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Andrew Murray (trade unionist)

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Andrew Philip Drummond-Murray (born 3 July 1958), commonly known as Andrew Murray, is a British trade union and former Labour Party official. Murray was seconded from Unite the Union to Labour headquarters for the 2017 United Kingdom general election, subsequently becoming an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn from 2018 to 2020. Born into an aristocratic Scottish family, Murray began his career as a journalist and later became a senior trade union official. Murray was chair of the Stop the War Coalition from its formation in 2001 until June 2011 and again from September 2015 to 2016. After many years in the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and then the Communist Party of Britain, he joined Labour towards the end of 2016. Since Corbyn ceased to be Labour leader (in 2020), Murray has rejoined the CPB.

Quotes

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  • For the Labour Party, the exclusion of the revolutionary trend in the movement paved the way for the unchallenged domination of the right wing and locked the party ever more firmly into class collaboration and reformism. [...]
    In that sense, the decision to reject communist affiliation paved the way for the whole miserable litany of Labour-led disasters from 1931 to 1979.
  • 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.
  • Next Tuesday is the 120th anniversary of the birth of Josef Stalin. His career is the subject of a vast and ever expanding literature. Read it all and, at the end, you are still left paying your money and taking your choice. A socialist system embracing a third of the world and the defeat of Nazi Germany on the one hand. On the other, all accompanied by harsh measures imposed by a one-party regime. Nevertheless, if you believe that the worst crimes visited on humanity this century, from colonialism to Hiroshima and from concentration camps to mass poverty and unemployment have been caused by imperialism, then [Stalin’s birthday] might at least be a moment to ponder why the authors of those crimes and their hack propagandists abominate the name of Stalin beyond all others. It was, after all, Stalin’s best-known critic, Nikita Khrushchev, who remarked in 1956 that "against imperialists, we are all Stalinists".
    • "Eyes Left", Morning Star (17 December 1999), cited by Michael Mossbacher in "British Anti-Americanism", Social Affairs Unit (2004)
  • Hitler is uniquely excoriated because his victims were almost all white Europeans, while those of Britain (and other classic colonialisms — French, Belgian, Dutch, Italian and Wilhelmine German) were Asian, African and Arabs.
    That Hitler's regime is seen as the most bestial of modern times is not of course objectionable. What needs to be confronted is the view that the crimes of other great powers of the last 150 years or so, being less lurid than those of the Nazis, can therefore be subject to a more nuanced judgment, in which the deaths of millions of people on the one hand can be offset against the construction of railways on the other.
    The British Empire was almost certainly responsible for more human deaths, albeit over a considerably longer period of time, than Hitler was.
  • There is nothing in the imperial record as chilling as the systematic extermination of the great majority of Europe's Jews.
  • [Israel is a "white settler state"] To ask Muslim community leaders to tackle "extremism" effectively when every night you can see on television a Muslim child being pulled lifeless from the rubble caused by the operations of the bloc of the USA, Britain, Israel and other white settler states like Canada and Australia is asking a lot.
  • The Salisbury attack is something we got wrong. When it happened, I thought, "Well, probably there's Russians behind this, because of the use of novichok." I just thought it was Russian gangsters — some business interests, and so forth. I didn't think the Russian state was behind it. And we were wrong. The evidence that's emerged since is overwhelming. We misread that. I still think that the line Jeremy was trying to follow, which is, "Get the evidence first and then state sanctions, and so on, rather than the other way around," is a defensible position. You don't run into saying "This is Putin's responsibility" when you haven't produced the evidence of it. In fact, this evidence has now been produced. Had we known then what we know now, we'd have taken a different view, I think. We just didn't think the Russian state would be so stupid and brazen as to do something like that — to carry out a poisoning attack on British soil. I know, given the Litvinenko precedent perhaps we should have done but that never really got sorted out so clearly . . . Up until then we'd still ha[d] a quiescent PLP. We were doing all right in the polls. That started bringing all the doubts about Jeremy and the leader’s office to the surface again.
  • There were no emails in 1978. Word processing meant dictating copy to stenographers; each newspaper had a phone booth in a gloomy corridor for this purpose. The [Morning] Star‍'‍s chief stenographer was an implacable Bolshevik called Doris. The 80-something comrade was hard of hearing with arthritis in her fingers, leaving her bereft of any qualification for her role beyond ideological rectitude. I had no chance of keeping an exclusive as I bellowed my scoops at a pace Doris could keep up with.
    Eventually I persuaded management that an infusion of youth was required in the stenography department, and a new typist was engaged. Dictating to her for the first time, I began my story, as so often in those days, with "Premier Thatcher...". I was stopped at that point. "How do you spell that?" she asked. "Which word?" I said. "Both." Give thanks for automatic spellchecks too.

About Murray

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In alphabetical order by author or source.
  • [During the 2017 general election campaign] Andrew Murray is a member of the Labour Party and he is an official at Unite, and he is temporarily helping us with the campaign.
  • He is a person of enormous abilities and professionalism, and is the head of staff of Unite the union.
    To manage a very large union and a large number of staff takes special skills, and Andrew has them.
  • [Asked about Murray's alleged "Stalinism"] I don't believe that Andrew is anything other than a democratic socialist and member of the Labour Party like me.
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