Blacklisting is the scandal that now demands action

 

Thousands have been driven out of work in Britain by corporate spying outfits. It's an outrage that calls for more than an inquiry 

• Seumas Milne
• The Guardian, Tuesday 4 December 2012 22.20 GMT

'Workers across Britain have been systematically and illegally forced into unemployment by some of the country's biggest companies.' Illustration by Matt Kenyon

 

As in the phone-hacking scandal, the evidence of illegality, surveillance and conspiracy is incontrovertible. In both cases, the number of victims already runs into thousands. And household names are deeply tied up in both controversies – though as targets in one and perpetrators in the other.

But when it comes to the blacklisting scandal, the damage can't only be measured in distress and invasion of privacy. Its impact has already been felt in years of enforced joblessness, millions of pounds in lost income, family and psychological breakdown, emigration and suicides.
It's now clear that workers across Britain have been systematically and illegally forced into unemployment for trade union activity – often on publicly funded projects and in collusion with the police and security services – by some of the country's biggest companies, using secret lists drawn up by corporate spying agencies.

Liberty has equated blacklisting with phone hacking, insisting that the "consequences for our democracy are just as grave". Keith Ewing, professor of public law at King's College London, calls it the "worst human rights abuse in relation to workers" in Britain in half a century.

But whereas David Cameron ordered a public inquiry into hacking, he rejected any investigation of blacklisting out of hand. And while a mainly anti-union media has largely ignored the scandal, all the signs are that it's continuing right now, in flagship public projects such as the £15bn Crossrail network across the south-east.

Thanks to leaks, tribunals, evidence to MPs and an information commissioner's raid, we now know that one of those private espionage outfits, the Consulting Association, had 3,213 names on its blacklist before it was shut down in 2009. Most were construction workers, based at sites from Clwyd to Croydon, but they also included environmental activists.

For an annual subscription of £3,500, 44 construction and outsourcing giants such as Balfour Beatty, Carillion, Sir Robert McAlpine and Wimpey paid £2.20 a shot for "intelligence" on the 40,000 names a year they ran past the association's database.

For that they could have access to such gems as "keeps extremely interesting company", "union activity", "brought in H&S issues", "politically motivated", "troublemaker", "recently seen at a leftwing meeting" and "girlfriend … involved in several marriages of convenience". Mostly, workers were branded "involved in dispute" or "company given details and not employed".

Through this covert power, building workers were driven on to the dole during a construction boom. Both Dave Smith, an engineer, and Steve Acheson, an electrician, were sacked from one major construction job after another after raising health and safety concerns (asbestos and lack of drying facilities) over a decade ago. They have never been able to work in the trade for more than a few weeks ever since.

Their cards had been marked by blacklisters. "Those people ruined my life," Acheson says. For some workers, they destroyed it. After hundreds involved in disputes on London's Jubilee line extension were blacklisted in 2000, at least two who were unable to find work committed suicide.

The Consulting Association, which used material the Information Commissioner's office said "could only be supplied by the police or security services", was fined £5,000 for breaching data protection law (paid by the Conservative donor Sir Robert McAlpine). Blacklisting was formally outlawed in 2010, but covert arrangements are by their nature difficult to expose.

Corporate managers who have been revealed to have been up to their necks in blacklisting are now running major publicly funded projects – including Crossrail and the Carillion-run PFI Great Western Hospital in Swindon – that are the focus of new blacklisting and bullying disputes.

Last week, Ian Kerr, the man who headed the Consulting Association, spoke in public for the first time, telling MPs there had been an "awful lot of discussion" between Crossrail contractors and his outfit, as well as those at the Olympic Park, Wembley stadium and other public construction projects. "Like it or not," he declared, blacklisting "will always be there".

Of course blacklisting isn't new. Throughout the cold war, the virulently rightwing Economic League ran a similar corporate espionage outfit, from where Kerr brought his database. And more recently civil servants, police and corporations have been shown to work hand in glove against climate change and other environmental activists.

Nor is blacklisting confined to construction, where unions still have real power. But in a deregulated economy – where union weakness has helped slash the share of wages in national income and an anti-union firm such as Starbucks can announce it's cutting staff benefits on the day it's in the public dock for tax dodging – this ugly corporate victimisation isn't just an outrage against civil liberties.

It's also a block on the revival of union organisation essential to turning the tide of inequality – and the defence of those paying the price of a failed economic model. Labour, which took 11 years to put its own ban on blacklisting into law out of deference to big business, now needs to commit to tougher rights at work. The scandal of corporate blacklisting doesn't just demand a public inquiry and compensation, but a real shift of direction on power in the workplace.

After 800 years, the barons are back in control of Britain

The Magna Carta forced King John to give away powers. But big business now exerts a chilling grip on the workforce

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 July 2012 20.30 BST

King John, surrounded by English barons, ratifying the Magna Carta at Runnymede. Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Getty Image

Hounded by police and bailiffs, evicted wherever they stopped, they did not mean to settle here. They had walked out of London to occupy disused farmland on the Queen's estates surrounding Windsor Castle. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that didn't work out very well. But after several days of pursuit, they landed two fields away from the place where modern democracy is commonly supposed to have been born.

At first this group of mostly young, dispossessed people, who (after the 17th century revolutionaries) call themselves Diggers 2012, camped on the old rugby pitch of Brunel University's Runnymede campus. It's a weed-choked complex of grand old buildings and modern halls of residence, whose mildewed curtains flap in the wind behind open windows, all mysteriously abandoned as if struck by a plague or a neutron bomb.

The diggers were evicted again, and moved down the hill into the woods behind the campus – pressed, as if by the ineluctable force of history, ever closer to the symbolic spot. From the meeting house they have built and their cluster of tents, you can see across the meadows to where the Magna Carta was sealed almost 800 years ago.

Their aim is simple: to remove themselves from the corporate economy, to house themselves, grow food and build a community on abandoned land. Implementation is less simple. Soon after I arrived, on a sodden day last week, an enforcer working for the company which now owns the land came slithering through the mud in his suit and patent leather shoes with a posse of police, to serve papers.

Already the crops the settlers had planted had been destroyed once; the day after my visit they were destroyed again. But the repeated destruction, removals and arrests have not deterred them. As one of their number, Gareth Newnham, told me: "If we go to prison we'll just come back … I'm not saying that this is the only way. But at least we're creating an opportunity for young people to step out of the system."

To be young in the post-industrial nations today is to be excluded. Excluded from the comforts enjoyed by preceding generations; excluded from jobs; excluded from hopes of a better world; excluded from self-ownership.

Those with degrees are owned by the banks before they leave college. Housing benefit is being choked off. Landlords now demand rents so high that only those with the better jobs can pay. Work has been sliced up and outsourced into a series of mindless repetitive tasks, whose practitioners are interchangeable. Through globalisation and standardisation, through unemployment and the erosion of collective bargaining and employment laws, big business now asserts a control over its workforce almost unprecedented in the age of universal suffrage.

The promise the old hold out to the young is a lifetime of rent, debt and insecurity. A rentier class holds the nation's children to ransom. Faced with these conditions, who can blame people for seeking an alternative?

But the alternatives have also been shut down: you are excluded yet you cannot opt out. The land – even disused land – is guarded as fiercely as the rest of the economy. Its ownership is scarcely less concentrated than it was when the Magna Carta was written. But today there is no Charter of the Forest (the document appended to the Magna Carta in 1217, granting the common people rights to use the royal estates). As Simon Moore, an articulate, well-read 27-year-old, explained, "those who control the land have enjoyed massive economic and political privileges. The relationship between land and democracy is a strong one, which is not widely understood."

As we sat in the wooden house the diggers have built, listening to the rain dripping from the eaves, the latest attempt to reform the House of Lords was collapsing in parliament. Almost 800 years after the Magna Carta was approved, unrepresentative power of the kind familiar to King John and his barons still holds sway. Even in the House of Commons, most seats are pocket boroughs, controlled by those who fund the major parties and establish the limits of political action.

Through such ancient powers, our illegitimate rulers sustain a system of ancient injustices, which curtail alternatives and lock the poor into rent and debt. This spring, the government dropped a clause into an unrelated bill so late that it could not be properly scrutinised by the House of Commons, criminalising the squatting of abandoned residential buildings.

The House of Lords, among whom the landowning class is still well-represented, approved the measure. Thousands of people who have solved their own housing crises will now be evicted, just as housing benefit payments are being cut back. I remember a political postcard from the early 1990s titled "Britain in 2020", which depicted the police rounding up some scruffy-looking people with the words, "you're under arrest for not owning or renting property". It was funny then; it's less funny today.

The young men and women camping at Runnymede are trying to revive a different tradition, largely forgotten in the new age of robber barons. They are seeking, in the words of the Diggers of 1649, to make "the Earth a common treasury for all … not one lording over another, but all looking upon each other as equals in the creation". The tradition of resistance, the assertion of independence from the laws devised to protect the landlords' ill-gotten property, long pre-date and long post-date the Magna Carta. But today they scarcely feature in national consciousness.

I set off in lashing rain to catch a train home from Egham, on the other side of the hill. As I walked into the town, I found the pavements packed with people. The rain bounced off their umbrellas, forming a silver mist. The front passed and the sun came out, and a few minutes later everyone began to cheer and wave their flags as the Olympic torch was carried down the road. The sense of common purpose was tangible, the readiness for sacrifice (in the form of a thorough soaking) just as evident. Half of what we need is here already. Now how do we recruit it to the fight for democracy?

Why do bankers get to decide who pays for the mess Europe is in?

There were summits about how much misery would be imposed on the Greeks – and no trade unions got a say

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 2 April 2012 20.00 BST

What you're about to read does, I admit, sound like a conspiracy theory. It involves powerful people meeting in private offices, hundreds of billions of euros, and clandestine deals determining the fates of entire countries. All that's missing is a grassy knoll or a wandering band of illuminati. There are, however, two crucial differences: these events are still unfolding – and they're more worrying than any who-killed-JFK fantasy I've ever heard.

Cast your mind back to the euro crisis talks last year, when the future of Greece was being decided. How much Athens should pay its bailiffs in the banks, on what terms, and the hardship that ordinary Greeks would have to endure as a result.

There were times when the whole of 2011 seemed to be one long European summit, when you heard more about Papandreou and Merkozy than was strictly necessary. Yet you probably didn't catch many references to Charles Dallara and Josef Ackermann.

They're two of the most senior bankers in the world – among the top 1% of the 1%. Dallara served in the Treasury under Ronald Reagan, before moving on to Wall Street, while Ackermann is chief executive of Deutsche Bank. But their role in the euro negotiations, and so in deciding Greece's future, was as representatives of the International Institute for Finance.

The IIF is a lobby group for 450 of the biggest banks in the world, with members including Barclays, RBS and Lloyds. Dallara and Ackermann and their colleagues were present throughout those euro summits, and enjoyed rare and astounding access to European heads of state and other policy-makers. EU and IMF officials consulted the bankers on how much Greece should pay, Europe's commissioner for economic affairs Olli Rehn shared conference calls with them.

You can piece all this together by poring over media reports of the euro summits, although be warned: you'll need a very high tolerance threshold for European TV, and financial newswires. But Dallara and co are also quite happy to toot their own trumpets. After a deal was struck last July, the IIF put out a note bragging about its "catalytic" role and claiming its offer "forms an integral part of a comprehensive package".

By now you'll have guessed the punchline: that July agreement was terrible for the Greeks, and brilliant for the bankers. It was widely panned at the time, for slicing only 21% off the value of Greece's loans, when Angela Merkel and many others agreed that financiers ought to be taking a much bigger hit. As the German government's economic adviser, Wolfgang Franz, later remarked in an interview: "If you look at the 21% and our demand for a 50% participation of private creditors, the financial sector has been very successful." Another way of putting it would be to say that the bankers overpowered even the strongest state in Europe.

None of this was inevitable. Iceland had made it clear that simply defaulting on one's loans didn't immediately lead to economic apocalypse. Across Greece, there were massive, repeated protests about the enormous spending cuts that citizens would suffer by paying off Goldman Sachs and the rest. And there was a growing movement in Greece and Portugal and France, among other countries, questioning the legitimacy of some of these loans.

None of these voters, none of these opinions got even a fraction of the consideration, let alone the face time, that was extended to Dallara and Ackermann. At Corporate Europe Observatory in Brussels, Yiorgos Vassalos has been tracking the negotiations over Greece: by his reckoning only the IIF got to have such personal, close-up access. These were summits settling how much misery would be imposed on the Greek people – and no trade unions or civil society groups got a say in them. "The only key players in those meetings were European governments and the bankers," says Vassalos.
Mindful of appearances, the EU has been less eager to admit to the influence of the bankers' lobby. When European officials were first asked by Corporate Europe Observatory about the extent of IIF access, they responded that it was limited to the Greek government. Only when it was pointed out that the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg were reporting that Dallara met Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy at midnight at an October summit to finalise a bigger reduction of the value of Greek debt did the officials back down: the IIF, they agreed, had been negotiating with a range of governments, on a whole host of issues to do with Greece's future.

So the bankers whose excesses helped land Europe in this mess then get to sit round the big EU table, like any other government, and decide who should pay for it. And the answer, unsurprisingly, is: not them. The bigger question is: why finance has been granted such power? In a forthcoming paper entitled Deep Stall, the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change gives one compelling reason: because so many countries across Europe are, through both their public and private sectors, so dependent on financiers in other countries for credit. That includes Britain, which relies on 10 eurozone countries for loans worth over 70% of its annual national income – a higher proportion even than Italy. The tale of the IIF and how it got such a powerful say on the fate of ordinary Greeks is really a chapter in a much bigger story of how governments across the western world got swallowed up by their finance industries.

I'm starting to think that the Left might actually be right

 Charles Moore in The Telegraph on 23/7/2011

It has taken me more than 30 years as a journalist to ask myself this question, but this week I find that I must: is the Left right after all? You see, one of the great arguments of the Left is that what the Right calls “the free market” is actually a set-up.

The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.

In the 1970s and 1980s, it was easy to refute this line of reasoning because it was obvious, particularly in Britain, that it was the trade unions that were holding people back. Bad jobs were protected and good ones could not be created. “Industrial action” did not mean producing goods and services that people wanted to buy, it meant going on strike. The most visible form of worker oppression was picketing. The most important thing about Arthur Scargill’s disastrous miners’ strike was that he always refused to hold a ballot on it.

A key symptom of popular disillusionment with the Left was the moment, in the late 1970s, when the circulation of Rupert Murdoch’s Thatcher-supporting Sun overtook that of the ever-Labour Daily Mirror. Working people wanted to throw off the chains that Karl Marx had claimed were shackling them – and join the bourgeoisie which he hated. Their analysis of their situation was essentially correct. The increasing prosperity and freedom of the ensuing 20 years proved them right.

But as we have surveyed the Murdoch scandal of the past fortnight, few could deny that it has revealed how an international company has bullied and bought its way to control of party leaderships, police forces and regulatory processes. David Cameron, escaping skilfully from the tight corner into which he had got himself, admitted as much. Mr Murdoch himself, like a tired old Godfather, told the House of Commons media committee on Tuesday that he was so often courted by prime ministers that he wished they would leave him alone.

The Left was right that the power of Rupert Murdoch had become an anti-social force. The Right (in which, for these purposes, one must include the New Labour of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) was too slow to see this, partly because it confused populism and democracy. One of Mr Murdoch’s biggest arguments for getting what he wanted in the expansion of his multi-media empire was the backing of “our readers”. But the News of the World and the Sun went out of the way in recent years to give their readers far too little information to form political judgments. His papers were tools for his power, not for that of his readers. When they learnt at last the methods by which the News of the World operated, they withdrew their support.

It has surprised me to read fellow defenders of the free press saying how sad they are that the News of the World closed. In its stupidity, narrowness and cruelty, and in its methods, the paper was a disgrace to the free press. No one should ever have banned it, of course, but nor should anyone mourn its passing. It is rather as if supporters of parliamentary democracy were to lament the collapse of the BNP. It was a great day for newspapers when, 25 years ago, Mr Murdoch beat the print unions at Wapping, but much of what he chose to print on those presses has been a great disappointment to those of us who believe in free markets because they emancipate people. The Right has done itself harm by covering up for so much brutality.

The credit crunch has exposed a similar process of how emancipation can be hijacked. The greater freedom to borrow which began in the 1980s was good for most people. A society in which credit is very restricted is one in which new people cannot rise. How many small businesses could start or first homes be bought without a loan? But when loans become the means by which millions finance mere consumption, that is different.

And when the banks that look after our money take it away, lose it and then, because of government guarantee, are not punished themselves, something much worse happens. It turns out – as the Left always claims – that a system purporting to advance the many has been perverted in order to enrich the few. The global banking system is an adventure playground for the participants, complete with spongy, health-and-safety approved flooring so that they bounce when they fall off. The role of the rest of us is simply to pay.
This column’s mantra about the credit crunch is that Everything Is Different Now. One thing that is different is that people in general have lost faith in the free-market, Western, democratic order. They have not yet, thank God, transferred their faith, as they did in the 1930s, to totalitarianism. They merely feel gloomy and suspicious. But they ask the simple question, “What's in it for me?”, and they do not hear a good answer.
Last week, I happened to be in America, mainly in the company of intelligent conservatives. Their critique of President Obama’s astonishing spending and record-breaking deficits seemed right. But I was struck by how the optimistic message of the Reagan era has now become a shrill one. On Fox News (another Murdoch property, and one which, while I was there, did not breathe a word of his difficulties), Republicans lined up for hours to threaten to wreck the President’s attempt to raise the debt ceiling. They seemed to take for granted the underlying robustness of their country’s economic and political arrangements. This is a mistake. The greatest capitalist country in history is now dependent on other people’s capital to survive. In such circumstances, Western democracy starts to feel like a threatened luxury. We can wave banners about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, but they tend to say, in smaller print, “Made in China”.

As for the plight of the eurozone, this could have been designed by a Left-wing propagandist as a satire of how money-power works. A single currency is created. A single bank controls it. No democratic institution with any authority watches over it, and when the zone’s borrowings run into trouble, elected governments must submit to almost any indignity rather than let bankers get hurt. What about the workers? They must lose their jobs in Porto and Piraeus and Punchestown and Poggibonsi so that bankers in Frankfurt and bureaucrats in Brussels may sleep easily in their beds.

When we look at the Arab Spring, we tend complacently to tell ourselves that the people on the streets all want the freedom we have got. Well, our situation is certainly better than theirs. But I doubt if Western leadership looks to a protester in Tahrir Square as it did to someone knocking down the Berlin Wall in 1989. We are bust – both actually and morally.

One must always pray that conservatism will be saved, as has so often been the case in the past, by the stupidity of the Left. The Left’s blind faith in the state makes its remedies worse than useless. But the first step is to realise how much ground we have lost, and that there may not be much time left to make it up.