A retired policeman who worked for a secretive unit monitoring political protests is suing a trade union over claims that he colluded with an unlawful blacklisting operation that prevented construction workers from getting jobs.
In a libel claim lodged in the High Court, Gordon Mills, who worked for five years in the unit, has accused the GMB of defaming him and is claiming up to £10,000 in damages.
His legal action is being defended by the GMB which said it had been acting in the public interest. The union said there was “credible evidence” suggesting that Mills, while he was a police officer, shared information with construction firms which were funding a clandestine blacklist of workers.
In 2006, Mills joined the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit which gave advice to companies, universities and other organisations that were the objects of protests.
He said that after he retired in 2011 after 30 years in the police, he wanted to pursue a career in academia, based on his work in the Metropolitan and Cambridgeshire forces. He became a part-time lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University.
The dispute revolves around four statements that were released to the media by the GMB last year, to publicise demonstrations that they were organising across the country against blacklisting.
In the statements, the GMB had said they were mounting the demonstrations “to shame 63 construction industry managers named as blacklisters who have yet to come clean and apologise for their actions.”
One of the demonstrations was held at Anglia Ruskin University as the GMB had said it wanted to “shame Gordon Mills, an ex-Cambridgeshire policeman linked to blacklisting of 3,213 construction workers.”
The GMB had said Mills gave a presentation in November 2008 to the Consulting Association, a secret organisation funded by Britain’s largest construction firms.
The Consulting Association was shut down in 2009 by the Information Commissioner who discovered it had unlawfully compiled a confidential database on the political and employment activities of 3,213 workers.
The construction firms checked the names of workers applying for jobs through the database and those seemed to be troublesome were refused employment. Some workers had raised health and safety issues on construction sites.
In his claim, Mills says the GMB’s accusations had seriously damaged his reputation, had caused him “serious distress and injury”, and in particular, had harmed his chances of advancing his academic career.
He says the accusations had wrongly portrayed him as “a former senior police officer who had been involved in the unlawful and disgraceful practice of blacklisting, colluding with construction firms covertly to blacklist construction workers for being union or health and safety activists.”
He says the accusations had also depicted him as refusing to “apologise and come clean about his involvement in the systematic, covert blacklisting of 3,213 workers and as a result, he deserved to be publicly shamed and humiliated.”
In its defence submitted at the high court earlier this year, the GMB denies that its statements to the media had caused serious harm to his reputation, or that they could be interpreted in the way Mills had alleged.
The union claims that it had a reasonable belief that during or after the 2008 meeting, Mills “had suggested a two-way information exchange and that following the meeting there had been a two-way information exchange between NETCU and the Consulting Association … which, it might properly be inferred, had contributed to blacklisting.”
The GMB cites what it says are notes written by Ian Kerr, while he ran the Consulting Association on behalf of the construction firms. These notes, according to the GMB, recorded that Mills, Kerr and a number of construction executives had been at the 2008 meeting and that the purpose of the meeting was “to liaise with industry and explain NETCU’s role.”
The GMB claims: “Kerr’s notes record that much of the meeting was concerned with [Mills] giving the attendees an overview of NETCU’s work on environmental and animal rights activists. Mr Kerr’s notes record DI Mills as saying ‘Cos [companies] need to have strong vetting procedures in place’.”
In its defence, the GMB also says that, according to the notes and a media interview given by Kerr, “in the weeks that followed there was further contact and/or information exchange” between Mills and those at the meeting.
The GMB claims that it included Mills in the demonstrations as it wanted to raise the public profile of allegations that police had been covertly colluding with blacklisters. No date has been fixed for a trial.
This year the construction firms brought to an end a long-running legal action when they apologised and agreed to pay about £75m in compensation to 771 workers for placing them on the illegal blacklist. Payouts to individuals ranged from £25,000 to £200,000.
