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John Spellar MP
[UK Parliament Official Portrait / Creative Commons]
A SERVING Labour MP has been urged to clarify whether he helped Margaret Thatcher’s government spy on left-wing trade unionists.
Lawyers for the Blacklist Support Group (BSG) have written to John Spellar MP, a former minister in Tony Blair’s government, seeking clarification on his potential involvement in secret meetings between Norman Tebbit and a leader of electricians’ union EETPU in the 1980s.
The Tory peer recently revealed that he had met with a leader of the now-defunct union while he was Thatcher’s employment secretary, seeking advice on how to deal with left-wing trade unionists.
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Forty years on, TONY DUBBINS revisits the Wapping dispute to argue that Murdoch’s real aim was union-busting – enabled by Thatcherite laws, police violence, compliant unions and a complicit media
Four decades on, the Wapping dispute stands as both a heroic act of resistance and a decisive moment in the long campaign to break trade union power. Lord JOHN HENDY KC looks back on the events of 1986