Shrewsbury 24 (Release of Papers)

Ian Mearns Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)]

The hon. Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth) claims to be a member of the most transparent Government ever. Ricky Tomlinson might have a couple of words to say about that. I congratulate—[Laughter.] Someone’s just got it!

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Mr Anderson) on the tenacity he deployed to secure today’s debate. I thank the Backbench Business Committee, which has been persuaded, unlike those on the Government Benches, that this issue is important enough to warrant a full parliamentary debate. It is important that we stick to the terms of the motion.

It is true to say that this debate has been a long, long time coming. We now know more than ever about the political, judicial, media and police manipulation that scarred the working lives of 24 ordinary men, who were wrongly convicted on trumped-up charges, with six of them unjustly jailed. As John Platt-Mills, QC, said:

“The trial of the Shrewsbury Pickets is the only case I know of where the government has ordered a prosecution in defiance of the advice of senior police and prosecution authorities”.

I want to praise on the record the remarkable persistence of the campaigners over the past four decades. In particular, I praise Ricky Tomlinson for the way in which he has used his fame as an actor to highlight this injustice. Despite his success, he has remained steadfastly shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with the other Shrewsbury pickets and their families. Ricky said from the dock during his trial:

“I know my children when they are old enough, will understand that the struggle we took part in was for their benefit and for the benefit and interest of building workers and their families.”

When I was indentured as an apprentice bricklayer in 1978, notwithstanding the introduction of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, Britain’s building sites were still workplaces of great danger and the conditions for workers were shockingly poor. On most sites, there were no proper toilets, washbasins or lockers. There were certainly no hard hats, goggles, gloves and masks as standard personal protective equipment. People died daily.

When workers had the audacity to ask the state to take action and stop the carnage, the Government of the day interfered in the business of the judiciary, resulting in the most political and corrupt criminal trial that had been seen in peacetime Britain.

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

If the strike and the prosecutions are a matter of such importance to national security that the papers will not be released 40 years later, why did it take the police five months to make any arrests?

[Steve Rotheram]

I will develop that point at the end of my speech and explain why it is so wrong that it has taken so long even for the matter to be debated in this House.

The people we are talking about were arrested on trumped-up charges, received a dodgy trial and were given unsound convictions. That would not be allowed and would not be acceptable today, and it should not have been allowed and should not have been acceptable then. It was a legal process that would shame a third-world dictatorship.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon has suggested, the exploitation of workers and the unacceptable and unsafe working conditions in which workers were forced to operate were the bedrock of the first ever national building workers’ strike in 1972. As a result of that national strike, which was settled on 16 September 1972, the building workers succeeded in achieving an across-the-board increase for all trades working in the construction industry. There was, however, enormous political anxiety as a result of that victory, fuelled by a targeted lobbying campaign by the National Federation of Building Trades Employers. Shrewsbury 24 campaigners firmly believe that the end of the strike was in fact the beginning of the employers’ campaign to have pickets prosecuted, and to use that as a deterrent should they ever have the temerity to take further industrial action.