Redacted Scans of Blacklists

Since the 1980's there have been two copies of Blacklists produced by the Economic League for is subscribers. Access to these have been made available to those who were interested pursuing litigation against the League or companies using their services, and to journalists investigating these activities. Those of us who have had access to the blacklists have been rigorous in avoiding putting them in the public domain since they were produced by the League to do harm to those blacklisted.

This is frustrating because it is only when you beginning to look ar them that you really fget a feel for how organised and extensive this conspiracy was, and how disorganised and shambolic was it's operation.

This is the first publication of a representation of these list and they have been heavily redacted so that they cannot be conceivably used for their original purpose, And of course the reality  is that most of the 20-30000 people  blacklisted on these two lists  in the 1980's will not be woking and very many will no longer be alive.

The first of the redacted blacklists is  a centrally held list ad it consists of nearly 1000 A 4 photocopies of Kardex trays, each with information on individuals held to be subversive or a risk of causing industrial unrest. 

Redacted Scan of Central Economic League  Blacklist

The second is a list held, and compiled locally in this case in the North West of England.

Redacted Scan of Economic League  North West England Blacklist

Both of the files are a snapshots of the registry files for the Economic League nationally, and in its regional offices,  They are the header line of index cards that contain more detailed information. While the overwhelming majority of the cards refer to individuals some cards refer to organisations including political parties and trade unions.

It is a nothing more complex than alphabetic index, there is no categorising of entries or cross tabulation. we have introduced line numbers to assist in navigating round the lists and counting entires. There is no consistent labelling on the headings and deaths of birth and National Insurance Numbers and home addresses are all but not always added. There are some entries which can't possibly identify an individual.

The central list includes what seem to be more than 11,000 entries, however the  vagaries of Adobe's Optical Character  Recognition (OCR) system which enabled this redaction to be carried out actually mist many complete lines out, rather then just representing them as unintelligible cont=stellations of punctuation marks. This list probably has closer to 20,000 entries.

The Northwest list is generally and better photocopy and includes more than 7,000 entires. The Entries for the North East, Scotland, the East Midlands, and London and the south east would have been similar sizes. What is surprising is that there is little duplication between the  Central and and North West entires. That may have been reflected in the other regions, What is certain is that the centralising and data cleansing was a source of the disputes within the League during the 1980s. And that led in turn to the disclosure of these two blacklists.

Note on redaction.

The combination of Adobe's OCR and the quality of Economic League's photocopiers have introduced  a randomised organic redaction to these lists. Fortunately all surnames and organisational names  were typed in capital letters. All capitals  have all been replaced by ampersands.  While there is not binding place for "&iverpool and &"anchester" or "&illiam" or "&eborah" there are no Surnames, All numbers have been replaced by the hash symbol, which disguises DoB, precise addresses and NI numbers now look like "&& ## ## ## ## &".

I think it is unlikely that anyone would recognise any they  know or knew in this redacted list. There may be some who have a hunch that they may be the person redacted in which case if they send  some of the missing information through, we will try to confirm or otherwise.