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MI5 spied on Labour MPs including a serving defence minister, new files reveal
BRITAIN’S security service spied on Labour MPs, anti-fascists and anti-colonial activists, MI5 files released today reveal. PHIL MILLER went to the National Archives for a sneak preview, and found this newspaper’s predecessor, the Daily Worker, was essential reading for British spooks
Labour war secretary Manny Shinwell MP (centre) sees off 1,500 soldiers from Southampton docks to fight in Malaya in 1948. It has now emerged that MI5 kept a file on him from 1917 to 1968.
NICK WRIGHT considers how the isolation of Israel and a new film on the controversial Italian communist leader are creating new reference points for Italy’s left
CARLOS MARTINEZ says Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are startling, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak
AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
Born on this day in 1931, the heroic revolutionary faces a dangerous new wave of White House aggression. We must treat his birthday as a rallying cry to resist the illegal siege of Cuba, writes ROGER McKENZIE
RAMZY BAROUD decries the rats of Gaza, the rodent and human type. Both abound as profiteering from tragedy reaches obscene levels
Manny Shinwell: The war secretary with an MI5 file
ONE of Glasgow’s leading socialists Manny Shinwell first came to the attention of MI5 in 1917, when he was picked out for being a conscientious objector to World War I.
Shinwell would go on to become chairman of the Labour Party, nationalise Britain’s coalmines and serve as a minister in charge of British troops in Malaya and Korea — but MI5 remained wary of this remarkable character, whose great-niece is none other than the Lib Dem politician Luciana Berger.
Her relative was described by MI5 as early as 1917 as a “most eloquent and convincing speaker” who had been repeatedly arrested for protesting against conscription in Glasgow.
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