The UK’s secret political police are spying on me. I know this because the Metropolitan police have refused to provide a copy of my police file. The reason? To do so “would be likely to prejudice the prevention and detection of crime”. My “crime” is being a trade unionist, campaigning to expose the scandal that led to more than 3,200 people being blacklisted by building contractors.



The police will also “neither confirm nor deny” whether the Blacklist Support Group, the organisation for which I work, is under investigation. That catch-all policy of “national security” was quoted after direct advice from the Association of Chief Police Officers. The blacklisting justice campaign now finds itself in the same situation as families of race murder victims: spied on by police who seem incapable of investigating the real criminals.

Why are the police keeping such a close watch on us? Perhaps it’s because part of the scandal involves state collusion. The Consulting Association’s anti-union blacklist was discovered in a raid by the Information Commissioner’s Office in 2009. As ever more blacklist files were disclosed, it became obvious that some of the information in them could only have come from the police or the security services. This was confirmed by David Clancy, head of investigation for the ICO (and formerly a Greater Manchester police officer).

Peter Francis, former undercover police officer turned whistleblower, revealed he spied on some blacklisted workers because of their anti-BNP activities. And the same information he collated appeared on their blacklist files. Unions and MPs called for a public inquiry, which was flatly rejected by David Cameron, Theresa May and Vince Cable.

Directors of multinational companies who were forced to give evidence to the parliamentary select committee investigation into blacklisting continued to deny any police involvement. Operation Herne, the investigation into undercover policing, claimed that any information flow was purely from construction firms to the police, driven by a sense of “civic duty”.

The curtain needs to come down on this charade. The Labour MP John McDonnell has now written to May, the home secretary, naming Detective Chief Inspector Gordon Mills, the head of police liaison at Netcu – the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit – as the senior officer who attended the secret Consulting Association meetings. McDonnell has repeated his call for a public inquiry. [See footnote.]

The role of Netcu was to spy on “domestic extremists”, which apparently includes union activists. Responses to freedom of information requests claim that not a single document from Netcu was transferred after the spying unit was subsumed into the Metropolitan police.

Meanwhile, companies have repeatedly told parliament and courts that they do not hold any correspondence or minutes from the Consulting Association, despite their directors attending meetings and paying hundreds of thousands of pounds in fees over a 16-year period. Group litigation at the high court is currently bogged down in arguments as the firms continue to dispute the disclosure of evidence.

What have they got to hide? Perhaps inconvenient facts. It is a curious coincidence that Assistant Chief Constable Anton Setchell, head of the entire UK domestic extremism spying operations between 2004 and 2010, is now head of security for engineering firm Laing O’Rourke, which has been accused of blacklisting.

The security services and corporations are trying everything to avoid proper scrutiny of blacklisting because it risks exposing not one or two bad apples but a systematic conspiracy involving the state. Blacklisting is just the latest in a long history of British state anti-unionism stretching back to Tolpuddle. It is no longer an industrial relations issue: it is a human rights issue. A conspiracy between big business, the police and the security services, and the refusal to disclose information that everyone knows exists amounts to a good old-fashioned establishment cover-up.

However, as with Hillsborough, with Bloody Sunday – and eventually, with child abuse – those responsible will be held to account.