Unite urges Hampshire police to investigate bandwagon leaflets attacking council workers
Unite urges Hampshire police to investigate `bandwagon' leaflets attacking council workers
The country's biggest union, Unite, has written to the Chief Constable of Hampshire police force requesting that they conduct an immediate investigation into the origins of leaflets distributed throughout the Southampton area attacking council workers.
Workers, including refuse workers, have been taking lawful industrial action since late May in protest at their employer's insistence that 4,300 council employees sign new, inferior contracts by July 11th – or lose their jobs.
Unite says that during the first week of strike action leaflets were stuck on residents' bins with the deliberate intention of smearing the workers.
The leaflets carry the Conservative Party logo but make no mention of who had written or produced the leaflets. Failure to clearly establish both authorship and production credentials are infringements of election law, as set out in the Representation of the People Act 1983.
Unite regional secretary, John Rowse, commented: "Our concern is that this leaflet is deliberately designed to cause division between the service users of the city and the workforce. Its purpose is not to inform the people of Southampton but to poison them against a solution being negotiated between the workers and their employers, Southampton City Council.
"This dispute will only be resolved by negotiation between these two groups. Interventions from third parties, made for some other gain, only damage prospects of a peaceful resolution.
"Moreover, in their haste to attack Unite's members, the authors failed to make it clear who produced or distributed this materials and could well have breached electoral law.
"We hope that Hampshire police force will take a dim view of this sort of bandwagon behaviour and caution those who did produce these leaflets to follow the law rather than stirring up antagonism against Southampton's workers."
In the letter to the Hampshire Chief Constable, Unite suggests that the leaflet violates Section 110 of the Representation of the People Act 1983 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1983/2/section/110) and Section 143 of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 as amended by the Electoral Administration Act 2007 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/41/section/143).
The union says the leaflet fails to meet a basic requirement of election law that all printed materials, including websites and emails, used during the campaign bear an imprint of the organisation producing the material.
For further information, please contact Unite press office on 020 3371 2065.
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