Lucy Parker’s revealing documentary shines a light on the surveillance that blacklisted supposed troublemakers
Lucy Parker’s film is about a nasty, dirty, century-old little secret at the heart of the
British state: industrial surveillance. It is about the Blacklist Support Group, formed 10 years ago when it was revealed that construction firms such as Balfour Beatty and Carillion had been submitting names of supposed troublemakers among the workforce (people who were sometimes doing nothing more than demanding back pay and union representation) to a central snoopers’ body they were bankrolling, blandly called the Consulting Association.
This grew out of another body called the Economic League, formed in 1919, and its mission was to circulate – and continuously update and expand – a blacklist of workers who would then mysteriously find themselves unable to get jobs. Keen to justify their meal-ticket, the beady-eyed blacklisters would look for more and more people whose working lives they could ruin: people who sometimes were doing nothing more than writing to the local press on leftist issues.