2
Conduct which kills freedom
Pauline was 18 when she took the job, which seemed like a simple secretarial position in a suburb of south London alongside three other women. Her role was to take phone calls, record the names given, check them against files and then report back if a file existed. Pauline (not her real name) recalls:
‘I was not that political when I started, it was just a job that was round the corner from where I lived. But I did become aware about what was happening in the country as a result of doing it, a lot more than my friends. I was very aware of left and right. It wasn’t said explicitly but I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk about what my job involved with anybody else.’1
It was 1972 and Pauline was working for the Economic League’s central records and research department based at 99a High Street, Thornton Heath. She would take phone calls from companies. They would give her a password to identify themselves and then the name, date of birth and national insurance number for an individual. Pauline would go and check a filing system and see if a record was held. If it was, she would report the information back. Two other women handled the invoicing of companies for their search requests and keeping the records up to date. Working in the same office were a group of men who liaised with corporations and the League’s other offices. Several of these men, as well the husbands of some of the secretarial staff, were former or serving Metropolitan Police officers. One of those Pauline remembers regularly dropping by was Ned Walsh, who sported a trilby and a mysterious manner. ‘He acted just like a spy, he was always very cautious,’ said Pauline. Walsh’s official post was researcher for the League, a job he held from 1961 to 1988. However, investigative journalists were slowly uncovering the shady operations of the League. Pauline was right about the actual role of Ned Walsh, according to journalists Mark Hollingsworth and Charles Tremayne: ‘His real job was to infiltrate trade unions, charities, research groups and anything else the League regarded as politically subversive.’2 According to the World in Action reporters, Walsh infiltrated the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Transnational Information Centre as a delegate from the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs union as well as meetings of the Transport and General Workers’ Union and the AGM of long-time League foe, the Labour Research Department. In the early 1970s, the League was getting more than £400,000 a year in subscriptions and donations and used that to employ around 160 staff and print some 20 million leaflets warning against the dangers of subversion.3
The list of companies Pauline dealt with would all turn up years later as subscribers to The Consulting Association.
‘Keir, McAlpine, Bovis, Babcock, Balfour Beatty, I remember them all ringing. They were only supposed to ask for a certain number of names to be checked at a time but sometimes they would have quite a lot and so they would give some, ring off and then ring back straight away with the next lot.’
And just as some companies were regular callers, so some of the names became familiar. Pauline said: ‘If anybody rang up about Des Warren then alarm bells would go. He and Ricky Tomlinson had big files. I remember getting calls about them.’ The League wasn’t the only organization with an interest in Tomlinson. Special Branch had a file on him which branded the former plasterer, later to become a well-loved actor, a political thug prone to violence.4
Echoes of McCarthyism
The League’s activities were mirrored in other countries. Over a five-year period from 1936, the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee, named after the senator who chaired it, investigated how companies dealt with trade unions in the United States. Chief executives and private detectives were called to give evidence. The result was to catalogue collaboration between the police, private security and corporations to sabotage meaningful industrial relations.
Edwin Smith, head of the US National Labor Relations Board, saw the impact on people marked out as union activists:
‘Here they were family men with wives and children on public relief, blacklisted from employment, so they claimed, in the city of Detroit, citizens whose only offense was that they had ventured in the land of the free to organize as employees to improve their working conditions. Their reward, as workers who had given their best to their employer, was to be hunted down by a hired spy like the lowest of criminals and thereafter tossed like useless metal on the scrap heap.’5
The hearings have a familiar ring to them. For instance, the head of the notorious Pinkerton detective agency was questioned about the reasons for spying on union meetings. He said it was to get: ‘Information dealing with sabotage, theft of material, and other irregularities.’ The actual reports produced by the agency showed no evidence of sabotage or theft but plenty of information about how unions were organizing. Asher Rossetter, the head of one company which employed Pinkerton, blustered: ‘It might lead to sabotage if those people were the kind that I think they may be – Communists.’6
Fast forward 70 years and company director Cullum McAlpine is giving evidence to MPs about The Consulting Association. He is asked to explain how what McAlpine describes as a ‘reference service’ would work.
‘I was led to believe that the member companies would provide information to The Consulting Association on individuals who had acted in a disruptive way on building sites, had broken some of the working-rule agreements, had sabotaged such things, or had committed criminal acts such as theft, vandalism or threatening behaviour – that sort of stuff.’7
Setting aside the passive voice used to distance himself from an organization with which he was intimately involved, McAlpine’s justification echoes that deployed by Rossetter. And that justification continues. On a corporate web page called Mythbuster and FAQs, construction firm Carillion explains its position in relation to blacklisting and its use of The Consulting Association. It says Crown House, a subsidiary which subscribed to the Association, was concerned about ‘suspected or actually reported sabotage, threatening behaviour and intimidation’ and when it attended meetings they would be about things like preventing theft.8 An analysis of the files by the authors shows that only a tiny handful mention theft – the main criteria for inclusion was lawful union activity.
Rossetter at least had the grace, or perhaps the lack of ingenuity, to admit that the surveillance and disruption of union members was a political decision. In post-War America, the blacklist was to become an explicit political weapon.
The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings and Senator McCarthy’s campaign against supposed communist infiltration had some very public victims. The Hollywood Ten, who refused to name names before HUAC, were among the most famous. Dozens of other actors, directors and screenwriters all found themselves effectively barred from their jobs. Beyond that, though, an estimated 10,000 people without a public profile were blacklisted because of their supposed subversive views. The storm lost its focus once McCarthy was exposed for being a self-aggrandizing bully; but while the Cold War continued so would the hunt for reds under the bed.9
‘Subversion in public life’
Back in the UK and in the 1970s an interdepartmental committee was set up, on the advice of MI5 director-general Michael Hanley, to advise the Cabinet on subversion in public life. It produced a series of reports looking at different sectors, including the construction industry. ‘The papers included considerable background information on unions and industry from the Department of Employment, and some from the FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office]’s Information Research Department.’10 The Information Research Department had for many years provided an outlet for government psychological operations and disinformation. We will meet them again later in this chapter in relation to the Shrewsbury trial. A request by the authors for the construction industry report to be released by the National Archives was refused on grounds of national security. The initials IRD appear on numerous blacklist files.
In 1974, the influential Institute for the Study of Conflict circulated a document suggesting the sacking and blacklisting of Communists and subversives.11 It was already happening, and Pauline, working out of her Economic League office, was involved in it on a daily basis. ‘You have to remember these people were trying to bring the country to its knees,’ she said. Having subsequently read the stories of those whose lives were blighted by its files, she does have misgivings about her work having targeted some people wrongly.
Retired bricklayer George Fuller was one of those whose file was started by the League and inherited by TCA, and whose life was blighted. Originally from Ipswich, with a soft East Anglian brogue, his initial experience was on the huge Barbican building project in London which began in the late 1960s and was the focus of a bitter industrial dispute.
‘The first job I got when I came to London was a Laing’s job at the Barbican – and by the time I got home I had a telegram telling me not to start. And, you know, there were jobs where I’d start working and get the sack within a few hours. It affects your skills really. You keep going from one job to another rather than having 18 months on nice quality particular work. Poor workmanship is not mentioned in my blacklist file. Up until then they never mentioned anything at all and then when you get elected as a union steward, they start talking about it.’12
In 1978 it was revealed that two Glasgow-based companies maintained their own blacklists. On their second day at work with Lafferty Construction, two joiners handed in their personal details and were sacked 20 minutes later. Four days later a manager handed them the blacklist which contained their names, along with 13 others. The pair then got a job with a company called Whatlings, only to be sacked again once they handed in their personal details. This time a sympathetic manager handed them Whatlings’ blacklist, which had 53 names. Out of the 72 names on the two blacklists, 67 were union members.13 While this shows it had its rivals, the Economic League had a history, ideology and connections second to none, which made it ‘one of the most powerful, most active and most durable of anti-labour employers’ combinations in the 20th century’.14
Originally known as National Propaganda, it was formed over Christmas 1919 with financial support from engineering, shipping and mining associations. It eventually became the Economic League in 1926. Its guiding light was Sir Reginald Hall – a Conservative MP and director of Naval Intelligence during World War One. Hall was convinced that there needed to be a ‘crusade for capitalism’ to counter what he saw as the growing popularity of socialist ideas in the wake of the Russian Revolution and general unrest in the aftermath of war. The midwives to the League’s birth made it unusual among the many anti-subversive organizations which sprang up at the time. The League combined what it called ‘educative propaganda’ with a covert strategy to ensure that all militant socialists, communists and other ‘subversives’ were denied employment in British industry. League speakers went out to the factory gates to preach the benefits of capitalism while printing presses churned out leaflets on the perils of socialism.
Less noticeably, names of those who would destabilize the British industrial elite were shared among League subscribers. In the General Strike of 1926 the League was quick to bring its propaganda and intelligence services to the aid of the government and demonstrate its value. That relationship, according to veteran League-watcher Mike Hughes, continued during the Cold War.
‘There is a persuasive body of circumstantial evidence of a continuing connection between British Intelligence and the Economic League after the Second World War: an already established relationship, a common cause (anti-Bolshevism), a common tactic (the blacklist) and the League’s employment of individuals with an intelligence background. It would be truly incredible if MI5 had not sought and received information from the Economic League and its nationwide network of contacts in personnel departments.’15
It has been described as big business’s ‘dirty tricks department’16 but it didn’t need to bug and burgle to gather its information. It took advantage of the open nature of many progressive organizations and turned it against them. Its officers attended meetings, they read its press and, where possible, they made links with those as ideologically opposed to ‘subversion’ as they were. If those fellow patriots were union leaders as well, then all the better. Alan Harvey was an assistant director at the League based in Skipton, Yorkshire, when he met what he thought were two businesspeople in 1987. They were actually World in Action reporters. Harvey explained that the information flow included sharing details with the police and Special Branch – ‘in return they’re not exactly unfriendly back’ – and tip-offs from trade unions. ‘A lot of trade unions don’t want subversives in their ranks any more than we want them in ours,’ he explained.17 As Harvey said: ‘People like CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament], Friends of the Earth, Anti-Apartheid, animal rights, they’re very useful vehicles for subversives’ and the League needed to know about the one in a thousand who ‘want to bring the whole system to its knees’.18 Bidding his new friends goodbye, Harvey said he was off to the nearby university. He explained: ‘I take my jacket off, put an anorak on, wander in and buy a few subversive newspapers.’ This example of the wide range of democratic campaigning organizations which are dragged into such political monitoring will be repeated with The Consulting Association.
As more League documents were uncovered and published by, among others, the investigative journalist Paul Foot in the Mirror, it became clear that the corporate paranoia of the Economic League meant that thousands of individuals were hoovered up in their spying operations. One was Syd Scroggie, a war hero from Dundee, blinded and left with one leg after standing on a landmine during the liberation of Italy in 1945. Scroggie went on to be the first blind man to climb Everest and appeared on the TV show, This Is Your Life. Scroggie, believe it or not, was added to the Economic League blacklist and branded a subversive after writing to a newspaper in support of Edinburgh District Council’s decision to buy a portrait of Nelson Mandela.19
The new recruit
The machinery of propaganda, blacklisting and the nexus of corporate interests and state security services was well-established when, in 1969, the League took on a new recruit. Ian Kerr was born in July 1942 in Leicester, the son of a master tailor. He trained as an art teacher and started his career in 1967 working at a primary and then a secondary school in Warley in the West Midlands and then the Lozells School in Birmingham. He left that career after two years ‘ostensibly to earn enough money to get married’20 and joined the Economic League as a training officer. While there was an explicit ideological drive behind the League’s operations and it tended to attract people with a similar view on society, this didn’t mean all were political activists. Mary Kerr spotted the advert for a League training officer in the Birmingham Post and showed it to Ian. He applied and was taken on. Mary says it was a financial decision.
‘Ian earned about £850 a year as a teacher and to get a mortgage they multiplied your salary by two and a half and didn’t take the woman’s earnings into account. When Ian joined the League, overnight he started earning about £1,600 a year and there were perks like £25 a month expenses.’21 That was in the spring. In the summer the couple were married, holding their reception at The Belfry.
It was also a big year for the League – 1969 marked its 50th birthday and as a present the Labour Research Department published a pamphlet: ‘A subversive guide to the Economic League.’ It showed an organization in good health, with an income of £266,000 and more than 150 firms subscribing to its services. Kerr was one of 39 speakers and trainers and its corps of propagandists organized 24,250 group talks and outdoor meetings, 6,340 courses for apprentices and 3,750 for supervisors. As Hughes puts it: ‘The Economic League was a major operator in the class wars of the late 1960s and early 1970s’22 and Kerr was stepping straight into the firing line.
Kerr was recruited by Jack Winder, who had joined the organization in 1963 and, like many in the League, had a military background. Winder, gregarious and always keen to promote his own skills, and the unassuming Kerr did not seem to have a lot in common. However, they lived close by each other in that well-to-do stretch of commuterland south of Birmingham and the families began socializing outside of work. Kerr’s meticulous yet diffident manner made him valuable for the often laborious work the League required. Giving the same talks over and again to bored apprentices was not enough to interest the League’s more self-regarding class warriors. For Ian, the conscientious worker and church-goer, it was the task he had been handed and therefore the one he would do his best to deliver. Mary recalls both of them preparing carefully the night before he was due to go out and address workers in his training capacity.
He might have been taken on as a training officer but he also undertook infiltration for the League. He was later to tell MPs at a Select Committee investigation:
‘A lot of these [union discussions] were held as public meetings in public places. I worked from the Birmingham office. They would hold them in Birmingham town hall, in the Digbeth Institute, which is a well-known meeting place in Birmingham, in upstairs rooms of pubs, and I would just go along and take notes. The briefing I would be given was to note who was speaking, who was he representing, how many were there, and what were the general points, ideas and themes that were being discussed. Then I would go back and make a brief summary. That sort of information would find its way into files, possibly, but equally into publications by the League that were put out publicly to newspapers in their attempt to get this particular view across to counter the anti-capitalist message, which was quite strong at the time.’23
Mary laughingly recalls that Ian, thin, about six feet tall, who had large round glasses and who never felt dressed for work unless he was in a suit, ‘must have stuck out like a sore thumb’. Despite this, Michael Noar, the League’s director-general between 1986 and 1989, praised Kerr’s work for the organization. Noar said he infiltrated ‘a lot’ of trade union and political meetings, recording who had said what and taking away documents such as attendance lists. ‘He was a key guy,’ Noar told the Guardian. ‘He was one of our most effective research people – his information was genuine and reliable.’24
According to Labour Research Department, at the end of the 1960s, construction and engineering firms made up 60 out of the League’s 155 subscribers.25 The interest in the construction sector grew even more in the 1970s. Most of the popular histories of the 1970s barely mention the 1972 building workers’ strike, perhaps because there were so many other strikes to report on. The imprisoned Pentonville 5 dockers and the miners’ strike of the same year have, for example, taken on mythic proportions. However, the building strike had just as profound an effect on both trade unions and on employers in the construction industry.26
The 1972 strike
It began when UCATT, which arose in 1972 out of the amalgamation of numerous craft unions, began renegotiating collective agreements. It knew it needed to establish its credibility as an effective negotiator. Within weeks a national strike was launched. Neither employers nor UCATT foresaw the ramifications. After two increased wage offers were rejected by unions, a series of targeted strikes started in June 1972. These quickly spread and a month later flying pickets were first used in Manchester to enforce the shutdowns. In July an estimated 160 sites involving 10,000 men were out, with many others affected by overtime bans and go-slows. The shrewd use of flying pickets wasn’t just forcing employers to the negotiating table; it was undermining their whole industrial strategy. In August an improved offer was provisionally accepted by UCATT and the other unions involved. However, the strike had galvanized rank-and-file action and, when the deal was announced, thousands marched against the agreement. UCATT was forced to reverse its decision. The labour historians Ralph Darlington and Dave Lyddon explain:
‘From early August to mid-September 1972, the last six weeks of the building workers’ strike witnessed a massive assertion of rank-and-file control over the running of the dispute. Even in an exceptional year this was outstanding. It was more than a strike. It was a revolt.’27
The rank-and-file revolt was co-ordinated by a movement called the Building Workers’ Charter, which had been set up in 1970 following a meeting of shop stewards from London, Liverpool and Manchester and was heavily influenced by the Communist Party and other leftwing groups. The Charter’s demands for greater union democracy and a wage policy of £35 for 35 hours quickly drew wide support among building workers.
Strikes were no longer targeted; whole cities shut down and Building Workers’ Charter members were busy organizing further action. Employers claimed that a few militants were to blame and that the majority of workers were uninterested or bullied into taking part. This was faithfully reported by the mainstream media, which had otherwise generally ignored the dispute. However, unions estimate that, at its peak, 270,000 workers across some 9,000 sites were involved. In September, the employers’ federation agreed the largest single pay rise ever won in the industry – though it was not the £1 an hour the Charter wanted. The unions called the strike off. The employers began preparing retribution.
Richard Clutterbuck was an influential rightwing theorist on political violence at the time and had developed his ideas while serving with the Army in numerous post-colonial wars. Later historians may have overlooked the battles in the construction industry but Clutterbuck’s view at the time suggested it was as potent as the more celebrated miners’ dispute. His analysis that the 1972 strike represented a major escalation in class war was widely shared amongst industry leaders. The characterization of the dispute as one of unbridled violence, and so ignoring legitimate grievances, would be rolled out repeatedly.28
A pamphlet produced by the Economic League quotes a National Federation of Building Trades Employers (NFBTE) report listing what it saw as a new militancy and violence in the industry.
‘The end result of the incidents recorded in this file was that small but well-drilled groups were able to hold to ransom a whole industry employing a million or more men and thereby cause incalculable damage and loss.’
As a League pamphlet warned: ‘The strike itself was an example of how extremist groups organize and plan their operations against British industry.’29 Who better to keep an eye on these extremist groups than the experts from the League? The refrain was the familiar one that political cadres were manipulating reasonable workers into acting against their interests. Construction sites had been very difficult places for unions to organize in because of the casual nature of the work. The growing militancy from the late 1960s up to the 1972 strike showed that employers could not rely on this factor any more – and the fear this aroused lay at the heart of their response.
The Shrewsbury pickets
Firms had already been asked to compile dossiers on flying pickets to highlight what they characterized as extreme levels of violence. One particular incident took place in Shrewsbury and entered union folklore. On 6 September 1972, 250 flying pickets in six coaches from Chester and North Wales responded to calls for support to shut down sites in Shrewsbury. At the first site they were confronted by the son of the contractor, armed with a shotgun. He was disarmed and the gun given to the police. Next they visited a McAlpine’s site in Telford, which was well-prepared to defend itself, and there were minor disturbances between some of the workers and pickets.
Ricky Tomlinson was one of the Shrewsbury pickets. ‘We went in … we spoke to the lads. There was a little bit of a scuffle here and there, but I’m serious there was nothing intentional. And at the end of the day the lads actually went off site.’30 Despite the fact that the pickets had been accompanied all day by police officers, the incidents were considered so insignificant that no arrests were made on the day.
Shrewsbury was painted in a whole different light by the NFBTE dossier, which was sent to the Home Secretary Robert Carr and the press. It portrayed a scene of apocalyptic violence. Clutterbuck describes one picket being a ‘giant’ and ‘like King Kong’ ripping up trees by their roots. ‘Those witnesses and victims to whom we spoke left us in no doubt as to the viciousness of the violence and the extreme degree of terror which they felt.’31 Sir Robert Mark, commissioner for the Metropolitan Police, said:
‘To some of us, the Shrewsbury pickets have committed the worst of all crimes, worse even than murder, the attempt to achieve an industrial or political objective by criminal violence, the very conduct, in fact, which helped to bring the National Socialist German Workers Party to power in 1933. Conduct of that kind kills freedom, and there are still people who feel that freedom is more important than life itself.’32
It turned out that Robert McAlpine had written to Mark complaining that, while there was no problem with the law governing pickets, the problem was a lack of enforcement.33 McAlpine could also call upon the support of the high sheriff of Denbighshire, who happened to be the ninth member of the McAlpine family in succession to have held that post.
In November, two months after the events, under pressure from the Home Secretary, police arrested dozens of pickets and 31 were charged. Even the then Attorney General, Sir Peter Rawlinson, considered the incidents so minor that a conviction was unlikely. In a letter to Robert Carr, the Conservative Home Secretary, dated 25 January 1973, Rawlinson stated that the strike had produced ‘instances of intimidation of varying degrees of seriousness’ but added that the Shrewsbury events ‘consisted of threatening words and... there was no evidence against any particular person of violence or damage to property.’ The Attorney General concludes by arguing, ‘proceedings should not be instituted.’34
Nonetheless, the prosecutions continued and the jury in a trial at Mold Crown Court acquitted all 11 of those before them. At that trial, defence lawyers had exercised their right to challenge potential jurors. At Shrewsbury Crown Court, 24 were tried, with six facing additional charges carrying maximum terms of life imprisonment. In between the two trials the Lord Chancellor had decided to abolish the defence’s ability to challenge the jurors. The courts were taking no chances and didn’t want a repeat of Mold. The day that the prosecution completed its case, ITV screened an hour-long programme called Reds under the Bed, followed by a studio discussion. The programme had footage of two of the defendants as well as images of marches and supposed violence by pickets. The discussion was not broadcast in every region but it was in the area covering Shrewsbury. The final words of that discussion were from a Tory MP talking about violence in the building strike. It seemed like blatant contempt of court but the judge dismissed complaints. Subsequently a government file revealed a memo from Thomas Barker from the government’s Information Research Department, saying: ‘We had a discreet but considerable hand in this programme. In general, this film, given national networking, can only have done good.’35 The jury heard numerous claims of violence and that pickets had been screaming ‘Kill, kill, kill’ and had been armed. The defendants were astonished by the picture painted.
Terry Renshaw, one of the Shrewsbury pickets, has a very different recollection of events:
‘We were people from North Wales, we didn’t know where the sites were. But the West Mercia constabulary were very obliging and took us one by one to the site. At the end of the day Detective Superintendent Meredith thanked the pickets for the way they had conducted themselves. Then the conspiracy started, between the government, the employers, the police, the judiciary and the secret service. We have the evidence of MI5 involvement.’36
Renshaw later served as a county councillor, became mayor of the north Wales town, Flint, and a member of the North Wales Police Authority.
At the end of the conspiracy trial, John McKinsie Jones was jailed for nine months, Tomlinson for two years and Des Warren for three years. Not for committing any violence but for the amorphous crime of ‘conspiracy’. In his famous speech from the dock Des Warren was defiant:
‘Was there a conspiracy? Ten members of the jury have said there was. There was a conspiracy, but not by the pickets. The conspiracy was between the Home Secretary, the employers and the police. It was not done with a nod and a wink. It was conceived after pressure from Tory Members of Parliament who demanded changes in picketing laws. Of course, there was a very important reason why no police witness said he had seen any evidence of conspiracy, unlawful assembly or affray. The question was hovering over the case from the very first day: why were there no arrests on the 6 September? That would have led to the even more important question of when was the decision to proceed taken. Where did it come from? What instructions were issued to the police? And by whom? There was your conspiracy.’37
There were two subsequent trials arising out of Shrewsbury, which saw three more pickets – Brian Williams, Arthur Murray and Mike Pierce – jailed and others receive suspended terms. Terry Renshaw’s suspended sentence meant the Preston College TUC tutor was later unable to stand as a Police and Crime Commissioner and still can’t get a visa to travel to the US. His fellow defendant, McKinsie Jones, said:
‘Like a lot of the other pickets, I had never been in trouble in my life. We were completely innocent of these charges. We were branded as criminals by the media. We were blacklisted.’38
The effect on Warren was far worse. Like Tomlinson, he considered himself a political prisoner, going on hunger strike and refusing to wear prison uniforms in protest. This resulted in his spending eight months in solitary confinement and at times being forcefully sedated with medication known as the ‘liquid cosh’. His family say that it helped to bring about the onset of Parkinson’s Disease, which killed him in 2004.
Ricky Tomlinson reflected on the effect Shrewsbury had on the defendants:
‘Many of them never worked again due to the blacklist, in particular Des Warren, who died in 2004. The prison sentences and fines we received for picketing completely wrecked our lives.’39
Even campaigning for the release of the Shrewsbury pickets was sufficient to ensure a worker had information secretly held about them. Scaffolder Mick Abbott, who died in 2014, raised money for the families of the jailed union activists and in 1975 led a march by building workers from Wigan to London to protest against the miscarriage of justice. Following the release of Des Warren from prison, the pair became close friends at the time when Des was writing his iconic book, The key to my cell. Abbot’s blacklist file starts in 1964, the first entry in which actually reads ‘On building industry blacklist’ and includes the following entries:
1974 Nov 28 (Workers Press) One of the signatories to an article saying ‘All unions with members in the building and construction industries must be forced to call indefinite strike action until 
and 
are released’ (The Shrewsbury pickets)
1975 Feb 4 (information for Mr 
– Bovis) This man is one of the leaders of the march from Wigan to London to protest against the gaoling of the Shrewsbury Pickets.
Abbott’s file records how he was repeatedly refused work by firms such as Tarmac, Bovis, Sir Robert McAlpine and Fergus & Haynes. Abbot later told The Observer newspaper:
‘This nearly ruined my marriage and it meant my children were on free meals at school. My file goes back to 1964 and the last entry says that I rekindled the campaign for justice for the Shrewsbury pickets in 2006. They have been watching me all these years and passing this information around, blighting my life over four decades.’40
The campaign Mick Abbott helped to rebuild to get the Shrewsbury convictions quashed has resulted in an application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). Eileen Turnbull, researcher for the Shrewsbury 24 Campaign, explains:
‘The CCRC are looking at abuse of process. They are not looking like any other criminal trial about whether forensic evidence has been messed up or whether there was false identification. This is about whether the government interfered with the case. Our application was lodged on 3 April 2012 and since then the CCRC say that the evidence we have submitted is tangible. So, if you think about it, they have tangible evidence before them to show inference by government: this trial was political. And we are going to prove it.
Forty years ago Ricky Tomlinson and Des Warren made a speech at the end of their trial and, word for word, what they said was absolutely correct. The problem was that no-one at the time had the documents or the information to prove it. We have now got documents that show a link between the security services and the companies and those documents are in with the application.’
One of the documents linking the security services to the Shrewsbury trial is a letter sent to Downing Street from Sir Michael Hanley, Director General of MI5 in the 1970s. Large parts of the letter are redacted but sections that are visible state that Warren and Tomlinson must be kept in prison.41
Shrewsbury picket Terry Renshaw reflects: ‘The question I have always asked is: were MI5 involved before the strike, during the strike or after the strike? And my belief is: all three.’
CCRC spokesperson Justin Hawkins has confirmed that ‘the issues that have been referred to the CCRC required detailed further investigation.’42
The campaign to overturn the miscarriage of justice has resulted in a vote in the House of Commons in favour of releasing all the documents in the case. But, over 40 years after the events, the official government files on Shrewsbury remain sealed on the direct order of the Home Secretary.
A new spying section
It is clear that the response to the 1972 strike by the construction industry was both overt and covert and involved close liaison with the state. The Economic League, as ever in lock-step with these interests, joined the fray. A key contribution, which would establish a direct antecedent of The Consulting Association, was the formation of the Services Group (SG). This was a separate section within the Economic League dedicated to spying on the construction industry. Companies that were members of the Services Group paid an additional premium for extra support from the League. It was initially co-ordinated by David Laver, who was also the League’s director for the Southeast Region. A bulletin was sent out to companies giving them sector-specific information. There would also be twice-yearly meetings between personnel and industrial relations managers and League officials. As journalists Mark Hollingsworth and Richard Norton-Taylor explained: ‘The aim of these meetings is for the League to brief the firms about the industrial relations scene in their area. If a major strike is taking place the League officials would identify trade union activists involved by name and provide information on them.’43
This modus operandi would be replicated by The Consulting Association.
There were nearly 40 members of the Services Group, and more than 40 companies at one time or another subscribed to The Consulting Association. Of course the flow of conglomeration and dispersal means that the list of company names was always likely to change. However, there is a large amount of overlap between the two lists. McAlpine, AMEC, Balfour Beatty, Edmund Nuttall, French Kier, John Laing, Matthew Hall Electrical & Mechanical, Norwest Holst and Trafalgar House were among those who were members of both. According to Kerr, the Services Group:
‘Operated within the Economic League on behalf of the construction companies. Economic League staff were given an additional role – or a role – which was to look after the construction companies’ needs, which were very wide-ranging. I became party to that as the League’s fortunes changed and the training activities wound down. I then moved across to being one of the co-ordinators. Each region of the League had a Services Group co-ordinator. I eventually became the Midlands region co-ordinator up to the point when the League ceased operating and the Services Group companies chose to continue as an operation. It, effectively, held a series of meetings with various chairmen. I was invited to some of these, at which point I subsequently was asked if I wanted the role of chief officer. It was then organized and set up by the steering committee as an unincorporated trade association. I was its main employee, with a contract of employment, PAYE and salaried.’44
Stan Hardy, former director general of the Economic League, gave evidence to the Select Committee investigation. He tried to convince MPs that the Services Group was very much run by Ian Kerr and that its records were not shared. ‘It was a totally separate set of records. It was not in the generality of the League’s records – it was totally separate. He was the only person who had access to it.’45 Kerr’s name crops up in League documents obtained by the Labour Research Department. There are minutes of a meeting held in 1988 which, indirectly, make clear Kerr’s central role in the Services Group. The Economic League records department was receiving 17,000 calls a month and ‘the great bulk of these were from SG’. According to the minutes, the Services Group was consuming more than 50 per cent of the League’s resources even though it contributed only about 18 per cent of the income (approximately £150,000).
The blight of ‘lump labour’
Meanwhile, many of the fundamental problems that had led to the 1972 building workers’ strike remained unresolved. It might have won the largest pay rise ever for construction workers but it hadn’t abolished the hated use of ‘lump’ labour. Ricky Tomlinson saw at first hand how it prevented effective organizing on building sites.
‘The biggest stumbling block was known as “the lump”. This was the colloquial name for self-employed contractors and sub-contractors, many who employed unqualified labourers and were notorious for cutting corners, doing shoddy work and ignoring safety. These weren’t licensed builders or card-carrying members of the union. They were cowboys, who disappeared as soon as the job was done, didn’t pay taxes and didn’t train apprentices. At the same time, they were undercutting proper tradesmen and forcing down wages to below poverty levels.’46
Instead of building workers being employed directly by construction firms with the benefits of holiday pay, sick pay, redundancy and other statutory entitlements, large contractors began to pay workers a lump sum to complete a certain amount of work. ‘The lump’ allowed employers to reduce costs but the workers lost all their employment rights and the Treasury lost tax revenue as well as employers’ National Insurance contributions.
During the post-War boom, large building firms generally employed their workers directly and the labour force normally transferred from one project to another with the same employer. This changed from the 1970s onwards, with major companies now winning the contract for large projects but then dividing the work into separate packages for brickwork, electrical, engineering, groundworks and concrete structure. Each of these packages was then sub-contracted to separate specialist sub-contracting companies. The major contractors therefore employed fewer and fewer staff (effectively only the senior managers on site and those employed at head or regional offices). Lump labour went from being a minor part of the workforce to being endemic. By the 1980s, especially in London, many of these sub-contractors simply stopped employing any workers directly. Instead the packages were sub-contracted multiple times until workers found themselves being employed on a supposed self-employed basis.
There are of course some situations where a building worker can be considered genuinely self-employed, such as when a small builder agrees to build your new extension, supplying all the materials, labour and plant, choosing their own hours, and taking time off whenever they choose, with their final remuneration depending on how profitable the project has been.
Most workers in the construction industry work for someone else. They are told what time to start and finish work and even when to take their tea breaks. They are told which section of a site to work in and are supervised by a company foreman. The company supplies all the materials and heavy plant. The worker is told to wear company-branded hardhats, high visibility jackets and other safety equipment. The vast majority of these workers are paid by the hour or by the shift and will receive the same weekly wage regardless of the profitability of the project – a site-negotiated productivity bonus as an incentive does not make anyone a small businessperson. Yet for decades, employers, courts and the tax authorities reclassified them as self-employed independent sole traders without any employment rights. The trade unions in the building industry have campaigned on this issue for the past 40 years.
Major construction firms have funded and lobbied successive governments to maintain this profitable set-up. The obvious example is Lord McAlpine, who was chair of the Conservative Party and a confidant of Margaret Thatcher. In The Servant, his presumptuous reworking of Machiavelli’s The Prince, Lord McAlpine wrote that the servant ‘must have his own network of informants and men who will assist him. The servant must always know how to use the network of the State. Dealing in deceit, as the servant must, great caution must be required. Avoid small deceits: like barnacles on the bottom of a ship, they build in the minds of people whom you may need to convince in a large deceit.’47
Big business argued for construction to be treated as a special case because of the temporary nature of much employment and politicians have dutifully introduced a myriad of tax schemes that normalized self-employment in the industry. The lump started off as a cash-in-hand part of the black economy but, with HMRC construction industry specific tax schemes, has become prevalent across the entire industry. The tax schemes’ names may change through the years, from 714 and SC60 certificates to CIS cards and offshore payments, but the outcome is the same.
Even on a major project with several thousand workers engaged on site, it is entirely possible that the principal contractor may only directly employ 10-20 people. These will almost always be the senior office-based staff.
Whether a worker is directly employed by a sub-contractor, employed via an employment agency or told that they must work nominally ‘self-employed’ is decided by the construction companies, not by the individual worker. The result is that most building workers involved in private-sector projects have worked on a variety of different payment methods during their working life. The actual relationship between the building worker and the company remains exactly the same, regardless of how it is labelled.
The advantage for the building companies of the official tax schemes is the saving in employers’ National Insurance contributions and tax liabilities but also the associated costs of redundancy and other employment rights payments. For the average building worker, the opportunity to consciously choose to work directly for a major contractor simply never arose. If you wanted to work on a building site, especially in London and the Southeast during the 1990s, you worked on a self-employed basis or you did not work at all. The impact was that hundreds of thousands of building workers over decades received no holiday pay, sick pay, redundancy pay or other statutory benefits such as being able to claim unfair dismissal – all rights enjoyed by employees.
Umbrella payroll
The latest blight in the industry is the use of ‘umbrella’ payroll companies. Many firms now only employ their workers if they agree to be paid through a limited company. The building company uses an employment agency, often wholly owned by the contractor itself, to set up all new starters as directors of their own individual limited company. At the end of the week, instead of being paid wages from the contractor, each worker has money paid into the account of their new company (with no income tax or National Insurance deductions). The worker’s own company then deducts both employee and employer National Insurance and pays the worker (very often at the minimum wage). A variety of expenses are claimed, before an additional amount is paid as a dividend. All this is to avoid being paid wages by the contractors, which, with creative accounting, absolves them of any tax or employment rights liabilities. Tax relating to companies is paid at a significantly lower rate than the 40-per-cent top rate of income tax.
All of the administration and accountancy related to the new umbrella company is carried out by the agency, which charges the workers a fee for this service that would usually be carried out by a company wages department. Effectively, workers have to pay £30-40 a week for the privilege of receiving their own wages. Very often the agency administering the system is not only owned by the contractor but based in the same building. On the surface it would appear that 200 small businesses are flourishing on a project. But in reality it is one building contractor employing 200 workers via another tax scam. The potential for corruption on the part of those with influence in the industry is obvious.
UCATT estimates that over half of the construction industry is falsely self-employed and that the Treasury as a result loses £1.9 billion a year in lost revenue.48 Construction accounts for around a quarter of the total number of self-employed workers in the UK, despite only making up about five per cent of the workforce.49 Even on prestigious projects such as the 2012 Olympics, where a conscious effort was made to enforce direct employment, the figures for PAYE peaked at 70 per cent on the Aquatic Centre but only reached 30 per cent in the Athletes’ Village.50
The unions have fought a rearguard action against casualization from the 1970s onwards. The National Working Rule Agreement that sets terms and conditions of employment for hourly paid workers on most building sites and the National Agreement for the Engineering Construction Industry (the ‘NAECI Blue Book’), which covers major engineering construction projects throughout the UK, both have clauses restricting the use of self-employed or agency labour. But the spread of bogus self-employment has been relentless, regardless of the wording of these nationally negotiated collective-bargaining agreements between the employers’ federations and the unions.
On 5 April 2014, the UK government changed the tax rules again, declaring that anyone working through an employment agency could no longer be classified as self-employed. The vast majority of agencies in the building industry immediately changed their systems, telling workers that the only payment option now available was to work under an umbrella company scheme. Some agencies were even telling the workers that because they were officially only earning the minimum wage, they might be able to claim housing benefit. Within weeks there were sit-ins and protests at major construction projects, with groups of agency workers demanding to be taken on directly – some were successful, others are still in a state of flux. Whether the new tax rules will see the industry’s casualized workforce enjoying full legal employment rights or the employers will discover another loophole remains to be seen.51
Mass self-employment has consequences beyond the formal employment relationships within the industry and the loss of tax to the Inland Revenue. The loss of employment rights that makes dismissing workers as easy as making a phone call to an agency has meant that trade unions have been unable to win unfair dismissal claims for their members. Combined with a systematic blacklisting of union activists, this means that trade unionism has disappeared on all but the largest construction projects. This is bad news for trade unions but the impact for issues such as safety mean the consequences for workers are even worse.
This constant battle involving unions attempting to represent workers, construction workers trying to organize and employers has bubbled and flared since the 1972 strike. And sitting inside the Economic League was the Services Group – a ready-made organization able to take off on its own to help frustrate such efforts. When media exposure forced the League to collapse in 1993, the construction firms activated their creature.