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Still no Truth and no Justice for Orgreave Miners

2nd November 2016

Still no Truth and no Justice for Orgreave Miners

On October 31st Home Secretary Amber Rudd made the announcement that the government had no intention of holding an enquiry into the events at Orgreave in 1984 during the great miners’ strike. This was a shock, as the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign have been campaigning for years for the truth to be unearthed and Theresa May had strung them along with promises of an enquiry.

On 18th June 1984 around 5,000 miners sought to picket the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire. There they were set upon by more than 6,000 police from all around the country. They were funnelled into an enclosed area and attacked mercilessly, including by club-wielding coppers on horse. Many were badly injured and 95 charged with riot, which at that time carried a potential life sentence.

Rudd sneered that there was no need for an enquiry as nobody had died (no thanks to the efforts of the police) and no injustice had occurred. This is because when the court cases against the miners came up, the police stitch-up fell apart as the police shamelessly perjured themselves and fabricated evidence - with identical forms of words. No injustice occurred because the vindictiveness of the police was matched by their incompetence!

A while back the BBC got hold of hundreds of documents that had been mouldering in a garage.They revealed that dozens of officers - from different police forces, involved in separate arrests - had written the same phrases, again and again, virtually word-for-word.

This was the action by the same South Yorkshire police force who conducted a cover-up on their part in the deaths of 95 Liverpool fans at Hillsborough. When the enquiry was finally held after decades of campaigning it found that South Yorkshire police had conducted “malpractice with impunity”.

Officially the Tory government claimed not to be interfering in the 1984-85 miners’ strike. In fact Thatcher’s fingers were all over the police riot at Orgreave - literally. Paul Mason has discovered a memo by Tory John Redwood in the National Archive marked secret covered in her handwriting.
Here

The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign have unearthed evidence from other documents showing the Thatcher was involved in efforts to smear the miners, direct police operations against them and fast track prosecutions. More documentary evidence incriminating the Tories still lies buried. The Campaign believed an enquiry could unearth it.

No wonder the present Tory government wants to bury this can of worms. Norman Tebbit, a member of the Tory government at the time, whined that an enquiry would have been “a stick with which to beat the Thatcher government” – including himself of course.

Jeremy Corbyn has promised that Labour will not let this go and a future Labour government would open an enquiry. He added that, “The determination of people to get justice never goes away and the government should remember that.”

Len McCluskey, General Secretary of Unite added, “Amber Rudd’s shameful refusal to hold an inquiry into Orgreave smacks of a continued cover-up by the establishment. It will be a bitter blow to those who seek the truth and justice, to those to whom her government gave false hope.The brutal actions of South Yorkshire police at Orgreave, the subsequent cover-up and the injustice to ordinary working men and women cannot go unanswered.”

The mining communities and the rest of us are entitled to a full, independent enquiry. An enquiry into what happened at Orgreave would show the true face of the Tory government.