Remembering the Battle of Orgreave

 

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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.

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.