Shrewsbury 24 (Release of Papers)

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

The lack of Members on the Government Benches shows exactly how much interest there is in this topic from this coalition Government of Tories and Liberals.

This Shrewsbury 24 debacle represents a catastrophic and deliberate miscarriage of justice by the state against working individuals. I say again for the record that this was deliberate. This attack on the Shrewsbury 24 was a deliberate, calculated miscarriage of justice. It is a catalogue of deceit, deception, secrecy and discrimination worthy of the best of the best North Korean governmental political plots. It truly is a must-read true-life story of thriller proportions. The covert, politically inspired interference of faceless decision-makers, be they politicians, civil servants, police or the judiciary, made life hell for ordinary hard-working people whose only crime was to dare to take industrial action against the mega cash-rich building companies of that time.

These people—the Shrewsbury pickets—were fighting for £30 for 30 hours and better health and safety on the building sites, where, as has been mentioned on more than one occasion, 571 people in the construction industry were killed in three years. Is that not fair? Is that not what we should be seeking in a modern-day society—health and safety, preventing people from being abused and killed when they take their sandwiches to work and want to return to see their families at night? Is that a crime? Should they have been punished—should they have been imprisoned, as the six Shrewsbury pickets were? The answer to that is of course not.

I have tremendous experience of picketing, and I am proud of having been a picket during many disputes. I witnessed what happened on the picket lines during the miners strike. It was absolutely disgraceful. What we have seen in the last two or three weeks is again a Government refusing to allow papers—confidential and secret papers—relating to that dispute to be released. What we have seen is absolutely ludicrous. There has not been the outrage there should be, but we have seen that senior Cabinet Ministers in a previous Government and a Prime Minister—Thatcher—stood at the Dispatch Box and deliberately misled the Commons, and deliberately misled the Government. Where is the public outcry from the press? There is not one, because they are not interested in ordinary people.

A lot can be said about this but I would like to finish on this point. We cannot even begin to understand how these men and their families felt when they were hammered by the state—by the Government. They were offered lesser charges and they would have been freed. They stood by their principles so that people in the future would benefit, and they went to prison. We cannot begin to think what it was like for these people, who could have been free—“£50 fine and you can go home tonight and be home by 3 o’clock.” That was the agreement, but they stood by their principles. We cannot begin to imagine how they suffered in their time in prison.

Let me say a word on Des Warren, who was treated very badly in his time in prison. The liquid cosh killed him and as a result we are where we are today.