Michael Ivens

Died in 2001.

"Ivens was director from 1971 to 1992 of Aims of Industry, a pressure group established during the Second World War by Lord Beaverbrook and other business leaders to combat the advance of socialism on the shop floor. Aims had campaigned against the post-war Labour government's nationalisation programme, and under the Wilson and Callaghan administrations it stood up both for employers and for individual workers against the might of the unions. Ivens was particularly associated with opposition to the National Dock Labour Scheme, the closed-shop arrangement which kept casual workers out of the docks: Margaret Thatcher, who abolished it, called it "that monument to modern Luddism".

"In 1975, Ivens was also a founder, with Norris McWhirter and Viscount de L'Isle VC, of the National Association for Freedom (NAFF, now the Freedom Association) to campaign against all forms of abuse of individual freedom, particularly from overweening union power. The association established its name through its support of three railwaymen dismissed for refusing to join a union, and achieved a membership, at its peak, of 20,000. It went on to fight an action to prevent British post office unions from boycotting mail to South Africa, and in 1977 it played a prominent role in the Grunwick dispute...

"Ivens was a founder, in 1969, of the Junior Hospital Doctors Association, formed to combat the closed-shop tendencies of the British Medical Association, and of the Foundation for the Study of Terrorism in 1986. He was a member of the advisory council of the Airey Neave Foundation...A devout Catholic, he developed an interest in later years in religious mysticism." [1]