Jim Cunningham
Main Page: Jim Cunningham (Labour - Coventry South)Department Debates - View all Jim Cunningham's debates with the Ministry of Justice
(9 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Anderson
My right hon. Friend asks a very valid question, and I hope that we get an answer from the Minister. It beggars belief. We know the context in which this case took place. We had industrial strife in a number of industries and obviously a lot was happening in Northern Ireland. We also know the context of police behaviour in the 1970s, because it is now coming out through things such as the Saville and Hillsborough inquiries, issues relating to the miners’ strike at Orgreave and the behaviour of the security services in relation to the Birmingham and Guildford bombings, for example. We are talking about 24 men among a larger group who went to a picket line. On the day, not one of them was charged, warned or arrested. If they had done something that warranted arrest, they would have been arrested there and then—not five months later, not after a fishing expedition, but on the day.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. He has assiduously pursued this issue since he came into Parliament. One way in which the trade unions were undermined in the ’60s and ’70s, certainly in the building industry, was through something called lump labour, which kept wages down. Sometimes these things are forgotten in this day and age, but they happened then. Sometimes people were expected to work in appalling conditions, and if someone got blacklisted, it was like a life sentence: they never got another job.
Mr Anderson
I thank my hon. Friend for reminding us of that, because what the building employers were doing was not only bad in terms of people’s working conditions; they were actually breaking the law. They were encouraging people not to be paid properly. In effect, those employers were not paying income tax or national insurance contributions, so they were stealing from the public purse, while at the same time coercing the Home Secretary to pressure the police into bringing forward a case against 24 innocent men, whom the judiciary would then prosecute as a warning to others. That is exactly what this is all about, and I am convinced that the papers show that. My right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) asked why the information release date has been extended to 40 years; I am not sure that we will get the answers even in 2022, if we are still around. The sad reality is that some of these men will not be around. That is a disgrace.
I look to the Minister as someone who, I believe, is an honourable man. I know that he does not have much time left over the next few days, but he may be in the same post in eight weeks’ time. Obviously, my colleagues and I hope that it will be someone from our party sitting in his place, because we have pledged to release the papers, and we have said that we will do it no matter what the Security Service or the spooks tell us. We will release them, because we see this as a debt to the people of the country, but we also see it as exercising the will of Parliament. Parliament spoke in January last year; that voice has been blocked deliberately by this Government. I look to the Minister today to try to help us to move that blockage and to move it now.