The Miners strike was all about Scargill spoiling for a fight with Thatcher.He thought he could bring her down in the same way that Heath was brought down in the 70’s. The miners were just pawns in Scargill game. No one died or was seriously injured at Orgreave but down in Wales a Taxi driver was murdered when a striker dropped a breeze block on to his Taxi from a bridge as he was taking a miner to work. Did not hear anyone asking for an enquiry in to that.
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Others have more expansive opinions. Some might see it as a dangerous tipping point at which the government thought it could solve industrial disputes with state violence. Others see it as the time when the worst Prime Minister in British History purposefully and malignly destroyed permanent national treasure to meet short-term political objectives.
I suppose if you’re down with that, you might not want a public inquiry. Perhaps you long for the day when your own industry is battered by mounted coppers on horses when it speaks up.
A lot of people are shocked that a state can act in this way, and that today’s government sees the unprecedented breaches of public trust as trivial or unworthy of investigation.
Scabs.
Probably worth pointing out that the strikers who dropped the breeze block were convicted and given long prison sentences. So to try and make a comparison between that incident and the battle of Orgreave is nonsense.
One thing that has always puzzled me regarding the policing of the miner’s strike, is who was policing the rest of the country, catching all the criminals, while ten’s of thousands of ‘Coppers’ were tied up for weeks on end policing the miners?
Perhasps the answer might lie in the indisputable first hand evidence that most of these ‘Coppers’ had no identification numbers on display. During the strike i was driving to the Yorkshire Dales for a long weekend break with my quite elderly father and his friend, a very articulate, dyed in the wool Socialist. On the outskirts of Yorkshire we were stopped, along with many others, by a huge posse of ‘Coppers’, asked where we were heading, and then turned back. Refused to let us continue. My old man’s friend, very politely, asked one of the ‘Coppers’, “Where is your identification number?”
Things very quickly turned aggressive, and it was made very clear that if we knew what was good for us, we would turn round and not enter Yorkshire. Reluctantly we complied. None of this extremely large group of ‘Coppers’ were displaying identification numbers. Which is, of course, unlawful.
Squaddies dressed up as ‘Coppers’? In Thatcher’s Britain? Surely not, that would be tantamount to Fascism! Oh, hang on a minute…!
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ah a tactic I was told about in Colombia with the military. Velcro ID numbers.
Reading about strikes. My mum was on a picket line a few years back for an older persons home with mainly female staff in their 50s. There were several police officers to ensure that senior managers were not intimidated by these women when they entered the building. It seemed a waste of police time.
If half of these accounts are true, well, fucking hell.
It would explain why the government really doesn’t want an enquiry.
The articles on Orgreave and the government’s reasons for refusing a public inquiry over the last week or so have been among the most widely read in this blog’s history. As a result of them, a number of people have contacted the author with their own accounts bearing directly on the official portrayal of events, with a particular focus on the involvement of armed forces personnel illegally masquerading as police officers.
That’s a well known rumour that, absolute bastards.
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Originally posted by @Barry-Sanchez
That’s a well known rumour that, absolute bastards.
Didn’t actually spot it in Nottarf’s post at the time, and did not know myself.
Very worrying.
Why is that problem i would sooner ruck up with squaddies than coppers, squaddies are good lads, i reckon they done the Miners a Favour getting the squaddies on the scene.
Documentary series on the 1984 miner’s strike on Channel 4
This week the Battle of Orgreave. Which now seems to have been set up by the government
I was incensed by the attitude of Thatcher’s government and the vicious unchecked brutality of the “police” at the time.
I’m still shocked and angry that despite the video evidence the police got off Scott(y)-free.
The Tory government of the time still has blood on its hands.
Met and chatted to Scargill at a benefit gig in ‘84 - seemed a genuine guy.
Didn’t he fall out with the NUM over union funds?
Don’t deflect - I’m talking about Tory sanctioned extreme violence and brutality
Watch the documentary and try to remind yourself that the media of the time wasn’t telling you the whole story 
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I think the only surprise is your surprise
About the Battle of Orgreave or CB’s post?
Not surprised by either tbf.
I am soo tempted to take the piss but I get the feeling that you are not your usual receptive self on this subject so I shall withdraw
Michael Mansfield, the eminent KC who defended many striking miners successfully in the High Court, has long expressed the opinion that there will never be a proper Inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave, because there is simply so much evidence, much of it on film, of organized police corruption and unrestrained brutality. Many of the court cases against the miners collapsed because of this, and hundreds of thousands of pounds were quietly paid to miners in compensation. One notorious thing that came out in these cases was footage of mounted police charging miner’s picket lines at Orgreave. In response to this charge, which resulted in several injuries, some serious, the miners responded by pelting the police with anything they could lay their hands on. In the evening news report the BBC neatly reversed the footage to show the miners attacking the police and the police then charging. Many experts described this as a ‘military cavalry charge’, which mounted police were not capable of, so the likelihood is that these were not civilian police anyway, but military, as it has long been established that soldiers were masquerading as police during the strike. It is a sad truth of course that the ‘independent’ BBC showed itself to be an instrument of government, and that the ‘police’ acted as agents of government and not of law. Just a few years ago the BBC did something very similar when PM Boris Johnson,(as he was then), turned up hungover and dishevelled at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday and for the evening news the BBC swapped the footage for film of Johnson’s appearance a couple of years earlier when he was Foreign Secretary, hoping nobody would notice. They apologized saying that a junior researcher made an error. Of course they did!!. And some poor deluded souls would have you believe that the BBC has a left wing bias.
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They most certainly do, when left to their own devices (which is most of the time.) However, they will certainly bow when expedient to the wishes of the government of the day, of whichever persuasion. The only real exception to that in my memory is the post-Iraq implosion of Campbell when the BBC rightly pointed out that the government had been fully aware of the nonexistence of WMD prior to the invasion. During the conflict, the corporation did it’s “duty” as directed by Downing Street. You’d have thought from their coverage of the conflict that our participation in that appalling debacle was perfectly reasonable and justifiable. It was only afterwards that a remark from Johann Hari triggered Campbell to a degree that could only serve to confirm the truth of the assertion.
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