011. He told John Harris in 2015: "Communism still represents, in my view, a society worth working towards – albeit not by the methods of the 20th century, which failed."^[3]

Murray is presently Chief of Staff for Unite responsible for most of the union's central departments and for its ten regions, and was elected to the TUC General Council in April 2011. Ahead of the public sector pension strike, he was named by Education Secretary Michael Gove in November 2011 as being, along with Len McCluskey and Mark Serwotka, one of three union "militants" who were "itching for a fight". Murray defended Arthur Scargill in a review of Marching to the Fault Line by Francis Beckett and David Hencke, which criticises the NUM leader's role in the miners' strike, advising Morning Star readers not to buy the book as doing so would only "feed the jackals".^[4]

As chair of Stop the War, he presided at the concluding rally against the Iraq war in 2003, a rally which is claimed as the largest political demonstration in British history. Murray stood down as Stop the War Chair in September 2011 and was succeeded by Jeremy Corbyn MP. He was elected by the Coalition's Steering Committee to the new post of Deputy President, but returned to the position of Chair in September 2015, following Corbyn's election as Leader of the Labour Party.

Positions

Murray is considered an apologist for Joseph Stalin by his critics, such as Nick Cohen.^[1] Described as an "admirer" in The Independent on Sunday in 2003,^[5] in 1999 he wrote in his Morning Star column:

In 2008, Murray identified "one of the successes" of the "nationalities policy of the Soviet Union" as being the promotion of "the cultural, linguistic and educational development of each ethnic group, no matter how small or how historically marginalised."^[7] This comment was criticised by author Edward Lucas in The Guardian who accused Murray of ignoring "the Chechens, Crimean Tatars and other victims of Stalin's murderous deportation policies."^[8] In a short history of the CPGB, published in 1995, Murray wrote: "That things happened in the USSR which were inexcusable and which ultimately prejudiced Socialism’s whole prospect is today undeniable. Whether Communists in the capitalist world could or should have done more than they did is much more contentious".^[9] Oliver Kamm, in The Times commented in 2016: "In short, Mr Murray believes that British communists in the 1930s were justified in backing the Great Terror, the Moscow Trials and the Ukraine famine. Mr Murray predictably supports the most nightmarish totalitarian state in the modern world".^[9]

Murray is a defender of North Korea: "Our Party has already made its basic position of solidarity with Peoples Korea clear".^[10] In response to a Daily Telegraph letter from Conservative MP and Defence Spokesman Julian Lewis,^[1][11] he claimed that he had made no secret of his political beliefs.^[12] "People throw the word ‘Stalinist’ around and demean it by trivialising it. But in the case of Murray it is just", wrote Cohen in 2015.^[13]

Writer

Murray is the author of several books and numerous pamphlets, including The Communist Party of Great Britain: A Historical Analysis to 1941 (1995),^[9] Flashpoint World War III (1997), Off the Rails (2001), A New Labour Nightmare: Return of the Awkward Squad (2003), Stop the War: The Story of Britain's Biggest Mass Movement (with Lindsey German, 2005), The T&G Story (2008) and The Imperial Controversy (2009), the later work was described Nathaniel Mehr in Tribune magazine as "an important and timely book".^[14] He has also contributed to The Guardian and has written a blog on the newspaper's web page.

Private life

Andrew Murray has been married twice – to Susan Michie (1981–1997) and to Anna Kruthoffer from 2003 to date. He has three children with Dr. Michie – Jessica Katharine Murray, Jack Douglas Murray and Laura Catriona Murray and a stepdaughter, Sally Charlton.

References