Failed UK foreign policy has spurred on ISIS , says Emily Thornberry in Wolverhampton

Emily Thornberry said there were questions marks over the success of the west’s military intervention in the Middle East, where she said the presence of British troops had ‘not necessarily made the situation better’.

It comes in the wake of last week’s Manchester terror attack, after which Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn sparked an outcry by linking terrorist acts carried out on British soil with western foreign policy.

Speaking during a campaign visit to Wednesfield with Wolverhampton North East candidate Emma Reynolds, Mrs Thornberry said: “Its right to say that some of the times when we’ve got involved, particularly in the Middle East, we’ve gone in with the best of intentions but not necessarily made the situation much better.

“Where we have left ungoverned space we can see it is somewhere where ISIS can focus and it may well be that those spaces have been used by ISIS to train up people who have come back and attacked Britain.

“That is not to say there is any excuse at all for murdering young girls on a night out and nobody is saying that.

“We are saying there is no excuse but we need to look again at a number of things to make sure we are doing it as well as we possibly can.”

Mr Corbyn’s comments prompted a furious response from leading Conservative figures. Theresa May accused him of providing an ‘excuse for terrorism’, while Chief Whip Gavin Williamson said the Labour leader had attempted to make political gains from the Manchester Arena bombing, which killed 22 people.

Meanwhile, Mrs Thornberry became the latest Labour frontbencher to hit out at cutbacks to police officer numbers.

One of the key pledges in Labour’s manifesto is to put an extra 10,000 officers on Britain’s streets following years of cuts to police force budgets. She said: “I think its clear that its been wrong to cut back on the number of police officers, we don’t think that’s the right thing to do.”

Labour has pledged to hire an additional 1,000 staff to work at GCHQ, SIS and MI5 to boost the UK’s capabilities against terrorism. Mrs Thornberry also slammed Prime Minister Theresa May, who she accused of being short on ideas.

She also said it was up to Labour to prove that there was an alternative to Mrs May’s ‘dreadful government’, and cited the party’s recent boost in the opinion polls as evidence more people were coming around to the idea of a Labour administration.

“From the experience I’ve got up and down the country, I think things are starting to change,” she said.

“We just want the chance to be able to say to them there is another way and there is a hope. There is an alternative to this dreadful government.

"They don’t seem to have any ideas and have no vision for Britain.

“Its just ‘trust me and I’m sure I’ll be able to muddle my way through’ - but she’s [Theresa May] asking for a blank cheque.

“Why should people trust her? She went into this election with a majority wanting to get rid of the opposition. She’s not going to and this is a general election and we’re holding her to account.”

Earlier this month Mrs Thornberry suggested that Labour could change its stance on the Trident nuclear deterrent after holding a review if it won power.

Her comments led to an embarrassing put-down from her party’s defence spokeswoman Nia Griffith, who said she was wrong to make the claims on an issue that was outside of her shadow cabinet brief.

Asked to clarify her comments on the issue, Mrs Thornberry said the Labour Party would not scrap the nuclear deterrent should they gain power.

“My view and the party’s view is that we’re renewing Trident – that is Labour Party policy and that’s what’s been voted for in Parliament,” she said.

Mrs Thornberry has played down internal conflicts within Labour and insisted that the party was like ‘a family’.

“The Labour Party is made up of different people and different opinions but we are all united and what unites us is the left,” she said.

Labour’s plan for a thousand new security and intelligence staff did not appear in its manifesto, but Mr Corbyn said there was a need for ‘properly resourced action across many fronts’ to keep communities safe.

Labour also intends to review the Prevent programme, which is designed to tackle extremism, and to ‘strengthen judicial oversight over the powers of the intelligence services’.

Meanwhile Labour’s election chief Ian Lavery said the upcoming election was ‘only the beginning in the Corbyn project’ regardless of the result on June 8.

Earlier in the campaign, Mr Corbyn appeared to confirm he would seek to hold on to his role when he said he would ‘stay leader of this party’, although he has since declined to repeat that and his team subsequently claimed his words were misrepresented.

But at a speech in Glasgow, Mr Lavery said: “Whatever happens in the election isn’t the end in the Corbyn project, it’s only the beginning in the Corbyn project.”