The Story so far....

The Economic League was founded in the wake of of the 1918 general election to  frustrate the political and industrial  ambitions of millions of newly enfranchised male working class voter and for millions of working class women and middle and radicalised by the fight for the vote, dangerous auxiliary roles on the front line  or undertaking industrial jobs previously reserved for men. All though the Great War wasn't the "war to end all wars" it permanently change the lives of women and the working class of Great Britain. 

Those changes were deeply resented by the oligarchy's who had dominated the political, economical and social life of Britain until the Representation of the People Act (1918) changed all that. In 1918 they launched an ideological "crusade for capitalism", organised by an organisation called National Propaganda directed and led by the leading figures in the ultra right Die Hard faction of the Conservative Party.

In1923 the first British "Fascisti"  emerged from that aggressive form of Conservatism and the following year National Propaganda tranformed itself into" The Economic League"  turning the graduates of its "Economic Study Clubs" to be their "constitutional workers" and the tough men leading their "Fying Squads" taking a more assertive crusade  for capitalism to the factory gate and to the foot of the CPGB and Independent Labour Party members' soapboxes.

Embedded in Industry, but in the political Wilderness...

The Economic League was absolutely a product of its time  but unlike other products of its time it never went away, and never shifted very far from its original Diehard Ideology. That was true even after the the Second World War when the under Eden, Macmillan, Douglas Home and then Heath Conservative leadership and membership looked down on those who held their views in the twenty five years after Attlee's defeat as political dinosaurs and part of their party's "lunatic fringe".

The League's alienation from mainstream Conservatism during this period was more than compensated for by its continuing, loyal and generous funding across all sectors of British Industry. That loyalty and generosity was fortified during its years in the political wilderness because of a service it offered to the thousands of commercial companies who subscribed to them. That service was a blacklist that enabled the subscriber  to avoid appointing anyone whom the League decided had radical political views, was a trade union activist. The basis for that judgement was often very questionable and dubious. The  constitutional appropriateness of jeopardising a person's ability to keep themselves and their family,  because they engaged in legal political activism or legitimate trade unionism was extraordinarily doubtful. It was all the more dubious  because of British - albeit  delusional - aspirations to represent all that was best in a liberal democracy.

Blacklisting cannot be an entirely secret operation, it is done "pour décourager les autres" as Voltaire remarked about the execution of Admiral Byng for failing to relieve the blockade of Minorca. But that awareness within the  labour movement  of employers blacklisting activists  was at best limited to a belief that those who were do blacklist had been identified as "ringleaders" in a  dispute and the mechanism for blacklistsing was negative referencing in a "old boys network" of personnel professionals within particular industries.

What happened when the Economic League's role in employment blacklisting started to be  exposed in 1986 waste  dispelled all those myths. There were tens of thousands. of blacklisted individuals, who struggled get jobs anywhere even in industries they had never worked in. Some of the information on the people blacklisted was wrong or hopelessly out of date some of it had come from employers but some had come from MI5 via special branches.

This is the companion blog site  to another site run for many years by Mike Hughes, www.spiesatwork.org.uk  there is much more information about the Economic League including original documents. 

 

The end of the League, but not its blacklisting

The Economic League  did not survive the  exposure in the late 1980's increasingly loosing credibility with, and damaging  to, the credibility, of the subscribers. It was dissolve in 1993. so outlived its old enemy by the CPGB by a couple of years. But that wasn't the end of the story for blacklisting or the need  discovering the full the truth about the Economic League.

Two weeks after the League's dissolution a consortium of construction giants that subscribed to the League, led by Robert McAlpines, purchased the blacklist from the redundant Head of Research, Jack Winder, for £10,000. The money should have gone to the receiver, but presumably had led the receiver  had been led to believe the blacklist had been destroyed by Group 600, as Winder had told the Guardian Journalist Richard Norton Taylor.

Callum McAlpine the director of Robert McAlpines  was organising this resurrection. As well as buying  (what  Winder later hilariously told a House of Common's select  committee)  was the blacklists "intellectual property rights", McAlpine also employed Ian Kerr to set up and run an unincorporated company to perpetuate blacklisting in construction the used the name The Consulting Association ("TCA"). Kerr was the former construction specialist on Winder's Economic League Team team, Kerr's operation didn't just involve the firms themselves. but all the smaller firms, in their supply chains and the employment agencies employing employing staff on behalf of the construction companies. The League's legacy  remains today, and the Legacy can be identified in breathtakingly expensive formal attempts to  unpick  its historic impact.

Those investigations haven't, and aren't going to deliver justice, or appropriate reparations for most of the League's victims. Most victims are, like the perpetrators, dead or approaching the end of their lives. The nearest thing to achieving  justice in the face of historic  abuse, in this case politically motivated discrimination against individuals in their access employment and in breaches of their fundamental human rights, is to acknowledge the abuse, identify the perpetrators (individual and organisational), and to put in place effective barriers to prevent the same abuse of future generations. Those barriers include effective legislative and regulatory action by government with financial and if necessary criminal sanctions and penalties. But they are not restricted to government action. Explicit proscription of political discrimination  in professional standards, effective regulatory quality controls and  compliance in contracting and and commissioning all have a role to play.

Some progress has been made  in the acknowledgement of the abuse and identification of perpetrators, but lille has been done in respect of protections, and what has been done is ineffective. Government of all colours have consistently given in to demands to remove "red tape" and regulation. The demands are accompanied by overt threats to government about what will happen if the demands aren't met. Those threats  have been made since the nineteenth century, by employers and trade associations in the commercial and financial sectors, for whom simple consideration of decency and humanitarianism is  a commercial bridge too far.

It is a particularly Dickensian viewpoint has proved false time and again over the last century and there quarters. This is meant literally. His 1854 novel  "Hard Times" is a a satire on the attitudes of industrialist in "Coketown", a fictional northern mill town not unlike Preston.  Having considered, in his own voice as narrator, the mill owner  Josiah Bounderby's contention that everyone in the town  "wished to be fed turtle soup off a gold spoon" Dickens goes on the say "another prevalent fiction was very popular there":

"It took the form of a threat.  Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used—that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts—he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would ‘sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.’  This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.

However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it.  So there it was, in the haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied."

We may expect to hear this prevalent, and as it turns out ancient, fiction repeated endlessly as the Employment Rights Bill progresses through the House of Commons.