Orgreave inquiry serves no one but Labour
Last week the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced an inquiry into the so-called Battle of Orgreave that she has been advocating for more than ten years. Some people have argued this is pointless, and an odd priority for a government with so many other challenges. Well yes, but I think it is worse than that.
• Orgreave inquiry into miners' strike clashes to begin in autumn
On June 18, 1984, somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 pickets assembled outside the British Steel coking works in Orgreave, South Yorkshire. It was the climactic moment of the miners' strike that both Scargill and Thatcher had long been preparing for.
The aim of the NUM was to stop lorries moving coke from the plant, but the pickets failed. Their challenge was met by something like 5,000 police officers and the confrontation became violent. Exactly why that happened is what the inquiry will seek to establish.
There is no question that many officers were violent and overstepped professional boundaries, and that afterwards there was quite a lot of official lying, covering up and fabricating evidence. All of this is quite well known, since the prosecutions of the arrested miners collapsed due to the unreliable evidence, and a number of them received compensation in an out-of-court settlement. The Orgreave inquiry will certainly tell of scandalous behaviour and find plenty that it will wish to criticise.
This does not make the inquiry a neutral investigation of the truth. It is, instead, a nakedly political exercise which will be led by someone — the Bishop of Sheffield — who has been campaigning on the issue for many years. What is taking place is an attempt to re-litigate the rights and wrongs of the miners' strike, using the evidence and grievances of only one of the parties involved.
Having lost the political argument over the strike at the time, the left has sought to rewrite the history of that disastrous dispute, and Orgreave is their weapon. The idea they are advancing is that the strike was somehow thrust upon the miners against their will, a class provocation by the establishment designed to crush working-class spirit. The Orgreave inquiry will seek to portray the dispute's violence as being originated by the police, with the miners as victims.
This narrative must be vigorously resisted. What happened that day wasn't the whole of the miners' strike. The so-called Battle of Orgreave wasn't even the only encounter in Orgreave. On May 29, less than three weeks before the famous battle, mass pickets threw darts and bricks at the police and dozens of people were injured.
The miners' strike of 1984 was thrust on to the rest of us by the miners, not by us on to them. It was the NUM who decided to try to bring the UK economy and broader society to its knees, pursuing an economic demand that was utterly ridiculous. The insistence that we continue mining coal whatever its economic viability could not possibly be yielded to by any government. And Scargill did not even really mean it to be yielded to, since his intention was actually to depose the government.
The miners gathered in large and deliberately intimidating numbers in order to use their physical presence to prevent other people from going to work. They sought to collapse the economy, destroying the livelihoods of millions of people. They made their particular target those miners who went to work, treating them as traitors in the class struggle — even though Scargill hadn't had the decency to hold a proper strike ballot.
All of this was a repeated and violent act, which they intended to continue until we all agreed to do whatever they wanted.
Margaret Thatcher and her government determined that this would not be allowed to happen. The police undoubtedly overstepped the mark quite seriously on occasion, but they were defending the freedom of all of us to elect our own government, decide our energy policy, keep the lights and heating on and go about our lawful business as workers and customers. If the police had lost at Orgreave and elsewhere, the losers would have been all of us, and the consequences economically and for the rule of law would have been disastrous.
The great irony of the Orgreave inquiry is that it comes about through an appeal to an elected home secretary and relying on the strong sense of the rest of us that justice and the law be upheld, when in fact the strike was an assault on all these things — elected governments, law and justice.
That is the actual story of the miners' strike and if Yvette Cooper really feels it is worthwhile, we can have an inquiry into all of that.
Let me explain why I think this matters. Liberal democracies must have the self-confidence to defend themselves and to insist that political disputes are settled politically. The moment one group shows it can get its way by violence or threat of violence, everyone will start to do it. People must be free to protest, but using your body to prevent someone going about their lawful business cannot be accepted as a way to win an argument.
Take the protests outside migrant accommodation. I have been arguing for much of the past 20 years against rapid mass migration and against the many failures of our asylum system that the disastrous migrant hotels manifest. Protest is inevitable and the reason for it obvious.
However, the arrival at these protests of far-right groups and violent individuals, threatening the safety of those inside the hotels and attacking police officers, needs to be met with a vigorous response. Liberal democracies need to police their borders and prevent illegal migration, but they also cannot allow vigilante justice and physical menace to determine asylum policy.
The Home Office has rightly formed an investigations unit, with police officers providing intelligence on the protests gathered from social media. Yet this was attacked by Nigel Farage as 'sinister' and by Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, as turning Britain into a 'surveillance state'. An outrageous position.
This is not the moment for the home secretary to round on the police and place herself on the side of violent protest, even if that protest was more than 40 years ago. The idea she is pursuing facts to right an ancient injustice is one I completely reject. It is partial truth and sectional justice she is after, in the political interests of the Labour Party.
daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk
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