POLICE officers have been accused of helping to blacklist construction workers in Britain.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission revealed this month that it is “likely that all special branches were involved in providing information” used to keep labourers out of work.
The information emerged from a Metropolitan Police inquiry into whether officers supplied information contained on a secret database held by The Consulting Association.
Labour MP Michael Meacher said the watchdog’s revelation would constitute a “monumental scandal”, outweighing even the phone-hacking scandal, if it were confirmed.
“Phone-hacking is a very serious intrusion into privacy and a breach of human rights, but it does not compare with being deprived of your job for years or even decades on end,” the back-bencher added.
The news that police are likely to have colluded in blacklisting comes as an important development to Irish victims of the illegal database in particular.
Last October, a panel of MPs investigating the practice was told that information in the blacklist about an Irish worker appeared to have come from “sources such as the police and the security organisations”.
