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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.

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.

Manny Shinwell aged 100
MI5 spied on a dinner party held by Labour MP Konni Zilliacus in 1946. One guest was described as having "badly-dyed hair, long face, dressed in rather arty-crafty clothes".
MI5 monitored Indian communist Gorpal Mukund Huddar, who fought with the International Brigades against Franco in Spain in 1938
MI5 bugged a phone call from a Daily Worker journalist about the election of communist Pieter Keuneman to Ceylon's Parliament in 1956
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