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Ian Kerr leaving Knutsford Crown Court in 2009
Ian Kerr was buried at his local Catholic church on a wintry day in December 2012. His widow Mary blamed his heart attack on the pressure of being the focus of a scandal about a blacklist of construction workers.
“He was frightened to death about it,” she said shortly after the funeral. “He took it so badly. For four years he had it hanging over him.”
No one believed there was a secret blacklist barring thousands of workers from the construction industry until four investigators from the Information Commissioner’s office turned up at the offices of Consulting Association in Droitwich, West Midlands in February 2009.
The firm, essentially a one-man operation run by Mr Kerr, did not appear in company registers and had no nameplate on its door.
But it was the nerve centre of a secret operation, spanning decades, that gathered information for more than 40 British construction companies that decided whether or not to hire staff based on the words scrawled by Mr Kerr on colour-coded pieces of card.
A typical file contained a worker’s full name, date of birth, home address, national insurance number, vehicle registration, work history, trade union membership and involvement in industrial action.
Files also recorded when fresh queries were made on individuals and the advice relayed — for example, to employ “under no circumstances whatsoever”.
Typical files included phrases such as “troublemaker and is politically motivated”; “militant and upfront in strike”; “currently drives 4WD Diahatsu”, “drew H&S [health and safety] issues to attention of 3245’s site manager”; “possibly involved with woman solicitor”; “known to create trouble”; “militant mouthpiece” and “appeared on BBC ‘Money Programme’”.
Every week I came home and had to tell my wife I had been let go again. She would think it was something to do with me
One claimant, Steve, who was blacklisted after joining a strike, said his failure to find work led to marital tensions.
“Every week I came home and had to tell my wife I had been let go again. She would think it was something to do with me, because we did not know about the blacklist. We would have that circle every three weeks,” he said.
“It is like eastern Europe, or East Germany or Russia — that kind of thing. It is just unbelievable.”
In the 1960s the mild-mannered Mr Kerr was teaching art at a primary school when his wife saw an advert in the Birmingham Post for a training officer.
The employer turned out to be the Economic League, a rightwing organisation set up after the first world war to counter the spread of socialism. It held files on thousands of individuals working in a range of industries.
When the league was dismantled in the early 1990s after criticism in parliament, Mr Kerr bought the files relating to construction workers and continued to monitor left-wingers. His activities continued up until the raid in 2009, after which he was fined £5,000.
The Consulting Association was overseen by a steering committee made up of “key people” in the UK’s largest construction businesses, including John Laing, Tarmac, Amec, Amey and Balfour Beatty.
Those companies referred individuals to the blacklist — typically for suspected trade union activism — paying about £2 a time to check whether potential recruits were already listed.
In written evidence to the Scottish affairs select committee, Mr Kerr listed a string of big public sector projects for which businesses used his services. These included the Millennium Dome, 2012 Olympics sites, NHS hospitals, GCHQ buildings and the Ministry of Defence’s facilities in Whitehall.
It is like eastern Europe, or East Germany or Russia — that kind of thing. It is just unbelievable
His information came from skimming leftwing publications, talking to company managers and scouring other potential sources of intelligence. Some was just thinly sourced hearsay.
Most of those named were blue-collar workers but the list included other figures such as Charles Woolfson, a former lecturer in industrial relations from the University of Glasgow, who studied the offshore oil industry after the Piper Alpha accident. He said it was “disconcerting” to have been singled out.
When Mr Kerr died two weeks after giving evidence to the committee some leftwingers posted offensive messages on social media. One tweeted: “Hope he died in agony.”
Mrs Kerr said her husband did not deserve the opprobrium. He never had any doubts about the job he was doing, she said, adding: “I think you have got to understand that these people…I would have described them as natural scumballs.”
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James Berrington, 63, was awarded £25,000 for being one of the thousands blacklisted from construction work. The former pipelayer first appeared, without his knowledge, in the files in 1976, when they were held by the Economic League, a rightwing group. From that point onwards, he says, he struggled to find the kind of work he wanted: he ended up working as a security guard, sometimes until 2.45am. Later the father of three moved to Glasgow to work as a concierge. “At the time I did not think anything of it, I just thought that the industry was going through a bad period,” he said. “When I discovered that my name was on the file I was a bit pissed, to be honest, I did not know why it had happened or what I had done wrong.” Mr Berrington admitted that he was a “troublemaker” in his youth and that he backed the Workers Revolutionary party, a Trotskyist group. But he said that his political beliefs should never have stood in the way of him being able to do an honest day’s work. The original 1976 file referred to his involvement in a dispute at a textile factory in Derby in the East Midlands. After a worker had been sacked “for no reason”, he had successfully intervened: persuading colleagues to walk out in order to get him reinstated. “I was on the left, I was probably a troublemaker as they would have seen it, but all I did was stand up for my rights and the rights of my mates . . . I would do it again,” he said. “It was unfair to me, and it meant that me and my young family only got by skimping and saving and working 40-hour weekends to get some money.” |
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