Government launches Orgreave inquiry, 40 years after clashes at miners' strike

The Guardian

5 days ago

More than four decades after the violent policing at Orgreave during the miners' strike and a failed prosecution criticised as a police 'frame up', the government has established a statutory inquiry into the scandal.
The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced the inquiry having informed campaigners last Thursday at the site in South Yorkshire where the Orgreave coking plant was located.
The inquiry into the policing on 18 June 1984 and the collapsed prosecutions marks the culmination of remarkable persistence by campaigners, who argue that the miners' strike remains an enduring source of injustice.
The present-day focus on Orgreave developed after 2012, when the Guardian highlighted the violence and alleged manipulation of evidence afterwards by South Yorkshire police, and the fact that five years later the same force was responsible for the Hillsborough disaster, in which 97 people were unlawfully killed.
Speaking to the Guardian at the Orgreave site, which has now been developed into an advanced manufacturing complex, retail estate, new homes and parkland, Cooper said: 'I think the miners' strike still has deep scars across coalfield communities, and the decisions made at that time – the broadest decisions that were taken by the Thatcher government in the 1980s – the scars can still be felt across the coalfields.'
The Home Office said in its announcement that the criminal charges brought by South Yorkshire police against 95 miners were dropped 'after evidence was discredited'. The legacy of Orgreave has been to undermine 'the wider mining community's confidence in policing for decades,' it said. Cooper said that as an MP for a former mining area in West Yorkshire, she understood the community feeling. She made it clear that the inquiry would address the collapsed prosecutions as well as the policing on the day.
'People have waited for answers for over 40 years,' she said. 'The scale of the clashes, the injuries, the prosecutions, the discredited evidence, all of those things – there's still so many unanswered questions.'
At Orgreave, about 8,000 miners assembled for a mass picket called by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), and were met by 6,000 police officers from forces nationwide, led by South Yorkshire police. The violence that ensued has become an infamous episode in British history, police charging on horseback and hitting miners over the head with truncheons.
Some miners did throw stones before the police charge and retaliated after it, and the next day 28 officers were reported to have been injured. Official reports later put the figure at 72.
The NUM, however, has always believed the police violence was pre-planned, and that the South Yorkshire force, and Margaret Thatcher herself, who described the Orgreave picketing as 'mob rule', greatly exaggerated the extent of miners' misbehaviour.
The prosecution of 95 miners for the offences of riot and unlawful assembly collapsed on 17 July 1985 after their barristers repeatedly accused police officers of lying in their statements and in court. Michael Mansfield KC, who represented several defendants, said after their acquittals that it had been 'the biggest frame up ever'.
The form of the Orgreave inquiry is modelled on the Hillsborough independent panel, whose 2012 report is recognised as a landmark, establishing crucial details about the disaster and overturning the false South Yorkshire police narrative that was intended to avoid responsibility and blame the victims.
The inquiry, which will have the power to compel witnesses to testify, will be chaired by Pete Wilcox, the bishop of Sheffield, who has long regarded it as important for community healing. As dean of Liverpool from 2012 to 2017, Wilcox worked with James Jones, then the bishop of Liverpool, who chaired the Hillsborough panel.
The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC), founded by strike veterans and activists in 2012, welcomed the announcement. Joe Rollin, a founder member, said he was 'cautiously elated' by the prospect of the inquiry.
'We've got a long way to go – and people know us, we're determined, and we'll not give up until we get the justice we deserve.'
Arthur Critchlow, one of the miners prosecuted, suffered a fractured skull from a police truncheon blow at Orgreave. He was with the OTJC representatives who met Cooper, and said he lived with the trauma every day.
'It's a massive injustice. For the 48 days of that trial I was convinced I was going to get life in prison.' The inquiry announcement was fantastic, he said. 'I just hope the miners will be vindicated, and the majority of the country will realise that we weren't lying – the media were lying, and the police were lying. I just want the truth, for people to know what the police did, and who ordered it.'
The NUM president, Chris Kitchen, said: 'We we are over the moon. We're hoping the inquiry will show that our dispute, which we believe was industrial, was political, orchestrated from No 10, or higher up the food chain towards No 10.
'And that the police were used as a parliamentary force to push a political objective, against working-class lads that were fighting for their jobs in this community and the industry.
'We never came to this field to cause a riot or to deliberately lame people. I don't think that was the same for the police, who came tooled up, with a plan to injure us, and to try and get the public perception on their side and end the strike.'
A spokesperson for South Yorkshire police said: 'We will fully cooperate with the inquiry in a bid to help those affected find answers.'