Shami Chakrabarti – raises blacklisting issue on BBC TV

'Phone hacking wasn’t the only privacy or information scandal of recent years and it’s very sad that the construction worker blacklist scandal has really not attracted the same attention.  One of the big things about phone hacking was that a private investigator was storing up all this personal information, people’s phone numbers and so on and that was used for phone hacking. Something similar happened with the Consulting Association that was storing up the names of people on a blacklist. They were blacklisted because they were trade unionists or they were raising concerns about health and safety; but health and safety on a building site is potentially a life and death matter. There were people whose lives were ruined; they found they couldn’t work in the construction industry for years and years and years.
'Interestingly, going back to Leveson, one of the things that hasn’t been touched on in all the coverage, is that Leveson is really concerned that the current Information Commissioner’s Office really didn’t do everything it could have done about phone hacking…. That would apply to this hideous blacklist that has been kept about construction workers.

'Now it seems, The Observer tells us that this has affected the Crossrail project and people have been blacklisted and not able to work on that.' 

Blacklist Support Group statement on Crossrail:

'It is a disgrace that public funds are being spent on blacklisting trade unionists on the Crossrail project. 
Workers have been dismissed from the largest construction project in Europe for raising safety concerns about high voltage cables and for joining the UNITE union. For nearly 3 months there have been daily protests about blacklisting on Crossrail and the firms involved have constantly denied that it is taking place.
On Tuesday Ian Kerr, chief officer of the Consulting Association blacklisting organisation told MPs that his members had talked at length about Crossrail during meetings to discuss the list: "An awful lot of discussion took place at Consulting Association meetings about the Crossrail project.'

In addition Ron Barron, the most senior industrial relations officer on the entire Crossrail project has lost his job last week after investigative journalists discovered that he was a proven blacklister having cross-checked job applicants against the secret blacklist of workers to be barred from the industry, a list that he helped to compile. An employment tribunal found that he introduced the use of the blacklist at his former employer, the construction firm CB&I, and referred to it more than 900 times in 2007 alone. 
The evidence of blacklisting on Crossrail is damning and overwhelming - none of the blacklisting firms are now even attempting to deny that these discussions took place.

This is a major systematic breach of human rights by big business subsidised by tax-payers money - when are they going to come clean?

Crossrail and the construction firms on Crossrail should make a public apology, pay compensation and reinstate all the UNITE members who have lost their jobs on the project. A union recognition agreement on the project is required as a matter of urgency for the public to have any trust in these people.

GMB Blacklisting Motion for Trades Union Congress 2012

Page 15:  Illegal corporate bullying

Congress agrees the maintenance of secret lists of individuals or groups, (so-called 'blacklisting'), is illegal corporate bullying causing misery for individuals and their families.

Congress:

i.  condemns activities exposed in 2009 when the Information Commissioner’s Office raided the Consulting Association, which operated lists on behalf of over 40 UK companies including Carillion, Balfour Beatty, Mowlem, Laing O’Rourke and Wimpey, and maintained records on trade unionists, politicians, journalists, lawyers and academics.

ii.  agrees with Keith Ewing this was ‘the worst human rights abuse in relation to workers’ in the UK in 50 years.
iii.  is alarmed that only a fraction of the 3,213 listed are aware of their inclusion.

iv.  believes the ICO list is evidence of an endemic, systemic and deep-rooted culture.

v.  agrees the level of wrong-doing and abuse exposed in the construction industry is equivalent to newspaper phone-hacking.

vi.  welcomes assurances won by Labour MEPs from the European Commission on ‘blacklisting’ of trade union activists.

Building on the resolution agreed by Congress 2010, Congress instructs the General Council to:

a.  campaign to expose these illegal activities.

b.  enable the ICO to reveal the names of the known victims of the Consulting Association.

c.  call on politicians to bring social justice for the victims and their families.

d.  encourage public bodies to review whether public contracts be awarded to companies involved in such activities.

e.  call for a public enquiry on a par with the Leveson Inquiry and changes in the law to make 'blacklisting' an imprisonable offence with unlimited fines for damages.

For the Love of Murdoch, Tony Blair, Carillion & Kieran Quinn:

The Cultivation of Anxiety in Political Leadership
by Brian Bamford

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The deals that our political leaders strike-up with powerful forces and outside interests has now been brought into focus on the international, national and local stage by the relationships struck by Tony Blair in Libya with Gadaffi, and earlier with Rupert Murdoch and the Sun newspaper, and now locally in Ashton-under-Lyne between Councillor Kieran Quinn (Labour leader of Tameside Council) and the construction company Carillion, accused by some of blacklisting trade unionists in Ashton-under-Lyne and elsewhere in the UK.

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TONY BLAIR'S autobiography 'A Journey' is more revealing than I at first realised and it is noticeable that he has had less to say than Gordon Brown on the recent Murdoch and the News International phone hacking case. On page 96 of this June's paperback edition of his autobiography he writes of his troubled time between 1995 and 1997 as he determined to modernise the Labour Party to achieve 'reconnection' with the British public: 'Members of the Shadow Cabinet would frequently say: "Come on, enough, we are miles ahead".' And, Blair says: 'Each time they said it, I would get hyper-anxious, determined not for a single instant to stop the modernising drive.'

In his very next paragraph, Blair gives away one of the solutions to his political anxieties when he writes: 'In June 1995 we had further outraged sensibilities by accepting an invitation conveyed through the editor of The Times, Peter Stothard, to address Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation conference on Hayman Island, Australia, the next month.' Blair justifies this arguing: '... as I said to Alistair (Campbell), not to go was to say (to Murdoch) carry on and do your worst, and we knew their worst was very bad indeed.' Former Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, had suffered the headline 'Nightmare on Kinnock Street' and, as Mathew Parrish said recently, not doing business with Murdoch 'had not done John Major much good'. Blair concluded that either 'you sat down to sup; or not. So we did.'

Do media bosses, like Murdoch, influence elections? It seems here that political leaders, like Blair, think that they do and that was why he went to Hayman Island to see Murdoch. Based on his reading on the evidence in a recent American study by the U.S. Economists Jesse Shapiro and Matthew Gentzkow, Tim Harford, the Undercover Economist in the Financial Times [FT] claims: 'Media barons tell us what we want to hear'. And yet, even if media bosses don't determine elections, if people like Blair mistakenly think they do then may not this in itself influence the political decisions our leaders take? Thus, even if Murdoch is just historically better at backing political winners than at changing the public's mind, he still had serious political clout in the corridors of power because most politicians feared him, as Blair evidently did, according to his autobiography.

The FT's Tim Harford writes: 'The most disturbing aspect of the phone-hacking scandal, it seems to me, is the reluctance of politicians to challenge Murdoch's empire, and in particular its cosy relationship with the police.' This kind of interference in politics is not confined to Murdoch and the media barons, Gillian Tett, the FT's U.S. Managing business editor, in her book 'Fool's Gold' about the bankers, has written of the recent crisis how the bank J.P. Morgan had 'in the early years of the twenty-first century ... watched with awe and envy as (rival bank) Goldman Sachs extended its tentacles into politics and government, often via its powerful network of alumni.' Ms. Tett wrote: 'J.P.Morgan now planned to emulate that strategy'. It set up its own 'alumni' society and began cultivating political allies and she says: '...as J.P. Morgan guests nibbled on canapes in the Piano Bar, Al Gore, an adviser to the bank, could be seen mingling in the crowds ... So could Tony Blair, another well-paid adviser.' Business is just politics by other means.

What of Tony Blair's crucial 1995 meeting on the Hayman Island with Rupert Murdoch at which Blair gave a speech? Blair writes of this thus: 'The speech ... went down well ... I could see the executives were in awe (and a little fearful) of Rupert.' Murdoch had introduced Blair 'in glowing terms' and the executives 'all rallied', and Blair says: '... I could fell we were in with a chance of winning the Sun's support.' I would rank this occasion as a kind of 'love test'! In effect, on Hayman Island in 1995, Tony Blair was being invited to declare his love for Rupert Murdoch before the assembled executives in the same way as Shakespeare's King Lear in the play of the same name demanded of his three daughters the love for which he was to be the sole recipient. Only King Lear's youngest daughter, Cordelia, denies him his request and is disinherited. Lear simply wants to divide his kingdom between his three daughters and for this he wants their declaration of' 'true' love. His youngest daughter Cordelia alone denies him this rather than be hypocritical. Murdoch, it seems to me, offered to share his power with Blair and was blessed with Blair's compliance. We do not know what would have occurred if Blair had followed the example of Cordelia rather than the older daughters Goneril and Regan, who understood that Lear required hypocritical proclamations of their love and gushing flattery. Tony Blair writes in his autobiography: 'The speech on Hayman Island went down well.' Or as Gremio in The Taming of the Shrew says: 'To give thee all, and in his waning age / Set foot under thy table' (II,I).

It was not only Tony Blair who got his feet under Rupert Murdoch's table; Margaret Thatcher before him had been there and Gordon Brown, despite his recent attack on Murdoch in the House of Commons, was to follow Blair in his entanglement with Murdoch; in the event only John Major was to play the role of Cordelia when he became Tory Prime Minister. In the recent phone-hacking scandal affecting Murdoch, Tony Blair has been remarkably quiet, unlike Brown and Ed Milliband.

What we are now seeing is the end of a political maintenance agreement. Hence, MPs have cottoned-on to the idea that they are in a looking-glass world and, as Tim Harford writes: 'When once it was politically dangerous not to bend the knee to Murdoch, suddenly it was politically dangerous not to stand up to him instead - and standing up to Murdoch is presumably a lot more fun to boot.' In truth, between the politicians there was no binding 'maintenance agreement' with Murdoch; only a series of love tests conducted over the last few decades between the likes of Thatcher, Blair, Brown and Cameron and the media mogul.

Stephen Greenblatt, the American literary critic and promoter of something called the 'New Historicism', in his essay 'The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear & His Heirs' writes: '(King) Lear speaks as if he had actually drawn up a maintenance agreement between Lear and his daughters ... [but] there is no maintenance agreement between Lear and his daughters;' and thus at the end of the play the two older daughters let Lear down. Just as with Lear, so it has been with Rupert Murdoch and the British politicians who had sworn their love: there had been no binding maintenance agreements between Rupert and the politicians but just opportunist hypocrisy and false declarations of 'love' as our MPs turn on Murdoch and even his dearest 'daughter', ethical Rebeka, has had to be cast aside.

But this problem is now systemic in British politics and in the Labour Party, thus even at a local level in Town Councils, companies seem to have come to control politics through unhealthy relationships with councillors: just as it was with Blair, Murdoch and Gadaffi in the national and international arena, so it seems to be with firms like Carillion and Council leader Kieran Quinn in Ashton-under-Lyne and the area that now goes under the name Tameside. In his autobiography, Blair muses about his relationship with Murdoch thus: '... I had a friend called Faust and he cut a deal with some bloke called Satan' ('A Journey', page 97). Over a decade ago, people had some misgivings about the long-term leader of Tameside MBC, Roy Oldham, when he began the transfer of council housing to an arms-length company - New Charter Housing Limited - but the man who oversaw this large-scale transfer was none other than the current Council leader, Keiran Quinn. Councillor Quinn did this knowing that the trade unions were opposed to the policy and he referred to opponents of the scheme, such as the then Lib-Dem councillor Peter Wright as being 'people who live on the margins of society'. Councillor Quinn declares himself to be a sturdy trade unionist, a member of the CWU, and he has successfully sought the help of Tameside TUC for support for post office pickets. Our sources in the Council suggest that Councillor Quinn is very much in favour of privatisation, except when it affects his own trade union at the Post Office.

These days all politicians be they Blair, Brown, Cameron, Roy Oldham or just Keiran Quinn seem to seek some agreement with the likes of powerful forces such as Murdoch or Carillion, which is only the temporary bond of hypocritical 'love' that King Lear embraced they all have what Stephen Greenblatt describes: 'the terror of being turned out of doors or becoming a stranger even in one's own house; ... the dread, particularly strong in a society that adhered to the principle of gerontological hierarchy, of being surplanted by the young.' As I write this I am aware that the global company Carillion was yesterday accused in the Tameside Reporter of being linked to 'The Consulting Association' and the Information Commissioner is quoted as saying: 'Information recovered from the Consulting Association's premises indicated that at some point in time there had been a relationship between Carillion and the Consulting Association.' The Consulting Association has now been closed down following one of its managers pleading guilty to keeping an illegal data base or 'blacklist'. Yet Carillion, while admitting that the Consulting Association operated 'blacklisting services', still denies it was a member. Kieran Quinn, who is yet to reply to a request from Tameside TUC that he should justify the awarding of Council contracts to a company like Carillion, was not able to make a response in time for yesterday's Tameside Reporter. A red-faced Councillor Quinn, after sucking-up to Carillion, must now be feeling like Tony Blair does about his relationship with Murdoch and Gadaffi.

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THE NEXT ISSUE OF NORTHERN VOICES - N.V.13 - IS OUT IN NOVEMBER. IT WILL COVER THE PROBLEMS OF TAMESIDE COUNCIL, BLACKLISTING, COUNCILLOR QUINN & HIS ANXIETIES.

Northern Voices 13 is priced £2.20 [post & package included] or £4.20 for the next two issues cheque payable to 'Northern Voices' from:

c/o 52, Todmorden Road,
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Email: northernvoices@hotmail.com

MET. Sword of Damocles hangs over The Guardian

GIVE SOME 'BOBBY'S JOBS' TO THE BOYS IN BLUE!

LAST night the Metropolitan police stopped its legal bid to get the Guardian to give up confidential sources for their reports into the phone hacking scandal by the News of the World. This follows an intervention by the Crown Prosecution Service and widespread anger about what appeared to be a vindictive approach by the Scotland Yard. The MET had claimed that one of the Guardian reporters, Amelia Hill, might have incited a source to break the Official Secrets Act.

But the statement put out by the MET announcing its climbdown left open the chance that they could apply again. It looks like this attempt by the MET to have a go at the Guardian journalists had stirred up a hornets nest and one police source said: 'Obviously, the last thing we want to do is to get into a big fight with the media.'

However, if the police can come back again at a later stage then this means that the Guardian will still be in a position were it has the 'Sword of Damocles' hanging over it. We've always said that perhaps the Guardian should follow News International's example and hand out a few 'Bobbies Jobs' to the boys in blue and employ some retired coppers as crap columnists. That should humour them up a bit.

More Organised Vengence?

THIS last weekend the Met have been after a court order under the Official Secrets Act to try to make Guardian reporters disclose their sources about the phone hacking scandal. Scotland Yard claims the Act could have been breached last July, when Guardian reporters Nick Davies and Amelia Hill exposed the hacking of murder victim Milly Dowler's mobile phone by an investigator acting for the News of the World.

It seems that the police plonkers in London who failed to pursue the News of the World are now reaching for the Official Secrets Act to deal with the journalists who showed them all up. Geoffrey Robertson QC writes in last Saturday's Guardian: 'That coverage has exposed not only the hackers but also the incompetence of the police, and it is no doubt for that reason that Scotland Yard is overzealous in its attempts to uncover the sources.'

The Guardian in an editorial argues: 'It beggars belief that the Metropolitan police - who, for years, declined to lift a finger against News International journalists despite voluminous evidence of criminal behaviour - should now be using the Official secrets Act to pursue the Guardian, which uncovered the story.'

Perhaps the Guardian should follow News International's example and get agate employing a few retired coppers from the Met. as staff columnists. That might help to keep Scotland Yard off their backs.

Academics & anarchists: on doing hacking & phone taps

'A Company of Bastards' & the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act

RECENT comment on the ethics of phone-hacking and the media reminded me of our practices in the 1970s, during the time of the alternative press and counter-cultural journalism in the North of England; not to mention what we got up to in the name of our academic interests. We didn't actually go in for phone-hacking as such but we did tape-record telephone conversations of various parties without their knowledge. Usually we did it with people that we did not like, such as slippery union bosses like Arnold Belfield (a Rochdale Magistrate and Secretary of the National Union of Textile & Allied Workers) or Albert Hilton (President of the Rochdale Branch of the National Union of Textile & Allied Workers) or as the publication Rochdale Alternative Paper did when it recorded the boss of the Weavers & Winders Union, others did it on the odd local employer or manager. We did this at the time mainly for practical reasons because, when it suited these people, they tended to have memory lapses and that could be troublesome for trade union activists on the shop-floor. In the early 1970s, Albert Hilton, then President of Rochdale National Union of Textile & Allied Workers, had to have his memory jogged by the production of a tape recording to prove that he had had a telephone conversation with me some weeks before the committee meeting at which he and the Secretary were trying to expel me from the union. He then made himself look guilty by responding thus: 'anyone can fake a tape recording!'

We didn't only limit these activities to tape recordings of telephone conversations either, sometimes we would engineer a tape recorder into a briefcase and take it to a meeting with the bosses or union officials to make covert recordings of the proceedings. These recordings would sometimes provide us with an aide-memoire so that we could fill in reports or to produce articles. But mostly they would be produced to undermine our enemies among the bosses and union leaders in the 1970s and beyond. A bloke called Brendan - close to the anarchist movement - was a bobby-dazzler at making these secret recordings and even Derek Pattison, who is now on the editorial panel of Northern Voices and is a life-long anarcho-syndicalist, in the 1980s got another anarchist called Ian Smith to ring up one of his ex-employers pretending to be a boss asking for a reference and expecting him to give a bad one so that he could later discredit that boss. Some of the material thus obtained may have been used for articles in Freedom, the anarchist weekly, when in the 1970s it was edited by Peter Turner, also a member of UCATT and Secretary of Hammersmith TUC.

Yet, this kind of surreptitiously acquired material had other uses besides wrong-footing dodgy employers and union bosses, it could be used for academic research. My own dissertation for my B.A. was based on one such confrontation between myself and a union official, Arnold Belfield, then, in the 1970s, Secretary of the National Union of Allied Workers: the thesis was entitled 'Members & Officials: Some Aspects of a Trade Union Dispute' and was based on a recording taken with Mr Belfield's knowledge on the premises of the union. One Friday evening I just tuned up at the office before it closed and slapped the tape-recorder down on his desk and started to interrogate him; there was a bit of an altercation of course, a bit of pushing and shoving, and then he rang for one of his union cronies for support. When that didn't work and I still refused to leave, Arnold Belfield, who was also a Magistrate in Rochdale, called in the police, and then when I still refused to leave until I got a proper answer to my questions from Arnold, the copper with the help of Arnold began to try to carry me out: it was all there on tape the shouting, the cries of 'get his other leg' and from the police officer: 'I sick of this, I'm finishing work at 6pm, and I don't want to be messing about with you!'

All this recorded data later proved useful for studying power relationships and how people relate to each other in argumentative situations while I was later doing my degree in 1976. A particular school of sociology in Manchester 'ethnomethodology', which was very fashionable in the mid-1970s, lent itself to this kind of material. Harold Garfinkel, who died on 21st April this year and was professor emeritus in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, had coined the term 'ethnomethodology', meaning 'people's methodology' in the 1950s. Michael Lynch who wrote Garfinkel's obituary in The Guardian in June wrote: 'In the social sciences, methodology usually refers to systematic techniques for collecting data but, following Garfinkel, ethnomethodologists identified it with a broad range of ordinary abilities, such as taking part in conversational exchanges, navigating through traffic situations and recognising what is happening in specific social environments.' Lynch says: 'Garfinkel's major work, Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), challenged 'top down' theories which proposed that society was structured around relatively limited sets of rules and overarching values.' Garfinkel proposed an alternative 'bottom up' picture of society built from what Lynch says are 'innumerable occasions of improvised conduct adapted to particular situations'. The tape recorder and later the video recorder proved a useful tool for collecting such data.

Was this ethical anymore than the conduct of the News International journalists? Some of this data was collected in a sneaky and covert manner to make it more authentic because the subject of the study would act more naturally if he or she didn't know they were being recorded. Garfinkel even got his students to probe the assumed existence of social order by using 'disruption or breaching experiments' and sending them out to upset commonplace routines in households and public places. My experience with the Magistrate and union boss, Arnold Belfield, and the Rochdale policeman was one such way of delving into the relationship between union officials and their members, authority figures and citizens. Only half in jest, was Garfinkel later in his life to describe the field of ethnomethodological endeavour as 'a company of bastards' - some of the things we got up to were a bit rum to be sure and Michael Lynch writes: 'Like a stand-up comic, he (Garfinkel) had a knack for exposing the strangeness of everyday routines.'

I suppose both Garfinkel, the ethnos and the anarchists at the time in the 1960s and 70s, would have argued that it was in the public interest to acquire this kind of information through tricks and wire taps. We would have said these methods were justified given what we were trying to find out, and in the case of the anarchists, dealing with employers and bosses, that it was our way of getting the edge of the employers and the union bosses. But whatever the ethics of doing this kind of thing, these past practices, both by academics and anarchists, have probably now all been made illegal under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act [RIPA 2000] in the year 2000. Today, I'm not even sure that Ervin Goffman would in England be allowed to secretly insert himself in a mental institution in order to collect information to write a book like Asylums. But RIPA 2000 did let employers and councils do some authoritarian things such as at Bury Council, where in 2006, they secretly filmed a team of their own binmen employees doing their work, and later tried to use the film footage to prove that three had been taking bribes off some shopkeepers: all these binmen ended up getting a significant sum in an out-of-Court settlement and payment which was later commented on in the Mail on Sunday and the Bury Times. In an unrelated case a security guard from Bury MBC told Northern Voices that the Council had covertly used audio recording gear in their work's car to record the conversations of their Bury MBC security staff going about their duties on the night shift. This kind of thing reminds one of the old East Germany under the Stasi or secret police. The signs are that the RIPA 2000 didn't really stop the abuses as it set out to do; I don't know if the academics or anarchists have now been intimidated by the RIPA 2000.