Within the last week the nature of State power has once again been clearly exposed. We now know that at least two persons were assaulted by police at the G20 protests, Ian Tomlinson who died and a woman (so far not named), even though neither was acting violently or illegally. Then a few days later there wer mass arrests of 114 people alleged to be planning direct action at a coal-fired power station in Nottinghamshire, though 12 hours later no charges had been made. However, when it came to a construction industry-operated blacklist designed to prevent union activists from getting work on building sites, no action was taken at all though the blacklist had been known about for decades. Yet there is a consistent logic lying behind all three of these episodes.

The logic is that under both New Labour and the Tories State power has been used, not as the upholder of the public interest or the genuine arbiter between conflicting interests, but as the unabashed ally and protector of corporate power. Protestors against climate change inaction and exploitation of black and foreign labour in the developing world must be held in check and where necessary (though preferably out of sight) beaten into submission. Environmental campaigners protesting against more coal-fired power stations must be arrested in droves, even though coal-fired stations have recently been denounced by a renowned climate change scientist as ‘factories of death’, no public consent has been given to extending them, and a massive revival of coal-fired power without CCS (carbon capture and storage which will not be available for a decade at least) will shred Britain’s statutory carbon reduction targets.
This same view of the nature of the State equally explains why nothing was done to stop the use of a blacklist by 40 or more construction firms (including some of the biggest like Balfour Beatty, Costain and McAlpine) victimising union activists and those termed ‘troublemakers’ from getting employment. Just as successive Governments sided with the fossil fuel and nuclear industries against renewable sources of energy and supported exploitation of cheap labour abroad, just as they protected the coal companies against any public interference whatever the damage caused, so the State cast a blind eye over illegal practices by the construction companies to keep out trade union action which might limit the exploitation of cheap labour on some of the most dangerous sites in Britain.
Nothing whatever would have been done had not one of the victims tabled an application to the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) under Freedom of Information provisions, which triggered a raid on the so-called Consulting Association two months ago which found a database of names of 3,200 workers described as ‘union activists’ or ‘troublemakers’. It’s not as though the Government didn’t know all about this long ago. The 1999 Employment Act contained regulations specifically aimed at outlawing blacklisting, but after lobbying from the construction industry they were quietly put on hold on the absurd grounds that the Government didn’t believe there was sufficient evidence to warrant their introduction!
So what should be done? The regulations prohibiting blacklisting which were so cynically put on ice a decade ago should now be immediately reactivated and made live and operative, though in an adjournment debate initiated a fortnight ago in the Commons by Michael Clapham MP the Government line was stalling and clearly DBERR under Mandelson/McFadden intended to do the least it could get away with. What of course is really needed is a Labour Government that genuinely represents the social democratic ideal of supporting the weak and powerless, protecting peaceful protest against injustice and upholding the right of employment for all, not using the State as the political arm of the CBI and bankers. But for that we shall have to await a new and massive re-mobilisation of the labour movement and of progressive politics across the spectrum, which the current financial-economic crisis does show some signs of developing.

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