Alistair Tice, Sheffield Socialist Party
40 years ago on 18 June there was a massive ‘police riot’ on the outskirts of Sheffield. Now, a renamed and privately owned housing estate stands on the site of the infamous ‘Battle of Orgreave’.
In 1984, 180,000 miners, members of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), began a year-long strike to try to save their jobs, communities and futures against the mass pit closure programme of the National Coal Board and Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government.
Three months into the strike, miners began to picket the coking works at Orgreave to try to stop haulage lorries from transporting coke (coal-based fuel) to Scunthorpe steelworks 40 miles away. There’d been a few days of skirmishes with the police, but then on 18 June, a mass picket of miners was ambushed and brutalised by a state-directed paramilitary police force (see right).
95 miners were arrested and charged with either riot (with the potential of a life sentence) or unlawful assembly. When the cases went to court, all the miners were acquitted when it became clear the police had falsified evidence. But no one in the police or government has ever been held to account for the violence and lies, including the BBC reversing film footage to falsely portray miners attacking the police first.
In 2016, the then Tory home secretary, Amber Rudd announced there would be no Orgreave inquiry, citing among other spurious reasons, that nobody had actually died! The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC) was set up over a decade ago to campaign for a such an inquiry to get justice for those miners, and expose the role of the police and complicity of the Thatcher government in what has been described as Britain’s ‘civil war without guns’!
Join us on Saturday 15 June at 1pm when the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign is holding a 40th Anniversary march and rally outside the City Hall, Barkers Pool, Sheffield.
Eyewitness: ‘The police were like rabid dogs’
40 years ago I was about to experience something that would change my whole life. In a place called Orgreave I was to experience, like many others, just whose side the police were on.
By the time of the first mass picket at Orgreave I was an experienced picketer. My tactics in dodging police to get to the pits, especially in Nottingham to picket, were second-to-none.
That first picket at Orgreave felt wrong. As we walked down to Orgreave there was no harassment from coppers, lads were shopping at the local Asda – it was like a carnival day.
Dressed in our shorts, t-shirts and trainers, we met up with the ‘thin blue line’ of coppers as far as the eye could see. Suddenly we saw the lorries carrying coke coming towards the Orgreave entrance. We surged forwards to stop them, roaring ‘here we go’, but once the lorries were inside Orgreave the coppers moved into us in an arrow-shaped formation. They charged and opened us up and the cavalry raced forward with huge wooden truncheons. It was like a game of polo to them as they smashed their truncheons down.
They were like rabid dogs let loose. My trust in the police ended that day forever.
We made a mistake not being prepared for them. Never make that mistake again.
Rebel with a cause, Rotherham
