The long fight for justice for asbestos victims
Mike Phipps reviews Bad dust: a history of the asbestos disaster, by Tom White, published by Repeater.
Tom White’s grandfather, a carpenter-builder, died in 1995 at the age of 64 in excruciating pain from malignant mesothelioma, the only known cause of which is exposure to asbestos. His grandmother received compensation from the Department of the Environment totalling £4, 710. Four years later, asbestos was banned in the UK.
In 2021, the Health & Safety Executive recorded that asbestos had killed around 5,000 people in Britain, although many researchers believe that this is a serious underestimate, and that the real total was closer to 20,000. Around seven million tonnes were imported and used between the 1870s and the late 1990s and we are still living with the consequences — Britain has the highest per capita rate of mesothelioma in the world.
Despite the ban, asbestos remains in place in thousands of buildings across the UK – there has been no coordinated removal programme. Meanwhile, over a million tonnes are still mined every years and only 71 countries have banned the material.
Racial capitalism
Bad Dust traces a history of the asbestos disaster. The first half of the book examines the highly profitable mining of the mineral in apartheid South Africa, where the price of asbestos trebled in the decade to 1960. By the mid-1950s, young mineworkers were being diagnosed with asbestosis after only a few months of employment and were often sacked without compensation, when they became too sick to work. Many were drawn from a wide hinterland across southern Africa and returned home to die in poverty.
An extremely interesting detail here is the development of an analysis by South African Marxists that the modern apartheid state, far from being an aberrant hangover from the Boer frontier, was something more fundamental. They argued that the formalisation of the state’s racism and authoritarianism was traceable to “the ‘mineral revolution’ of the late nineteenth century, the penetration of Southern Africa by British capital and imperialism, and the accompanying growth of the migrant labour system.”
Far from being an archaic anachronism that the economic development of the country would sweep away, modern apartheid was essentially an economic system – racial capitalism. White traces how the radicalisation of anti-apartheid forces in South Africa – particularly through the development of the Azanian Peoples’ Organization – led to calls for a complete ban on the asbestos industry. “We’d rather starve than sell our lives,” Building Allied Mining and Construction Workers Union General Secretary Pandelani Nefolovidwe said at the launch of the campaign in 1985.
Belated action
In the asbestos processing factories of northern England too, workers suffered from asbestos poisoning and died young, yet the owners refused for decades to pay a penny of compensation, despite the medical evidence. The 1982 broadcast of an ITV documentary, however, watched by six million viewers, brought home the human impact of the disease and led to demonstrations in several cities. It forced the government to take belated, limited action – while the asbestos companies hired private investigators to compile a dossier on the programme makers.
White believes that the failure to develop a full Occupation Health Service in the post-war years was central to the issue not being acted on years earlier. In the absence of state legislation, he evaluates the action taken by trade unions to protect their members against the health hazards associated with the material – by dockers, shipyard and building workers, sometimes in the face of opposition from their own union leaders. The TUC in particular comes in for some trenchant criticism for putting jobs before health.
The second half of the book explores the development of the anti-asbestos movement, often in the form of local community initiatives, but soon coming up against powerful national and international corporate interests. The struggle to ban chrysotile – white asbestos – seemed on the verge of victory in 1998, until the Health and Safety Commission pulled back from publishing draft regulations, apparently on the direct orders of Tony Blair’s office. The French government’s decision to ban chrysotile was being challenged by Canada, where the substance was manufactured, through the World Trade Organisation. Demonstrations at the Canadian embassies in London, Copenhagen, and Sydney followed. It was the EU, over a year later, that took the decision to ban asbestos, with the UK falling into line.
But there was no attempt to address the issue of removal, increase funding for research into asbestos-related diseases or tackle the increasingly adversarial treatment of victims. “The New Labour government,” argues White, “had a historic opportunity to fold the challenge of asbestos removal into a broader renewal of the public realm and, at the same time, to reassert social security as a right, not a favour. It did neither.”
Litigation
The limitations of what the government had done were underlined by a High Court judgment in 2001. The Court ruled in the case of a carpenter who had worked for a number of companies that because it was impossible to identify which company had exposed him to the “guilty fibre,” or indeed whether his illness was caused by environmental exposure, neither could be held liable for his death. The decision was a shock: “The proliferation of asbestos in the built environment, a situation that had been pursued relentlessly by the industry and from which it had profited enormously, could apparently now be marshalled in service of their exoneration, rather than their guilt.” After much campaigning, the ruling was overturned by the Law Lords. But the line of argument that no single company could be held responsible was championed ruthlessly by the asbestos firms in other cases.
Meanwhile, after lengthy litigation, South African asbestos mining companies reached settlements worth millions of pounds with miners whose health had been destroyed by the industry. In one case, despite the company repeatedly saying it had nothing to hide, the settlement stipulated that payment would not be made unless the plaintiffs’ lawyers agreed to destroy all the evidence they had received during the hearings. “The money from the settlements soon disappeared, much of it spent on doctors’ bills, but across the country, the asbestos remains.”
Long after the ban on asbestos, its victims continued to suffer, thanks to benefit cuts in the years of austerity. Cuts to the Health and Safety Executive budget meant successful awareness campaigns were abandoned. In 2012, it emerged that a planned year-long audit of the condition of England’s 23,000 schools would exclude asbestos. The government agreed a new compensation scheme with the industry behind closed doors where the compensation rate was set lower than the average payment recoverable in civil claims. The scheme’s narrow focus on mesothelioma meant that those suffering from other asbestos-related illnesses were excluded. Asbestos Victims Support Group Forum chair Tony Whitson described it as a “gift” to the insurance industry.
The total cost of removing asbestos from all schools and hospitals is high – around £15.6 billion. Yet an estimated 1,400 school staff and 12,600 former pupils died from mesothelioma between 1980 and 2021. Asbestos is a recyclable substance, but, as the author notes, recycling it, “like the notion of a global energy transition, raises nothing less than the question of democratic planning of the global economy.”
Will Labour tackle the crisis? If this meticulously researched book helps raise awareness and encourage more grassroots campaigning, the government might yet be forced to acknowledge the ongoing scale of the disaster and do something about it.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
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