Alistair Tice, Sheffield Socialist Party
There was optimism amongst the hundreds of supporters of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign at the rally in Sheffield, marking the 41st anniversary of the police riot against striking miners.
13 years of relentless campaigning by ex-miners and supporters has led to a positive meeting with the home secretary to discuss implementing Labour’s 2024 manifesto commitment to an Orgreave investigation, and the options and format of the inquiry.
Police riot
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.
However, as the latest report from the campaign says, neither the police or Margeret Thatcher’s Tory government have ever been held to account for “the Conservative government’s political interference and involvement in the 1984-85 miners’ strike, and how they used the courts, violent policing, and the media to demonise and criminalise the miners, and give the police confidence to behave with impunity throughout the strike.”
Amongst the many great speeches at the march and rally this year, Socialist Party member Lois Austin spoke on behalf of the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance (COPS). She explained how, just as during the miners’ strike, over decades, special units of the police and MI5 infiltrated many campaigns – including entering relationships and fathering children, in order to spy on, gather information, and try to provoke violence.
Lois, along with now Socialist Party general secretary Hannah Sell, were spied on for 5-6 years, as young leaders of the Youth Against Racism In Europe (YRE) campaign in the early 1990s. Their undercover cop handler subsequently became a whistleblower, leading to the ongoing public inquiry into undercover policing SpyCops, where Lois is a key witness.
Capitalist state machine Both the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign and COPS have exposed the role of the police as part of the capitalist state machinery – not a neutral impartial arbiter in society, but ultimately “armed bodies of men”, which act to defend the interests of the rich and powerful, whenever they are seriously threatened by the workers’ movement and mass opposition.
