‘We don’t want a new Cold War’, NATO chief says

– ‘Mafia-like groups’ –

Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has questioned whether the Russian state was responsible for the attack, warned Friday against a “drift to conflict”.

Writing in The Guardian, the Labour leader said “a connection to Russian mafia-like groups that have been allowed to gain a toehold in Britain cannot be excluded”.

“To rush way ahead of the evidence being gathered by the police, in a fevered parliamentary atmosphere, serves neither justice nor our national security,” he said.

Corbyn’s leftwing views have in the past drawn criticism of many of his own MPs, and several among them have defied him to back the Conservative government’s position.

By Friday morning, 33 Labour MPs had signed a parliamentary motion blaming the Russian state “unequivocally”.

Corbyn wrote that Labour was “no supporter of the Putin regime”, but added: “That does not mean we should resign ourselves to a ‘new Cold War’ of escalating arms spending, proxy conflicts across the globe and a McCarthyite intolerance of dissent.”