Operation Reuben: The Met Police and the construction blacklist

A stone's throw from St Paul's Cathedral, a public inquiry is investigating how and why police officers became engaged in industrial scale spying on law-abiding members of the public. 

Generating little press coverage, the Undercover Policing Inquiry has already established that between 1968 and 2010, officers infiltrated more than 1,000 primarily left-wing political organisations - including unions. 

In 2023, chairman Sir John Mitting published a damning report about the first 14 years – 1968 to 1982 – which found just three of the groups police targeted had actually been justified.

He said the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) – an arm of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch – should have been shut down in the 1970s.

“The question is whether or not the end justified the means,” he wrote.

“I have come to the firm conclusion that, for a unit of a police force, it did not; and that had the use of these means been publicly known at the time, the SDS would have been brought to a rapid end.”

But one question the report did not address is whether those undercover officers were supplying information not only to their bosses, but to industry leaders, who used it to blacklist left-wing labourers.

One police investigation has already found that they did, but indirectly. That investigation was called Operation Reuben (also known as Operation Herne) and was conducted in direct response to a formal complaint by a group of blacklisted workers.

It confirmed, at least in part, what investigative journalists and blacklisted workers had been trying to tell the public for decades.

The Economic League

In 1919, a group called the Economic League began managing a blacklist across multiple industries, to block labourers deemed “left-wing troublemakers” from getting work.

The existence of that blacklist was publicly revealed in 1987 by ITV’s World In Action documentary series, which aired three half-hour documentaries that provoked extensive follow-up newspaper coverage.

In the first – called The Boys on the Blacklist – two undercover reporters posed as employers and secretly filmed their meeting with one of the Economic League’s organisers, Alan Harvey.

He spoke freely of “police collusion”, telling the reporters of a reciprocal agreement whereby the Economic League provided information to Special Branch and it was “not unfriendly back”.

Local police claimed they investigated these claims and found no supporting evidence. But all records of this investigation were destroyed before blacklisting victims could demand access to it.

Mired in scandal after the TV and newspaper headlines, the Economic League was supposedly dismantled in 1993.

The investigation report into Operation Reuben/Herne - which probed allegations that undercover spy cops facilitated industry blacklisting - was marked for the Met Police commissioner's eyes only. It was later released under Freedom of Information laws (Image: Met Police)

The Consulting Association

But from its ashes rose a ‘new’ outfit called The Consulting Association (TCA), which continued to run a construction industry blacklist.

TCA’s managing director had been part of the Economic League’s construction branch.

The Economic League's existing files on construction workers were simply taken over by TCA.

Over time, Operation Reuben later found, “TCA’s blacklist grew to incorporate campaigners with no direct link to the industry but who were deemed to pose a risk due to their beliefs and linked subversive activities, eg. animal rights and environmental campaigners.”

So a law-abiding person who went on an anti-fox hunting march, for example, might suddenly find himself blacklisted, driving his family into poverty, perhaps even costing them their home.

Blacklist seized

In 2002, a BBC investigation into the Economic League’s former blacklisting activities again suggested police had been among those supplying the information used to ruin workers’ lives.

But specifically, it alleged that they had been undercover police, spying on the labourers.

In 2009, the Guardian began its own blacklisting investigation. In 2010, a former undercover officer told the newspaper he knew information he had gathered was used in blacklisting files.

The Guardian investigation sparked action by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which regulates data use in the UK.

It raided TCA’s offices, seizing the blacklist and associated records.

Ian Kerr, who had been TCA’s managing director, admitted his involvement in blacklisting but was fined just £5,000 – the maximum fine at the time.

Observation reports

The seized files suggested undercover police surveillance had ended up in blacklisting files.

For example, said blacklisted Dagenham union rep Dave Smith, they contained reports about workers being “observed” at anti-fascist demonstrations in central London, which seemed highly unlikely to have been compiled by their bosses.

If so, it meant the state had spent taxpayers’ money conspiring with industry leaders to destroy people’s lives and careers, purely for their political beliefs.

David Clancy, a former police officer-turned-ICO investigator, testified before the Scottish government that he suspected information in the files came “from the police and the security organisations”, due to “the language contained within some of the reports”.

Operation Reuben/Herne found it proven that information gathered by undercover spy cops had somehow found its way into the hands of construction industry blacklisters (Image: Met Police)

More from Newsquest on the Spy Cops inquiry:

• Undercover spy cop 'organised Debenhams animal rights bombings'
• 'Dad always said he was being spied on... It's strange to see it in print'
• 'I was spied on by undercover cops... It sounds like insane conspiracy theory'

Operation Reuben

The Blacklist Support Group, founded by Dave Smith, retained lawyers and filed a formal “corruption” complaint against the Met in 2012.

The resulting investigation – Operation Reuben/Herne – found it “proven” that “police, including special branches and the security services, supplied information to the blacklist funded by the country’s major construction firms, The Consulting Association and/or others.”

It said there was “no evidence” that the Special Demonstration Squad “set out to procure information” or “provided any information directly” for blacklisting.

But it found that “sections of the policing community throughout the UK had both overt and covert contact with external organisations”, which included “a potentially improper flow of information from Special Branch to external organisations, which ultimately appeared on the blacklist.”

“Operation Herne has clearly established that on the balance of probabilities and based upon the extent of investigations conducted to date, the allegation that police or Special Branches supplied information is ‘proven’,” the report said.

“There appears to be a case to answer for unauthorised sharing of information under the Data Protection Act 1984.”