Blacklisting

Grahame Morris Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)]

Let me first put on record for the benefit of the hon. Member for Keighley (Kris Hopkins), who is no longer in the Chamber, that all the legislation that controls donations to trade unions was passed by his party when it was in government. Let me also put it on record that none of the people who donate money to the Labour party are languishing in jail, unlike people who have funded the two coalition parties, namely Michael Brown and Asil Nadir.

The motion ought not to divide the House, but I want to hear from the Minister whether she agrees with the last three lines of it, because that is the “doing” part. Will she commit herself to

“begin an investigation into the extent to which blacklisting took place and may be taking place”?

If, like the Secretary of State, she is going to try to dance on the head of a pin and, basically, say “It is everyone’s responsibility except mine”, she may as well divide the House. If she does not intend to do anything serious about this, we may as well forget about it.

This debate is about fairness, it is about justice, and it is about what most of us mean by being British. What do we mean by that? We mean that we, as a people, have an innate sense of fair play: we believe that everyone is innocent until proved guilty, and we accept that anyone who is accused of wrongdoing should at least have the right to clear their name. Blacklisting denies people those basic tenets in which we all believe as a nation and which are among the things that bind us together, and it has got to stop.

Let me tell the House about my history in relation to blacklisting. The most important person I know of who was blacklisted was someone whom I never met: my own grandfather. My grandfather was a local official in the Durham Miners Association during the 1926 strike. At the end of the strike, after he had been out of work for six months, he was told—like my good friend the Member for Midlothian (Mr Hamilton)—“You are not coming back to work.” He was told by the manager, when he went to his house, “Gus, I want you back at work, but if I took you back, the owners would send me down the road.” The owners just happened to be the Bowes Lyon family, who, as we knew, ran this country and ruled this country for many years. That was the attitude that they took nearly a century ago.

Eight years of poverty followed. My grandfather died in abject poverty, which meant that my 14-year-old father became the family breadwinner. He was sent down the mines—against his wishes and the wishes of his mother, but there was no alternative.

In recent history, there were disputes in the mines in the 1970s and 1980s. There was clearly state intervention in all three of those disputes, but that was particularly the case in 1984-85. Nobody seriously doubts that within that dispute there was infiltration of the National Union of Mineworkers at the highest level; there was infiltration by MI5 in the general secretary’s office, and there were agent provocateurs on the ground. State employees were directing people in the back to work movement, and we saw the use of the military on the picket line and the very clear politicisation of the police. It is good news that the Independent Police Complaints Commission is now investigating the possibility that evidence was tampered with at Orgreave—we may at last get the truth from that.

Despite that history—despite the fact that 11,000 people were arrested during the miners’ strike, hundreds were jailed and more than 1,000 people were sacked—there is a qualitative difference between that dispute and what we are dealing with today. At least in that dispute most people had an inkling of what they were being accused of. My hon. Friend the Member for Midlothian might not have liked the fact that he was accused of doing certain things, but at least he knew that that was happening to him. He lost his job because of what was said about him, but people do not have a clue that this blacklisting is happening to them—that is the really invidious thing. It is simply unfair for people to be facing that. The people facing the blacklisting are on that list without knowing it, without the chance to make their case and without there being any trace of natural justice.

These people may have been placed on that list with the collusion of the police and the Security Service—those are not my words, but the words of the investigation manager of the ICO. If the Secretary of State does nothing else as a result of this debate, he should surely invite that gentleman to come in and have a word with him. I know that it is an independent organisation, but it acts on behalf of this House and of the people we represent. If the people we pay to uphold the law of the land are perverting the course of justice in what they do by undermining people who are trying to carry out their legal duty to ensure that their health and safety and that of their colleagues is paramount, there is something seriously wrong. The fact that this might have happened before 2009, with the collusion of elements of the state, should in no way let them off the hook.

[Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend refers to things that happened during the miners’ strike, when there were indeed great injustices, but this blacklisting was happening only last year, during the construction for the Olympics, so it is very recent. It is current, and it is a disgrace that people who are legitimately raising concerns about health and safety are finding themselves placed on blacklists and denied employment.

[Mr Anderson]

It is an absolute disgrace, and I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. As I say, the people being blacklisted are doing something that they are compelled to do by laws that we in his House passed 40 years ago. They are doing the right thing, but by doing so they are losing their employment at present and their potential for future employment.

This morning, we heard the Shrewsbury pickets give a moving description of what happened to them. The really desperate thing behind what happened to them is the fact that the state was involved. Even today, 40 years later, the state is refusing to put documentation into the public domain for reasons of “national security”. I do not accept that. I think that what is being done in the name of “national security” is clear: people are hiding behind “national security” to protect the guilty, to protect the men and women in the shadows—the Security Service, the police and, going back to 1972, the politicians. They were clearly directing what was going on, in order to undermine the people involved and make sure that they faced a charge of conspiracy, which could have led to them doing life imprisonment. That is not something that is going to happen to the building organisations, who were using force against these people; there is no criminal sanction for them. We have the chance to do something seriously good here today, and I hope that the Minister will give us some hope that she is actually going to do something about this.