A BILLIONAIRE family once headed by a key player in an operation which blacklisted trade unionists and others from employment is bankrolling the Conservative Party, The Ferret can reveal.
The Cayzer family – a late member of which was vice president of the Economic League – have given £844,500 to the Tory Party since 2001.
The League secretly gathered information about individuals on behalf of hundreds of employers who helped fund the group.
But the details held on some workers – some of whom lost their livelihoods – were exposed as false or inaccurate by campaigners and journalists, which led to the league being disbanded in 1993. A successor outfit that illegally monitored workers was shut down in 2009.
Recent recipients of donations from the Cayzer family and their companies include the Dumfries and Galloway Tory Party branch and MP David Mundell.
A Labour MSP accused the Tories of being “devoid of ethics” for accepting the donations. A trade union claimed the league had “sinister motives” and that those involved must not be allowed to “slip back into obscurity”.
THE CAYZER FAMILY
THE Cayzers are made up of relatives and close descendants of London-born Charles William Cayzer, who founded the Glasgow shipping firm, Clan Line, in 1878 before becoming a Dunbartonshire councillor and Tory MP for Barrow-in-Furness.
He reportedly bought a Scottish estate for each of his six sons, and was given the title of Baronet of Gartmore, named after his Stirlingshire estate.
But it was his grandson, Ayrshire-born William Nicholas Cayzer, who was involved in the Economic League, serving as vice-president. William was reportedly made a life peer by Margaret Thatcher after he gave £95,000 to her party.
In 1988, a Scottish Labour MP, who branded the League a “private enterprise secret police force”, claimed William was one of its “leading lights” and his companies were the Tory Party’s “leading financiers”.
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The peer died in 1999, and the current patriarch, Charles, who was not directly linked to the League, chairs The Cayzer Trust Company, which has given £642,500 to the Tories. The Cayzer Trust Company was a member of the League.
A notable landowning family valued at £1.2 billion, the Cayzer’s Scottish estates have included Ralston in Renfrewshire, Cove in Argyll, and Kinpurnie in Angus – then Scotland’s most expensive property.
According to the Who Owns Scotland land database, trustees of the current Charles Cayzer, and others, own Corrybrough and Clune estates at the edge of the Cairngorms National Park.
HISTORY OF THE ECONOMIC LEAGUE
ORIGINALLY called National Propaganda, the League was founded after the First World War to promote capitalism and deter Communism – particularly in working-class communities, and the factories and companies that employed them.
Working with the police and MI5, tens of thousands of individuals were spied on and profiled, and the information was shared with companies that helped fund the outfit.
Individuals barred from employment by these firms included those considered to have extreme left-wing views, or whose past activity was troublesome to employers, such as filing complaints about health and safety, or instigating industrial action.
Also included were those who campaigned for nuclear disarmament, or against apartheid in South Africa, including a Midlothian SNP activist. But those denied a job had no knowledge of why they were rejected, with one individual unknowingly blacklisted for being falsely linked to terrorism.
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The stress of unemployment reportedly led to some trade unionists losing their homes, getting divorced, or having fewer children.
Among those blacklisted were the actor Ricky Tomlinson and John Mann before he was a Labour MP. Mann claimed that his blacklisting in the 1980s saw him denied work while he was raising a young family, and aiming to move closer to his terminally ill mother.
The League also reportedly held files on journalists and 40 Labour MPs, including Gordon Brown. Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, last year promised that in government, her party would “stamp out blacklisting once and for all”.
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While the League was wound up in 1993, a private investigator who worked for the outfit reportedly commandeered its records and set up the Consulting Association – another blacklisting organisation designed to monitor construction workers.
The director of a construction firm founded by a Scots businessman admitted to loaning £20,000 to the association and was believed to have “acted as a non-executive chair”.
The association’s database, which breached data laws and ignored privacy rights, was seized during a raid by the Information Commissioner in 2009, and warning letters were sent to 40 companies suspected of blacklisting workers.
DONATIONS
SOME £43,500 of the Cayzer’s Tory donations went north of the Border.
Dumfriesshire MP Mundell and his local party took money from the family via the Cayzer Trust, their investment arm, Caledonia Investments, and two individuals – the nephew of the League’s Nicholas Cayzer, Peter Buckley, and his wife, Mary. The Buckleys have no direct links to the League, however.
The latest donation, of £8500, was given to the Dumfries and Galloway Tories in May by the family Trust, while Mary Buckley gifted £7500 to Mundell in March – both just months ahead of the July General Election, in which the former Scottish secretary was re-elected.
Buckley, a reported Cayzer trust representative who owns Westerhall Estate north of Langholm in Dumfriesshire, has continued to fund Mundell and his local party since her husband died in 2008.
A Cayzer charitable arm has also funded a local newspaper in Mundell’s constituency.
Between 2001 and 2009, the former family patriarch, James Cayzer, donated £11,000 to the North Tayside and Angus Tory branches, where his residence of Kinpurnie Castle was located. James, a major Cayzer trust shareholder who died in 2012, had no known involvement with the League.
The Cayzers also gave £50,000 to MP Lee Anderson before he defected from the Tories to Reform UK, and backed others, including former vice chair of the Tory Party, Ben Bradley.
‘DEVOID OF ETHICS’
LABOUR MSP Richard Leonard said: “That the Tories are still accepting donations from super-rich aristocratic families associated with the blacklisting scandal is shocking.”
He added: “It shows how desperate and devoid of ethics they are.”
Gary Cook, a senior organiser for the GMB Scotland union, said the extent of workers losing their livelihoods due to the league’s “entirely sinister motives” was unknown.
“The covert collection and distribution of information on union members to ensure they would not be hired continues to stain this country’s industrial history,” he argued.
“We should not allow those responsible, who hid in the shadows for so long, to slip back into obscurity. What they did cannot be forgotten or whitewashed from the history books.”
Cook added: “Anyone continuing to accept support from those implicated in compiling those lists or their families should consider the widespread revulsion and whether that is something they want to be associated with.”
The Cayzers, Caledonia Investments, the Conservative Party and David Mundell did not respond to The Ferret’s requests to comment.
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