The Economic League: A Shady Blacklist of Subversives

Number 18 Museum Street in Warrington is a rather unassuming looking abode. The most I can ascertain about the place is that it’s a hostel for homeless and vulnerable people, set up by the charity Room at the Inn in the wake of Warrington YMCA’s closure. Naturally, the people at the charity are keeping tight-lipped. But given number 18’s history, it’s following a long tradition of anonymity and secrecy.

Until 1993, number 18 was the discreet seat of a power without responsibility. It was the North West headquarters of the Economic League, a private vetting agency for British industry that operated for over 70 years and destroyed countless lives.

If you have a tolerance for the poor writing and faux history of Steven Knight’s bafflingly popular BBC series Peaky Blinders, you may know the name the Economic League. Headed up by Paddy Considine’s Father Hughes, they were depicted as a right wing cabal of Special Branch, resorting to extortion, kidnapping, and murder to prevent a communist revolution occurring in post-WWI Britain.

There’s a grain of truth here: the League was established in 1919 by William Reginald Hall, the newly elected Conservative MP for Liverpool West Derby and former Director of Naval Intelligence, and a group of industrialists. Fearful the emboldening of the trade union movement and increasing militancy in the workplace could lead to a revolution like that in Tsarist Russia, their aim was to promote pro-capitalist perspectives.

In the mid-1920s, the director general was one John Baker White. An intelligence officer in both world wars, White remained in his role at the League until 1945, when he became Conservative MP for Canterbury. Under his auspices, the League began to compile dossiers of organisations and individuals of a communist bent, establishing a “permanent clearing house of information in connection with” such groups and people.

In short, the League became a blacklisting operation that predated the McCarthyism of Cold War America. The difference was that McCarthy operated in plain sight, justifying his actions to the senate and the world’s media, whereas the League avoided the spotlight entirely. An unaccountable organisation, the League operated as a private security service for British industry. Through decades of extensive monitoring of trade unions, the communist parties, anti-apartheid organisations, and groups such as CND and Greenpeace, the League had compiled a list of individuals they deemed “subversive”. For a fee-paying subscription to the League, companies could make confidential enquiries about their existing or potential employees via their nearest office. With the League operating from seven regional offices, stretching from Glasgow to Surrey (with the Warrington office serving the North West of England), the whole of the UK was, in effect, catered for. The League euphemistically called their services “labour-screening” or “vetting” – a more accurate term would be blacklisting.

If you grew up, as I did, in the North West of England in the 1980s and 90s, you probably knew someone in your family or their social circle who had been involved in unions and industrial action. As a kid in St Helens, I had seen first-hand the effects of the 1984-85 miners’ strike and witnessed the collieries on my doorstep close their doors for good a few short years after the pitmen returned to work. Equally, I knew of another strike that had personally affected my family and was often mentioned in hushed tones: the embittered, seven week-long, unofficial walkout at Pilkington’s Glass in 1970.

Growing up at the time, the adult life I glimpsed around me, felt a lot like Boys from the Blackstuff, and I well remember those occasions (mercifully few and far between, as my dad always insisted they were no place for kids) of stiflingly long waits in grim and desolate benefit offices for something beyond my infant understanding, casting awed and curious glances at men, big men, but clearly men who were beaten and broken by something I couldn’t quite determine. I know now that these men were broken by the emasculating feeling of unemployment. Contrary to Tory rhetoric, these men wanted to work but, for some, a non-descript looking office just a half hour’s drive away from St Helens’ dole office, could mean that they never would.

With a figure like White at the heart of the League, relationships with local police and Special Branch were naturally very smooth and, presumably, mutually beneficial. Indeed, an ongoing inquiry into undercover policing has, in recent years, been compiling evidence that suggests it is highly probable that Special Branch disclosed information relating to trade unionists to the League.

Dossiers based on information and surveillance were compiled by the League, often for the most innocuous of things. For example, in the mid 1930s, the North West office would provide information to the Warrington-based British Aluminium Company regarding increased trade union membership on their factory floor. By the 1950s, demand was so high at the League that a decision to formalise the “vetting procedure” was taken. However, for many years, senior executives would deny that vetting was even a service that they provided their clients within the car, construction, and engineering industries.

With so much of its background in the security services, it’s perhaps inevitable that the methods of the League and the companies who consulted them were a bit cloak and dagger. These methods even stretched to how the League was reimbursed for their services. Firms appeared reluctant to see the League’s consultancy fees appear in their accounts, clear for shareholders and employees to see, and so their payments were effectively laundered through solicitors’ offices across the land.

In 1986, a time when the public were waking up to what the League were doing and they could no longer deny that vetting took place, its then director general, Michael Noar, excused his client base’s desire for secrecy, stating that the growing scrutiny on the League’s affairs left them feeling “embarrassed by the public association”. Arguing that the League was the subject of attack by certain political parties and the media, he stressed that: “There is no statutory obligation on us to disclose because we are not a political organisation in the sense that we campaign for or against political parties.” Presumably for Noar, it was just a coincidence that so many of the League were involved in the Conservative Party.

As Noar spoke in 1986, the League checked over 200,000 people for subscribing companies. The procedure was equally “cloak and dagger”. According to the 1988 expose Blacklist: The Inside Story of Political Vetting by Mark Hollingworth and Richard Norton-Taylor, if more than six names were to be vetted, a company was required to make their request by post. The company was expected to put in writing the name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number, and occupation of those they wish checked, and a unique code that identifies the company, given to them by the League, was to be marked at the top of the page. On receipt of the letter, the League would then consult two sets of files for their answers.

The first, was known as “raw data” or “low grade material”; these dossiers kept note of an individual’s political activities or beliefs and were not said to be used for vetting, but for future reference – presumably, in case they expanded on their activities. Much of the data compiled within these files derived from newspapers, left wing journals, and the campaign publications from various pressure groups. In the highly politicised 1980s, no one was safe from the attention of the Economic League, not even celebrities. With stars and broadcasters increasingly lending their names to causes as diverse as the miners’ strike and the CND movement, Michael Noar admitted that their names would be gathered in the raw data files, “but there is no question of putting those names on a blacklist”. Noar would go on to admit that the details of “around 20,000” individuals were kept in these raw data files.

The second dossier to be consulted was the more serious “subversive” file. Kept on a card index, Noar estimated that these files contained “approximately 10,000” names whose trade union and political record proved, in his eyes, that they were “clearly opposed to a capitalist free enterprise society” and therefore a risk to employers.

Presumably, and for a fee, Noar was perfectly happy to consign these ordinary men and women, untouched by the spotlight of fame, to the blacklist. Again, speaking in 1986, Noar denied that the records maintained at the League constituted a blacklist: “A blacklist to me is a list of people which says ‘don’t employ these people’, which is not what we say.” Yet that is exactly what these companies were doing after consulting the League.

Having allowed sufficient time for the checks to be made, the company was then expected to ring their branch, identify themselves with the same code, and request the result of the vetting process. In a stroke, people’s futures were altered. “Troublemakers” were discreetly let go of, in a manner which circumvented employment laws that were there to protect individuals from unfair dismissal. Proposed employees who had previously performed favourably at the application process now saw their opportunities snatched away from them with little to no explanation.

One such man was 56-year-old Bill Anderson, a retired proofreader for the Scottish Daily Record and Sunday Mail. In 1987, the North West broadcaster Granada TV investigated the League in their award-winning current affairs series World in Action. Speaking to the programme, Anderson recalled how he applied for a job ad as an Advisory Services Manager. Unbeknownst to the former trade unionist, the job was for the Economic League. He was stunned to receive a letter outlining the role:

“We require you to monitor the revolutionary fringe and identify its supporters and their targets. This entails careful first-hand study and the maintenance and development of our intelligence network.”

Appalled by what he had read, Anderson took the story to his former employer, effectively blowing the whistle on the League’s covert surveillance and information gathering practices. World in Action’s investigative journalists uncovered that Anderson had paid the price for going public – his name was now found on a list in the League’s Glasgow office. Suddenly, breweries that had once seemed very keen to receive his applications for tenancies were now proving unresponsive. Further research conducted by World in Action proved that the breweries in question were subscribers to the League’s services.

World in Action also discovered how inept and cavalier the League’s investigations were. Caught on camera was one official who recommended that a company not employ someone because he had the same surname as someone on the blacklist. The programme was the start of the League’s collapse. At time of broadcast, the League had an income from company subscriptions of around £1m. Three years later, this had fallen to £660,000 with some of its largest subscribers, notably Ford Motor Company, severing all links.

By 1990, a parliamentary inquiry was established about the blacklist. It was the death knell for the organisation which finally ceased operating in 1993. At its close, it was revealed that the League held files on 22,000 people. The number of people whose lives its activities effectively destroyed are impossible to estimate, but it’s clear that it did affect people in our region, and all from a nondescript, little office on Museum Street in Warrington.

header image source: AEU Journal, May 1989

newspaper clippings and blacklist scans via: Michael Hughes / spiesatwork.org.uk