Blacklist Support Group – Thank you from Shami Chakrabarti
The Blacklist Support Group were nominated for Human Rights Campaigners of the Year Award at Liberty Awards Ceremony. They say:
And Liberty say:
“Dear Dave and all at Blacklist Support Group,
Thank you for joining us at the Liberty Human Rights Awards on Monday and congratulations on your nomination for the Campaigner of the Year award. We were delighted to be able to acknowledge you and so many other worthy nominees at what we believe may have been our best event yet.
I am so grateful to you all for helping to make the evening such a lively and positive celebration of inspiring work and I hope you are extremely proud of your nomination. The turn out this year spoke volumes in these challenging times and we were delighted by the response and enthusiasm from our guests.
I also want to thank you for your ongoing commitment to human rights which is greatly appreciated by everyone here at Liberty.
You may remember that Sandi Toksvig made the very public gesture of joining Liberty at the end of the evening. If we might tempt you to join us you could go to this web link Join Liberty or phone the membership team on 0207 378 3663.
Best wishes,
SHAMI CHAKRABARTI”
And raising the issue of blacklisting on BBC TV Shami said:
“Phone hacking wasn’t the only privacy or information scandal of recent years and it’s very sad that the construction worker blacklist scandal has really not attracted the same attention.
One of the big things about phone hacking was that a private investigator was storing up all this personal information, people’s phone numbers and so on and that was used for phone hacking. Something similar happened with the Consulting Association that was storing up the names of people on a blacklist.
They were blacklisted because they were trade unionists or they were raising concerns about health and safety; but health and safety on a building site is potentially a life and death matter. There were people whose lives were ruined; they found they couldn’t work in the construction industry for years and years and years.
Interestingly, going back to Leveson, one of the things that hasn’t been touched on in all the coverage, is that Leveson is really concerned that the current Information Commissioner’s Office really didn’t do everything it could have done about phone hacking…. That would apply to this hideous blacklist that has been kept about construction workers.
Now it seems, The Observer tells us that this has affected the Crossrail project and people have been blacklisted and not able to work on that.”