Tuesday briefing: Uncovering the truth behind the bloodshed at Orgreave, four decades on

The Guardian

6 days ago

Good morning. In 1999, the investigative journalist David Conn sat down at home one evening to watch a documentary by the film-maker Yvette Vanson called The Battle for Orgreave, which told the story of the violent policing in 1984 of coalminers at the Orgreave coking plant in Rotherham, South Yorkshire during the miner's strike.
A pivotal moment in the year-long strike by the mining unions, opposed by the Thatcher government, what happened on that day at Orgreave is also remembered as one of the most brutal clashes in British industrial history.
The violence and bloodshed perpetrated by police at Orgreave was already infamous, but it wasn't until David watched Vanson's film that he learned that 95 miners were arrested that day and then put on trial the following year on charges of riot and unlawful assembly. The trial collapsed after the police evidence was discredited.
The film was the start of a 25-year reporting journey for David to investigate the injustice at Orgreave.
His initial reporting into the scandal in 2012, which made links between the conduct of South Yorkshire police at Orgreave and its policing of the Hillsborough disaster five years later, has this week culminated in the government announcing a statutory inquiry in an attempt to get to the truth of what happened at Orgreave more than four decades ago.
For today's newsletter, I talked to David Conn, now the Guardian's investigations correspondent, about his reporting on the Orgreave scandal and the long road towards establishing the inquiry.
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On a hot, cloudless summer morning on 18 June 1984, at the height of the bitter miner's strike, 8,000 miners gathered to picket a coke works in Orgreave. Within hours, the day descended into chaos as the miners faced a force of 6,000 police officers. Police on horseback repeatedly charged the crowd, police bludgeoned picketers and 'snatch squads' were dispatched to arrest over 95 people, who were then charged with rioting.
The incident has become widely known as the 'battle of Orgreave', and was even re-enacted in a famous performance work by the artist Jeremy Deller. But David Conn finds the term inappropriate. 'It suggests two equal sides engaged in conflict. This was, in reality, a scene of shocking police violence with officers riding horses into a crowd of men wearing jeans and T-shirts and then beating unarmed people with police truncheons,' he said. 'The miners went there as part of an industrial dispute and some did throw stones, but the extent of misbehaviour was greatly exaggerated and they were met with a state force that was equipped and ready to inflict violence.'
How this story of a injustice came to be told
Fifteen years later, when David sat down to watch Vanson's documentary, he was shocked by the images of unarmed men being set upon by police, but it was what happened at the trial that was more disturbing. 'I had no idea it had even happened,' he said. 'Yet it was clearly a huge injustice, dubbed an alleged 'frame-up' by South Yorkshire police.'
All 95 men were acquitted after their defence team argued that the police's own footage at Orgreave contradicted the testimony from officers that had been the backbone of the case against those standing trial, all of whom would have faced heavy prison sentences if convicted.
'Some of the miners who were acquitted that day said that they expected to be greeted by banks of TV cameras and reporters when they walked out of court because of the discrediting of the police case . But the world had moved on,' said David. 'Their stories just did not become part of the public narrative about what happened at Orgreave.'
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What is the connection between Orgreave and Hillsborough?
David immediately saw a link between the forgotten trial and the conduct of the South Yorkshire police at Hillsborough.
'I was already reporting on the false narrative that the South Yorkshire police had constructed seeking to blame Liverpool supporters for the disaster but which was due to their complete mismanagement of the football match,' he said. 'So watching that film was a jaw-dropping moment because [I realised] it was the same police force accused of fabricating evidence and lying.'
During his later reporting on Orgreave, David found a document that showed the chief constable of South Yorkshire police, Peter Wright, had been invited to in March 1985 for drinks at the Home Office to celebrate the great work he and his officers had done policing the miner's strike. 'So not only were they not held to account for violence that everyone had seen on television or the fact that, later, the trial had collapsed, but they were congratulated for their fine policing,' he said. 'And it appeared to be the same culture, led by the same chief constable, supported and celebrated by the government, that was in place during the disaster at Hillsborough, and the same lack of accountability was allowed to shift responsibility and falsely blame the victims – another huge injustice – for decades.'
Back in 1999, with the Hillsborough injustice still enduring and scant public awareness of the Orgreave trial, as a young freelance journalist David found it difficult to secure commissions to report on these scandals but stuck with the stories for decades as he became established at the Guardian.
It wasn't until 2012, when his reporting on the Hillsborough disaster and alleged police cover-up had helped establish the Hillsborough Independent Panel Report (HIP), that he was able to publish his first piece making the connection between the two scandals. The HIP's 2012 report became a landmark, leading to a second Hillsborough inquest, whose jury in 2016 found that no behaviour of Liverpool supporters was to blame for the disaster and that the 96, now 97, people who died were unlawfully killed due to gross negligence manslaughter by the police.
Why did it take so long for an inquiry to be set up?
David's 2012 article, pointing to the link between the two 1980s South Yorkshire policing scandals, prompted a BBC Yorkshire documentary about Orgreave, broadcast the same year, which highlighted that dozens of police officers' statements alleging criminal behaviour by miners had the same opening paragraphs apparently dictated to them by detectives.
Shortly after, activists and veterans of the strike set up the Orgreave Truth and Justice campaign, which has since fought for justice for the victims and accountability for the violent policing that they were subjected to and the discredited evidence advanced to try to convict innocent miners of serious crimes.
By 2015, Yvette Cooper was calling for an inquiry, which Labour included in its 2017 manifesto. The government made it a priority to establish the inquiry after they came to power last summer.
What happens now?
The inquiry will comprise a panel of experts, chaired by Pete Wilcox, the bishop of Sheffield, modelled on HIP. Yet, unlike that panel, the Orgreave inquiry will be statutory, giving it the power to compel people to provide information. Wilcox, who is developing the framework of the inquiry with the Home Office, said he expects it to begin work in the autumn.
Eventually, it is likely to produce a report that will aim to illuminate the full truth of the police operation and, campaigners hope, redress the historic 'enemy within' portrayal of the miners involved in industrial action in the 1980s perpetrated by the Thatcher government and large sections of the media at the time. It may also shine light on the culture of South Yorkshire police that was still in place in 1989, when the FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough would descend into horror.
Although no police officer has ever been held to account for the false evidence that was used to charge 95 men, David said it could be unlikely that anybody could be prosecuted, although it has not been ruled out.
Is this a victory for the Orgreave campaigners?
The launch of the inquiry into the Orgreave scandal is 'a hugely positive outcome', said David. 'It's a positive result for the families and the campaigners and it does show that our journalism can make a concrete difference.'
Reporting on Orgreave has been long and time-consuming. 'I've interviewed some of the miners who stood trial after being falsely accused and a lot of them were young guys at the time, with young families and they talked about just how terrifying it had been coming up against the system,' he said.
'They'd been through the strikes, they'd lost so much – their industry, their jobs – they'd faced violence at the hands of the police, and then they were terrified they'd spend years in prison.'
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One man called Arthur Critchlow (pictured above), who David first saw breaking down in tears while being interviewed in Yvette Vanson's documentary, who had suffered a fractured skull from a police truncheon, had said this week that the injustice was a trauma that he carried around with him every day for decades. 'And so seeing Arthur Critchlow, with Yvette Cooper in Orgreave this week, talking about what happened and the need for justice is a very emotional moment for me as well, if I'm honest.'
Yet for David, this week has been bittersweet: 'It has been 40 years that this injustice has been allowed to stand.'
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