Michael Ivens

From an Obituary in the Guardian

Michael Ivens, who has died aged 77, was a libertarian best known for his campaigns against trade union power in the 1970s, especially as director of Aims of Industry (1971-92), a position he used to promote rightwing views on business freedom, privatisation and the evils of the closed shop. He was also prominent in other rightwing organisations, including what is now the Freedom Association, which he helped to set up in 1975.

But while fiercely opposed to trade unions overriding individual rights, Ivens was not a conventional believer in full-blooded capitalism. In the early 1970s, he co-authored a pamphlet arguing that business had responsibilities to different stakeholders, including employees and suppliers. This viewpoint was briefly pursued through the Foundation For Business Responsibilities, although Ivens, whose second wife, Katy, was a Westminster councillor, resigned from the group after it was implicated in the scandal over Westminster council's gerrymandering at the end of the 1990s....

In the 1960s, he edited the Esso staff magazine, and developed an interest in business, which combined with his politics to create a philosophy bringing together individual liberty and corporate responsibility. This led to the anti-union stance, based on a distaste for subsuming individualism to a collective organisation, a philosophy set out in pamphlets such as The Case For Capitalism and Industry and Values.

Fears about the supposed socialist takeover led some on the eccentric right, including some former senior military officers, to begin talking in terms of counter- revolution. This kind of activity was sponsored by a collection of organisations, one of the least shadowy being the National Association for Freedom (Naff), now the Freedom Association, which was founded in 1975 by Ivens, Colonel Juan Hobbs, of British United Industrialists, Viscount de L'Isle and Norris McWhirter.

Naff's crowning glory was the battle over Grunwick, a photo processing lab in north London where an industrial dispute over union representation blew up into a cause célèbre in 1976. The dispute saw mass picketing, including Arthur Scargill's miners, and court actions by the company, which were financed by Naff. The organisation was widely credited with winning a small business victory against trade union might, and the affair prepared the ground for the Conservatives' anti-union legislation of the 1980s.

Once Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, groups like Naff and Aims of Industry faded away somewhat. Ivens switched his attention, first, to privatisation - and especially contracting out local authorities' direct labour organisations - and, latterly, to the European Union. In the 1997 general election, he was involved in a shadowy group known as Entrepreneurs for a Booming Britain, which placed full-page newspaper advertisements supporting John Major.

Michael William Ivens, campaigner, journalist and poet, born March 15 1924; died November 4 2001