Who Knew What? The Convenient Disappearance of the Trade Union Complicity from the Blacklisting Narrative
This article follows a documentary trail from Unite's Legal Department in 2009, through internal union inquiries, Westminster meetings, Parliamentary debates and High Court litigation, to the inquiries which followed. It raises a straightforward question: what did people inside Unite, the wider trade-union movement and prominent Labour politicians already know about allegations of trade-union complicity in blacklisting, what did they do with that information — and why has there still been no transparent public accounting of what happened? The present Unite inquiry is not simply an inquiry into whether construction workers were blacklisted. That has long been established. The issue it was tasked with examining concerns alleged conduct by trade-union officials — including collusion, the handling or suppression of blacklisting information and related official conduct. I am not suggesting that everyone named below possessed the same information or reached the same conclusions. ...