Exposed – Bosses at the World’s biggest asbestos factory
It has been revealed that bosses at Turner and Newall, the world’s biggest asbestos factory, spied on journalists and environmental campaigners who exposed the killer dust’s dangers and then launched a covert campaign to discredit them by accusing them of being communists.
Jason Addy, the Rochdale-based campaigner and PhD researcher has uncovered documents from industry archives revealing that Turner and Newall executives monitored people they considered ‘subversive’ and kept a dossier of their activities at the height of the asbestos safety debate in the 1980’s.
Among the thousands of archive pages there is damming correspondence between Newall and Turner and Rochdale’s then MP, Cyril Smith.
Cyril Smith was enlisted by Turner and Newall in an attempt to discredit the makers of an award-winning documentary, Yorkshire TV’s Alice: A fight for Life that told how asbestos workers were dying from cancer.
In a letter sent from the firms Rochdale factory to Smith’s office at the House of Commons, they made arrangements to meet ahead of the select committee hearing where Yorkshire TV directors were due to give evidence and attached a number of questions that were deemed’ suitable’ as ‘thought starters’ for the committee.
At the hearing, the TV directors had to defend suggestions that researchers on the programme had communist sympathies-dangerous allegations at the time.
Smith later admitted that he owned shares in Turner and Newall.
Mr Addy said: “The Alice documentary was ground breaking. The revelations about asbestos cancer in the workforce and environment were chilling. The scandal and injustices revealed were met with more than silence from Smith. Instead of defending dying workers and their families he instead went on the offensive to defend asbestos. He faced some of these allegations whilst still alive. He callously dismissed then in an interview to BBC TV – ‘nobody made them work there… they could have left’.”
Mr Addy is one of a number of campaigners calling for a full-scale inquiry into what they describe as “decades” of espionage against campaign groups in the UK.
Ref: Independent, Rochdale News