Today I remember of one of the 20th Century's most
brutal attacks by the state on its own citizens.The Battle of Orgreave,
which took place during the1984 Miners strike,which resulted in an all out paramilitary
operation aided by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative cabinet. The miners' strike of 1984-85 was the longest lasting and most brutal and bitter industrial disputes of the second half of the 20th century in
Britain. It had a huge impact on virtually every subsequent industrial
and political development.
In 1981, Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher launched a war on unions by announcing the closure of 23 coal pits, starting an on-going industrial dispute which crescendoed at Orgreave 3 years later. On March 1, 1984, the state owned National Coal Board under American Ian
MacGregor announced that it planned to close 20 coal pits with
the loss of over 20,000 jobs. This decision was to go and pit Mrs
Thatchers government against the NUM and its then president, Arthur
Scargill.
The year-long strike that followed would change the political, economic and social history of Britain forever. The courage and determination of the striking miners, their families and communities would charge and inspire the political consciousness of hundreds of thousands of people, as it did for me, aged 16 and a half at the start of the strike.
The year-long strike that followed would change the political, economic and social history of Britain forever. The courage and determination of the striking miners, their families and communities would charge and inspire the political consciousness of hundreds of thousands of people, as it did for me, aged 16 and a half at the start of the strike.
In the early months of the strike the mass picketing and flying picket
tactics employed by Arthur Scargill had proved devastatingly
effective and police had responded with road blocks to turn traffic
back.So on June 18th 1984, the National Union of Miners (NUM) mobilized 10,000 striking miners to picket Orgreave cokeworks near Rotheram in South
Yorkshire. The
miners wanted to stop lorry loads of coke leaving for the steelworks.
They thought that would help them win their strike, and help protect
their pits and their jobs and communities However the police were determined to hold them back.
A force of 5,000 police officers descended onto Orgreave to break the
pickets, armed with riot equipment, armoured vehicles, attack dogs and
military horses. Unprovoked, baton-wielding police charged the miners on
horseback and the fleeing picketers were chased through the terraced
streets of Orgreave; many were badly beaten and dozens were arrested.The number of officers was unprecedented. The use of dogs, horses and
riot gear in an industrial dispute was almost unheard of. Some of the
tactics were learned from the police in Northern Ireland and Hong Kong
who had experience dealing with violent disorder.
During the subsequent court case a police manual was uncovered which
set out the latest plans to deal with pickets and protests. Police vans
and Range Rovers were fitted with armour so they could
withstand the stones being thrown by some in the crowd. The miners
suspected the whole operation was being run under government control.
Many believe Orgreave was the first example of what became known as
“kettling” – the deliberate containment of protesters by large numbers
of police officers. It marked a turning point in policing and in the
strike. Police directed pickets to an area of land which left them hemmed in
on three sides.Before this event the miners had been stoically out on
strike for about 12 weeks, during which they had been assaulted on
picket lines, with individuals being handcuffed and beaten without any
cause or provocation.
At Orgreave the miners after being herded together. were
savagely attacked by Police cavalry in full riot gear under the
jurisdiction of Thatcher's Government attacking fleeing miners with
long swaying batons as Miners ran for safety. It saw the police going
berserk under state orders, repeatedly attacking individuals wherever
they sought refuge, as they fled into a nearby Wheat field and into the
community of Orgreave, where the police carried on their pursuit
through the streets. It resulted in scenes of ugliness, fear and menace, as all
concepts of Law and order that the constabulary were supposed to
withhold were abandoned, that left skulls cracked, bloodied and beaten, bodies littering the ground. The police frenzy at Orgreave was consciously designed to batter the NUM into submission.
Far
from the liberal ideal of a politically neutral body serving the public
the police were used at Orgreave to further the anti-socialist rampage
which dominated Thatcher's 1980's. As Michael Mansfield QC wrote :"They
wanted to teach the miners a lesson, a big lesson, such as they wouldn't
come out in force again."
At the end the day 95 people were arrested, for no crime
whatever, detained without ready access to medical treatment, denied bail
altogether or only granted it on terms equivalent to house arrest, and
charged with the grave offence of riot, which carried a substantial
prison sentence.The aim was to ruin the strikers’ reputations, by presenting them as a group of thugs.At least 79 people were injured with some never recovered from, wjile others never ever recovered their jobs, families were scarred,
and most saw their workplaces and communities decimated.
To add further injury the BBC reversed the order of events in its news footage to corroborate
the police cover-up, that violent miners launched an unprovoked attack Yet later admitted that it, “made a mistake over the sequence of
events at Orgreave. We accepted without question that it was serious,
but emphasised that it was a mistake made in the haste of putting the
news together. The end result was that the editor inadvertently reversed
the occurrence of the actions of the police and the pickets.” The BBC
also neglected to film a picketer being attacked by a police officer
while offering no resistance, which they later blamed on a “camera
error”.
This dishonest reporting by the broadcast and printed media—that it had
been a riot by miners against the police, rather than the other way
around—set the false narrative for the rest of the Miners’ Strike, with
Margaret Thatcher calling striking miners and their supporters ‘the
enemy within’.to frame arrested miners for one of the most
serious events on the statute book - the offence of Riot. No police
officer has ever been prosecuted or even disciplined for their role in
the terrible events that occurred.
Orgreave revealed the true intentions of
Thatchers government, with the full collusion of the police ,it was
noticed that they had no intention of finding reconciliation or
settlement to this industrial dispute. The sole intention was an
ideological one, to mortally wound the National Union of Mineworkers, to
defeat it with military force and with naked violence ,by any means
necessary.
Just over a year later, in July 1985, the trial of 15 miners charged
with riot and unlawful assembly collapsed with cases against a further
80 miners being subsequently dropped. The ‘enemy within’ were all
acquitted,and eventually police paid out more than £400,000 compensation to 39 people
who had taken action for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment. but the state machinery that had assaulted them and
subsequently fitted them up has never been held to account.
Immediately following Orgreave there were calls for an inquiry into how the
cases ever came to trial and the actions of the police, not just into
the unprecedented violent and military-style policing deployed on the
day, policing that resulted in many serious injuries to miners, but into
the subsequent manufacturing of evidence that was presented at trial.
Several Labour MPs, MPs who had supported the miners throughout the year
strike, including Tony Benn, Martin Flannery, Dennis Skinner and Jeremy
Corbyn along with the NUM called for an inquiry back in 1985.
In October
2016 the Home Secretary Amber Rudd announced that there would be no
statutory inquiry or independent review and some Government papers will not be released until 2066, when those involved will almost certainly be dead.
The miners strike lasted
until March 1985, during which it politicised a generation of people,
sadly however at the end hundreds of mines closed afterwards and many
miners faced redundancy. And dizzy with her own success, Thatcher began a policy of
deindustrialisation of British industry and further impoverishment of
working class people, and a government assault upon unions has
continued since.
The miners strike of 1984 saw a heroic community fighting for jobs and survival was wholly denigrated and depicted as violent by the majority of the British media, at the time. Orgreave marked a turning point in the policing of public protest. It sent a message to the police that they could employ violence and lies with impunity.
It was only a year after Orgreave that the so-called
“Battle of the Beanfield” took place ,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2018/06/battle-of-beanfield-anniversary-lest-we.html with violent and unprovoked
attacks by the police on New Age travellers, followed by large-scale
wrongful arrests. And more recently there have been examples of police
“kettling” demonstrators in London for several hours – a kind of
pre-emptive imprisonment.
In 2012, the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC), was
formed to campaign for a public inquiry into the policing of events at
Orgreave following the success of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign and
revelations about corruption in South Yorkshire Police.An inquiry alone will not be able to provide justice for the miners.
An inquiry would simply be one section of the ruling class
investigating another, which (at best) would result in Orgreave being
put down to rogue police officers and irresponsible government
ministers. But we already know what happened. South Yorkshire Police used violent
tactics to break the pickets and dutifully served as foot soldiers in
Thatcher’s broader class war, the police riot at Orgreave was the work of the whole
state apparatus; the government, police, and media working in tangent to
crush the working class and the most militant sections of the labour
movement. Similar events and state tactics were seen later in the same
decade in the case of the Wapping print strike and the Hillsborough
disaster.
On April 15, 1989 at the Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield,
inadequate crowd safety practices lead to crushing deaths of 96 people
at a match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. A recent inquiry
concluded that South Yorkshire Police, who were responsible for crowd
safety, were not only accountable for the deaths due to gross
negligence, but were also guilty of manipulating witness statements and
giving false evidence to shift the blame onto the fans and the victims
themselves, as had happened at Orgreave.
Unlike the violence at Orgreave, this tragedy was not intended. Yet the police perception of the football fans as
hooligans who needed to be contained (rather than kept safe) and the
subsequent attempts to smear the victims and their families, showed a
blatant disregard for the lives of the people they were supposed to
protect, suggesting contempt for the working class at the South
Yorkshire Police.
Whilst it is hard to say how integral the battle between police and
miners was to stoking this animosity, the subsequent establishment
cover-ups were undoubtedly linked. Thatcher was indebted to the South
Yorkshire Police for their assistance with crushing the unions and in
return provided them with immunity for their failings at Hillsborough.There is also complling evidence that thee same senior officers involved in the politically motivated brutality at Orgreave were also reponsible for the cover up of Hillsborough
The police powers used at Orgreave and throughout the miners’ strike
were about policing people exercising their right to protest. Democracy is not only about parliament and elected representatives.
Protest and the right to assembly are a human right and have a
fundamental role to play in a democratic society, to be part of the
debate and influence and change the agenda.
Protests often challenge the status quo, encourage people and
governments to think differently on fundamental issues and provide an
essential voice for minority or marginalised groups.
The determination and success of the Shrewsbury 24 Campaign having
their convictions overturned after 47 years and plans by the Scottish
government to pardon miners convicted for matters relating to the
’84-5 strike reminds us that the freedom to campaign and protest in a
democracy is essential. If the government does not respect the law, why should we?
Many years later and the lies and massive injustice still remain but the truth will be heard, and the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign continues, please show your support for their campaign for truth and justice and to defend our right to protest.
It is becoming a more dangerous world with the latest laws passed making certain forms of protest illegal.
ReplyDeleteit certainly is With the passing of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, we are living in very dark days for civil liberties in the UK. This deeply-authoritarian Bill places profound and significant restrictions on the basic right to peacefully protest and will have a severely detrimental impact on the ability of ordinary people to make their concerns heard. The inexorable rise of fascism in Britain continues.
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