My Lords, I will speak to a number of these amendments simultaneously, using a different word to the thematics that have come through, but with the same purpose. The word that I refer to is “competence”: the competence of decision-making, and whether the legislation, in the view of the Minister as well as the Committee, is sufficiently precise in ensuring it. We have heard words such as corruption—that is very important—and concepts of reasonableness, which are also important.
I can recall when I and other trade union colleagues had suspicions about an individual who we thought was acting rather strangely over a period of time. He was observed selling Nazi memorabilia in London Bridge Station on a Saturday morning—not a normal activity for trade unionists, even in those days. We were suspicious, and he suddenly moved on. I had a sharp thought that I would handle his pension because it was an accrued pension entitlement that was to be transferred. Rather than leave it to the finance people, who would have handled it in a very financial way, I made the calls myself. I was fairly certain that he was not who he said he was, and that for some reason he decided to look into the heart of moderate trade unionism. The question that it begged to me, rather than being a question of principle, was what a waste of resources it was—what incompetence.
I found later that I was on the Economic League blacklist. I found out why by a fair amount of research. I looked into the case of the—I think it is fair to say—loud-mouthed communist, the very good actor Ricky Tomlinson, whom I got to know over the years. He was stitched up for being an industrial activist for no good democratic reason. He was a communist without any question and he was loud-mouthed, but he was participating in a perfectly normal way in our civil society, and yet he was stitched up.
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Mine was much less serious, but I was stitched up by being put on that Economic League blacklist. I know that I was put on it because I was one of the organisers of the national anti-apartheid demonstrations. My role was not very political in that context. It was not glamorous; it was organising stewards and stewarding. I had to have an intricate knowledge of extreme-left groups, because my tasking by the Anti-Apartheid Movement—and through them from the African National Congress—was to ensure that Trotskyist groups did not take over the march to divert from the general messaging of the Anti-Apartheid Movement.
It was very mundane and matter of fact but it was actually quite a complex operation—knowing exactly who the extreme Trotskyists were, what their agenda was, how they would operate and what they would try to do within the march. As part of that, I had to liaise with the Metropolitan Police—one of a small number—on how the march would operate, how it would be stewarded and where it would go. For my pleasure, I ended up a few years later on the Economic League blacklist. I know that only because Ciba-Geigy chemicals in Manchester told me that when it had given me a job, and then had to embarrassingly withdraw it.
The truth of the matter, which was self-evident to anyone around at the time, was that I was not an extremist. But not only was I not an extremist, I was one of the people most active within the Labour Party and the unions in combatting extremism, to such an extent that I was personally responsible for the exposure of the far-left infiltration of the ANC in 1985. The Labour Party, under my report, took action and helped crack that particular problem.
I am looking and thinking about what was going on at the time not in terms of my rights, or anything like that, although those can be important, because it can
have—as it did for Ricky Tomlinson—very detrimental effects on your economic well-being, your family and so on. I am not even thinking particularly of principle but of competence. If that resource is being employed in that way, it is not being employed in another way to deal with people who want to cause problems within the state and usurp our democracy.
To jump forward to the more recent scandals we have seen, not least in Nottinghamshire, where so-called green groups were infiltrated by police officers and horrendous sexual abuse took place, there ought to be the right of remedy for those women. That right should be there now, and that scandal is certainly not in any sense a closed chapter. Let me look at it from an angle which has not been discussed: the competence of infiltrating some obscure green group with hardly any members.
When I was an MP at the time, they targeted the two power stations in my area, and they were just an irritation. Do your Lordships know the biggest problem that created? It was me arguing with the power station owners, the police and the local authorities about toilet facilities and the problems of the workers on site if such a group of people are there. Those people—I think I called them “woollybacks” at the time—were not a danger to the state or society but a bit of a danger to themselves, climbing up cooling towers without toilet facilities available. They were a little bit of a public health risk and were hypocrites, turning up not on their bikes or walking but in motorised vehicles, polluting the local area that I live in. I gave them the full whack in terms of the political welcome that they wanted. However, that is not how you disrupt a power station. It is an aggravation, an irritation and a cost, and we should not allow such criminality. But, frankly, that is easy and simple to deal with. In fact, if it had been left to the local people, I could have got a few people to deal with it very easily: trade unionists working inside the power stations, who did not want their economic lives threatened by some eco-protest.
In fact, if you were an eco-warrior of some kind and you wanted to create an economic problem, you would attempt to get employed inside the power station, get in charge, run the trade union and bring it out on some kind of prolonged strike. That is how you do economic damage. Of course, that is not possible, because trade unions have always been the bulwark against such kinds of extremism. That is the whole point of trade unions. They exist to complement capitalism, not to overthrow it, and to battle and share the products of capitalism. Therefore, the whole mindset that would infiltrate trade unions was an absurdity. However, the whole mindset that would put resource for an extraordinary length of time into a tiny group of people who are so obscure and irrelevant that when they come to power stations—as they came to West Burton, near my house—they are only a threat to themselves and not to anybody else, begs the question of competence.
When we talk about reasonableness, I hope the Minister can address that, because that resource ought to have been used at that time in trying to root out the future terrorists and encouragers of terrorism—the ones who are a threat to our society and people’s lives
in our society. Therefore, on this question of this competence, the problem or dilemma that we and the Government have is that we are leaving it to people whose mindset may not understand, and certainly did not in the past, what is a threat and what is an irrelevant irritation that a simple bit of policing can handle.
If you look at the groups that were infiltrated, frankly it is a comedian’s hotchpotch of the irrelevancies of the far left—extremist groups where they are all flooding now, back out of the Labour Party, spending most of their time battling with each other about some dead theorist whose view on Libya or something over the last 30 or 50 years is the right one, or whose analysis of the Russian Revolution was the right one. They are back into that. They are easily identified, because they like to publish everything. It used to be newspapers, but now it is online. Frankly, that irrelevance could go on forever—about who they were, where they were and how many have ended up in here. I will not embarrass anyone like that, because they are on all sides of the House; I am not going to do that.
My point on competence is absolutely fundamental to the powers that are there. I hope that the Minister will address that, because it is fundamental and it is the problem of the past, alongside the abuses that took place. It must not be a problem in the future, because that will put us all at risk.