TWO former managers of the now-defunct Economic League blacklisting outfit have set up a consultancy to keep tabs on "anti-business" pressure groups, trade union activists and socialists.
Going by the politically neutral name of Caprim Limited, it operates from a post office box number in Redditch in the West Midlands. Companies House records list the directors as Stan Hardy, a past director general of the Economic League, and Jack Winder, the organisation's director of information, who each hold 30 €1 shares.
Tribune has been sent photocopies of what appears to be a regular bulletin, Caprim Monitor, spelling out the wide range of McCarthyite services now on offer.
As well as traditional Economic League "labour-screening" activity, which enables bosses to vet the political and HOME trade union background of prospective employees, Caprim also offers an "anti-business monitoring service" which targets "the many and varied organisations whose activities threaten a company's freedom of action".
The Campaign Against the Arms Trade and the Ethical Investment Research and Information Service are given as examples.
The Economic League, established in 1919 to combat the Bolshevik menace on the shop floor, went into voluntary liquidation last year with creditors of As recently as 1987, it claimed to have 15 employees in its London offices, 60 others across the country, and an income of €1,000,000 a year. But with union militancy on the wane and a flurry of unwelcome media interest and parliamentary scrutiny, many companies simply stopped subscribing.
The organisation was heavily criticised for effectively keeping people out of work on the basis of inaccurate or flimsy inPeople were blacklisted for campaigning against hospital closures, signing nomination papers for relatives standing in local elections for the Communist Party or simply for being mentioned in Left-wing newspapers.
Paid spies
The League used paid spies in at least one trade union, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and even the Liberal Party, and monitored such "vehicles for subversion" as Christian Aid, Greenpeace, the Child Poverty Action Group and Oxfam.
The names of mainstream
THE RIGHT-WING coalition of Silvio SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 60, April 16 1994, Page 7