Sheffield Socialist Party member
13 years of relentless campaigning by ex-miners and supporters in the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC) has finally forced the Labour government to carry out it’s manifesto commitment, announcing that there will be an independent inquiry, with statutory powers, into the role of the police and Tory government in the ‘Battle of Orgreave’.
On 18 June 1984, during the year-long miners’ strike to save jobs and communities, 95 striking miners were arrested at Orgreave, near Sheffield. Police in full riot gear, with truncheons, dogs, and charging horses, brutally attacked miners dressed in T-shirts and trainers, who had gathered for a mass picket at the coking plant.
Those 95 miners were later charged with either riot or unlawful assembly, offences that could carry a life prison sentence. But when the cases went to court, the trial collapsed due to the unreliable and untruthful evidence of South Yorkshire Police. All 95 were acquitted.
But in 2016, the then Tory Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, callously ruled out such an inquiry on the grounds that “there were no deaths or wrongful convictions.” More like a cover up!
So the OTJC has welcomed the inquiry ordered by Labour Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, but wants to make sure that the inquiry has the power to require all the relevant information and evidence to be produced to it, especially in the light of Northumbria police having already destroyed all their Orgreave files (another cover-up!). And OTJC say “the inquiry must ensure those who have an interest in the inquiry must be able to fully participate in order to lend their experience, knowledge and understanding to the process, and be accessible and inclusive to allow people to provide oral contributions to the evidence-gathering process.”
Given the increasingly authoritarian nature of Keir Starmer’s government, it’s all credit to OTJC for achieving this inquiry. It is quite right that it demands the exposure of the role of the state and government in the political policing of the miners’ strike, and not just the blaming of a few ‘bad apples’.
