Andrew Murray (trade unionist)

[5][6] Murray was born in 1958 to Peter Drummond-Murray of Mastrick, a stockbroker and banker who was Slains Pursuivant from 1981 to 2009, and The Honourable Barbara Mary Hope, daughter of former Conservative MP and governor of the Madras Presidency in British India from 1940 to 1946 Lord Rankeillour.

After working as a messenger at Reader's Digest and a copy boy for the International Herald Tribune, he undertook journalism training at the Sussex Express.

[9] In this post, he "[marched] with a million Leningraders to mark the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution in 1977"[10] and was reportedly the first journalist at the scene when Airey Neave was assassinated in 1979 by the Irish National Liberation Army.

Murray was appointed as chief of staff for Unite in 2011 following Len McCluskey's election as general secretary late the previous year.

Ahead of the public sector pension strike, he was named by Education Secretary Michael Gove in November 2011 as being, along with 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".

He announced his intention to stand down as Stop the War chair in June 2011 and was succeeded by the Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn in September 2011.

Murray blamed the ban on collusion between the UK "deep state" and the Ukrainian security service to discredit him and undermine the Labour Party, but that he had never tried to go to Ukraine nor obtain a visa to do so and that nor was he "planning a political visit to a country where the parliamentary speaker is a Hitler admirer and pogromists and Nazi collaborators are national heroes".

[31] Murray is the author of several books and numerous pamphlets, including The Communist Party of Great Britain: A Historical Analysis to 1941 (1995),[32] 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), and The T&G Story (2008).

[34] In 2019, Murray attracted controversy for having argued in the book that Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler is the most hated historical figure because he killed white rather than non-white people.

Murray wrote, "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.

"[35] Regarding the neo-Nazi Admiral Duncan pub bombing in 1999 by David Copeland, Murray wrote in the Morning Star: "Everything about this episode strikes me as odd.

"[10] 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.

"[38] 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.

"[39] 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.

[32] In 2016, Oliver Kamm commented in The Times: "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.

[32] Murray was a critic of David Miliband in his role as Foreign Secretary, arguing that his stance on the 2008 Georgian crisis revealed him as a "neoconservative", whose approach had "made it abundantly clear where he stands on the great divide in world politics today.

[42][11] In response to a letter published in The Daily Telegraph from Conservative MP and Defence Spokesman Julian Lewis,[9][43] he replied that he had made no secret of his political beliefs.