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25-years on from a UK government-ordered union ban

Monday, January 26th, 2009

I am reminded by the Stronger Unions website that today marks the 25th anniversary of the banning of trade unions at the Governments’ intelligence gathering centre GCHQ in Cheltenham.

The denial of a basic human right to GCHQ workers – 14 of them were sacked because of their refusal to resign their union membership – and the “enemy within” language deployed by the government, led to a fierce campaign from trade unions and civil libertarians. The incoming Labour government eventually repealed the ban in 1997.

Where did Amnesty stand on this back in 1984? I don’t know, but maybe the written history of Amnesty-trade union relations, which we have commissioned to be published this year as part of our celebrations, will shed some light.

What I’m pretty sure of is that the decades of co-operation and solidarity in the years since the ban means that if an abuse of that sort happened again, we’d be out there adding our voices in protest. We understand loud-and-clear that the right to form and join trade unions free of harassment and intimidation is a fundamental human right, and if it’s worth fighting for in Iran , in Colombia and in Zimbabwe, it’s certainly worth defending here at home.

In a future dispute of this sort, if someone with the talent of Brian Finch were to make a painting of the demonstration, I would expect to see plenty of Amnesty Workers Rights = Human Rights placards!

Have Your Say: 25-years on from a UK government-ordered union ban
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3 Responses to “25-years on from a UK government-ordered union ban”

PaulStott
Posted: Jan 28th, 2009 at 11:01 am

I was always lukewarm about this issue.

What about the ‘human rights’ of all the people GCHQ workers spied on all those years? Should such characters ever be accepted into the bosom of the trades union movement anyway?

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joe
Posted: Feb 3rd, 2009 at 11:07 am

“I was always lukewarm about this issue.

What about the ‘human rights’ of all the people GCHQ workers spied on all those years? Should such characters ever be accepted into the bosom of the trades union movement anyway?”

excuse me but are you lacking common sense or something? if someone didnt spy on them, then you’d probably be dead by now as most of the people spied on are terrorists

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Ann Downey
Posted: May 3rd, 2009 at 9:08 pm

Grow up please, I was a founder member of the campaign.
Everyone in Britain has the right to belong to a trade union thanks to the sacrifces my colleagues and I made, not that any of you would be interested in what we went through. I tired of gobby dope heads back then as I do now, who inbetween gulps preach peace,but are too cowardly to fight for freedom and democracy. The one thing we can be very proud of here in the UK is we do have freedom of speech, there is no political correctness just good manners.
What a shame though that we have to teach folk manners.
Everyone is special has a contribution to make but Thatcher decided (with her co horts) that greed is good, destroyed home grown industries including a non political civil service, to try to grow an offshore banking haven - oh whoops aren’t we paying for it now. It is this current Government - love or hate them that inherited all that shit and I stopped voting after 1984 after what I saw down in westminster. This month I will break that and vote again.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 6:57 pm and is filed under Contributions & Guests . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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