POLICE LAW, POLICE FORCE, POLICE STATE - The MINERS' STRIKE 1984
 |
| Orgreave - May 1984 Photograph is copyright Martin Jenkinson |
On Monday 14 May 1984 over 30,000 men, women and children rallied in Mansfield at the end of which Arthur Scargill and Tony Benn MP were amongst the main speakers. Scargill told Mrs. Thatcher: “You were successful in the Falklands, but you won’t win this battle.”
However, Eric Hammond, the Electricians’ Union leader said
that his power station members would continue to cross picket lines and
delegates at the annual conference of the CPSA, the biggest Civil Service
union, defeated a motion calling for an all-out strike in support of the
miners.
The situation was even worse for the miners in Britain’s
fourth biggest union, the 750,000 strong National and Local Government
Officers’ Association (NALGO), where the decision of the union’s National
Executive Committee to donate £10,000 was opposed by a Conservative trade union
group within the membership. It later led to a special conference in which the
decision was taken not to give any more financial support from national funds.
Many NALGO branches continued to donate money but the conference decision was a
serious setback.
Returning to their buses after the rally in Mansfield miners
were charged by police, some on horseback, and in the ensuing pitched battle
many on both sides were injured and 87 arrests were made. Jim Edwards from
Lancashire was stretchered away badly hurt. The following day, Nottinghamshire
Chief Constable Charles McLachlan said that 50 of those arrested would be
charged under the rarely used Riot Act, which carried unlimited imprisonment and
fines. In the event the riot charges were later unceremoniously dropped.
Two days after the Mansfield rally, Co-op administrative
worker Anne Scargill, the wife of Arthur Scargill, joined the list of those
arrested during the strike when she and three other women were taken into
custody after picketing, with twenty other women, at Silverhill Colliery.
Placed in a dog compound she was later asked to undress
before being put into a filthy cell and questioned about newspapers she read
and her politics. Bound over until October she was not allowed to picket again
in Nottinghamshire until then. When the case came to court all four of the
arrested women were pronounced not guilty when the magistrate stopped the case.
One week later police deployed riot gear for the first time
during the strike when at least 5,000 miners gathered outside the Orgreave
coking plant near Rotherham. Those who had assembled were
met by police from ten counties, who had been charged with
ensuring coke could be transported by road to the nearby Scunthorpe Steel
Works, where an agreement with the NUM to use supplies only to keep the ovens
warm had been broken in order to produce steel.
Rail workers’ solidarity
Coal to Orgreave had, in fact been stopped after ASLEF and
NUR train crew members refused to take a train in or out of the site after the
miners mounted a picket over the road bridge at Treeton.
This sympathetic action meant the NCB had to bring the coal
by road to Orgreave. However, whereas in 1972 lorry drivers – who were members
of the TGWU – had refused to cross picket lines the same level of solidarity
was missing in 1984. Many drivers were no longer in any union. They were happy
to benefit from the rail workers’ solidarity by earning in some cases over
£1,000 a week by driving often dangerously unroadworthy vehicles. There were
also reported cases of unqualified drivers being allowed to get behind the
wheel.
On May 29 1984 what was the largest picket of the dispute so
far surged forward when the first convoy arrived. In the fierce clashes that
followed 81 people were arrested. Arthur Scargill, who was present throughout
the day, said afterwards: “We’ve had riot shields and riot gear, we’ve had
police on horseback charging into our people, we’ve had people hit with
truncheons and people kicked to the ground.”
Orgreave May 29, 1984 Photograph by Martin Jenkinson
On the following day – 30 May 1984 – Scargill was arrested
as he led around 80-100 pickets to the plant. It was a move clearly designed to
remove the miners’ leader from the scene at any cost. He was found guilty in
December 1984 of two charges of obstruction and fined £250 with £750 costs.
Magistrates told him his “actions demonstrated a very poor example for those he
sought to lead.”
The NUM leader retorted that he “anticipated the same kind
of anti-working class judgement that has been the order of the day throughout
this mining industrial dispute.”
Thatcher told the House of Commons: “What we have got is an
attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law, and it must not
succeed. (cheering) It must not succeed. There are those who are using violence
and intimidation to impose their will on others who do not want it … The rule
of law must prevail over the rule of the mob.”
On 18 June 1984, around 8,000 miners assembled at Orgreave
for a mass picket. They were opposed by 4,500 police officers from different
forces nationwide.
To the surprise of many pickets the police were friendly and
even helpful in directing people towards picket lines. Speaking many years
later to the Guardian newspaper, Bob Bird, a West Midlands officer who
was a member of the short shield police support unit at the plant, said: “It
would have been easy to turn people away, but the decision was taken to let
them in. If you were to choose an area to defend, you would choose that site,
and the police were decided: if there was to be a confrontation, we were not
going to lose.” It was a trap and the police aimed to inflict a major defeat on
the miners.
Headlines left those with no direct contact with the strike
the impression that miners were a foolish mob that were being manipulated by
Arthur Scargill. None reported this was a strike to save a way of life that
would allow miners to keep their self-respect by maintaining a decent living
standard. It was a strike to ensure that communities stayed alive and there
would be jobs (not great ones but jobs none-the-less) for the next generation
of young men looking to earn a decent living. Because, while no miner ever
wanted his son to go down the pit, they were realistic and somebody had to do
it, and they knew that the pits were essential to the very fabric of their
communities.
Printworkers reacted angrily on occasions throughout 1984-85
at the blatant bias they were being asked to run. On 15 May the Sun newspaper
production chapels refused to handle an Arthur Scargill picture and story
likening the NUM leader to Adolf Hitler. The paper was printed without either.
A month later on June 27th printworkers in Fleet Street also
stopped the publication of the Sun, Daily Mirror, Financial Times and Sporting
Life because their editors refused to print a statement from the print
unions supporting the miners.
Some stories were total fabrications, including the Daily
Mirror headline of 10 September that said: ‘‘Scargill to ballot members on
final offer’’.
The bias extended into TV coverage of the strike. In
November 1984 ITV pulled their commissioned South Bank programme Which Side
Are You On? after it was considered that the programme was too one-sided in
that it allowed the miners and their families to complain about police
brutality and media bias. It was later shown on Channel 4 but only after the
Independent Broadcasting Authority insisted on a ‘balancing’ programme that
criticised Arthur Scargill.
The media also played a major role during the NCB’s ‘back to
work’ campaign in the second half of 1984 by issuing a daily list of the
numbers of miners who it was reported had returned to work. Such a daily drip
was intended to persuade strikers that they could not win and should therefore
cross a picket line and return to work. Much later the press gave heroic status
to the breakaway strikebreaking group which subsequently became the Union of
Democratic Mineworkers (UDM).
Ninety-five people were arrested at Orgreave on June 18 and
they were charged with riot and unlawful assembly. Lengthy prison sentences
seemed almost certain but when the first 15 appeared at Sheffield Crown Court
in 1985 their trial collapsed after 16 weeks when it became clear the police’s
oral and written evidence was unreliable. Each prosecution had been supported
by two police officers making near-identical statements. The signature of one
officer was analysed and found not to be his. Another admitted having had his
statement dictated to him.
All charges against pickets were subsequently dropped and
South Yorkshire Police (SYP) later paid out £425,000 compensation to 39 pickets
in out of court settlements. Nevertheless, no police officers were disciplined
for misconduct in what Michael Mansfield QC, who represented three of those
charged, said was “the biggest frame-up ever”. SYP later went on to doctor the
statements of police officers present at Hillsborough in April 1989, when 96
Liverpool fans lost their lives due to the force losing control of operations
on the day.
It took a 23-year campaign by Liverpool fans to finally get
the state to admit what really happened at Sheffield Wednesday’s football
ground. The Hillsborough Independent Panel report released in September 2012
showed SYP had attempted to divert blame for their own failings by crafting a
false case against supporters alleging ticketless drunken supporters had caused
the disaster.
Margaret Aspinall, whose son James, then 18, died at
Hillsborough said: “The police were liars.”
In the report’s aftermath, SYP referred its officers’
conduct to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), who are
currently conducting the biggest ever review of the police.
For many years the Guardian journalist David Conn had
highlighted that Hillsborough and Orgreave had both been policed by the same
force. Then on 22 October 2012 a BBC 1 Inside Out documentary featured a
retired police inspector who was on duty at the coking plant on June 18 1984.
Norman Taylor recalled he and other officers had parts of their statements
dictated to them: “A policeman in plain clothes mentioned that he had a good
idea of what had happened. And that there was a preamble to set the scene. He
was reading from some paper, a paragraph or so. And he asked the people who
were there to use that as their starting paragraph. It was basically the time
and date, the name of the place.”
Barrister Mark George QC, who specialises in criminal trials,
had analysed 40 police officers’ Orgreave statements and found that 34,
supposedly compiled separately, used the identical phrase: “Periodically there
was missile throwing from the back of the pickets.” A paragraph of four
sentences was identical word for word in 22 separate officers’ statements.
Chris Kitchen, the current NUM general secretary, called on
the IPCC to extend the Hillsborough inquiry to include events at Orgreave:
“Many miners were subjected to malpractice during the strike by South Yorkshire
Police… police operations at Orgreave and elsewhere during the strike need to
be investigated now the details of what SYP did at Hillsborough have been
revealed.”
The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign was established in
November 2012 to seek ‘‘truth and justice for all miners victimised by the
police at the Orgreave Coking Plant, South Yorkshire, on June 18th 1984 … We
call for a full public inquiry, to take place as soon as possible.’’ The
campaign organiser is Barbara Jackson, who was employed as an administrative
worker at the NCB offices in Sheffield in March 1984. She was just one of nine
members of COSA – the white collar section of the NUM – at the offices who
embarrassed the other 1,000 workers there by striking and organising a daily
picket line throughout the strike.
The mounting pressure saw SYP refer itself to the IPCC, who
confirmed they would be conducting a scoping exercise (used to identify the key
issues at an early stage in any investigation) to examine allegations of
assault, perjury, perverting the course of justice and misconduct in a public
office and then judge whether they should launch a full investigation into
policing at Orgreave on 18 June 1984.
It has since been revealed that a team of nine detectives
had been secretly established to build cases against miners, who had, in fact,
been beaten back by police officers using sophisticated riot-control equipment,
including short shields and batons, and unsophisticated brutality. ‘Snatch
squads’ were also used to rush in, after officers on horseback had charged the
crowd, to arrest any pickets who had been beaten and/or had failed to escape.
Perhaps the worst violence on June 18 came in the afternoon
after the majority of pickets had left the field in search of food and drink. As
pickets who remained in the field relaxed in the sun the police, now
outnumbering the remaining miners, decided to ‘have it out’ with them once and
for all.
The subsequent charge by the cavalry and the snatch squads
did not have as its aim the protecting of scab lorries – as there were none and
the plant had been closed – or dispersing an unruly crowd. It was an unprovoked
attack designed solely to inflict physical damage on men fighting for their
jobs.
The miners fled across the field with many seeking shelter
in the village. The cavalry charges followed escaping pickets into residential
and industrial sites hundreds of yards away from the coking plant. Mounted and
foot police wielded their truncheons indiscriminately and with the aim of
dealing some fearful blows that threatened life and limb. Some miners were
felled deliberately from behind and one was severely savaged by a police dog.
Those who went to the aid of their fallen comrades were similarly beaten.
Amidst the scores of serious injuries there were thousands with lesser injuries
including split heads and faces and bruises to backs and limbs.
Police behind riot shields at Orgreave. Sophisticated riot
control equipment was combined with unsophisticated brutality. (18 Jun 1984)
The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign is at
www.otjc.org.uk. Phone 0114 2509510 for a speaker at your campaign meeting. A quarter
of the author’s fees from the sale of this book will be equally split between
the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign and the Justice for Mineworkers
Campaign, 103 Cliff Road, Hornsea HU18 1JB.
Lesley Boulton, a member of Sheffield WAPC, was caught on
camera being attacked by a baton swinging mounted police officer as she went to
help an injured picket. Under the headline ‘‘She was only trying to help…’’ the
picture was published on the front page of Labour Weekly, dated 22 June
1984 and later became widely used in the Left press in Britain and abroad.
With the exception of the Observer – who published a
small version on 24 June – the mainstream media ignored the photograph until
Labour MP Jo Richardson produced the picture during a debate on policing at the
Labour Party conference on October 3. Even then some questioned its
authenticity. Boulton subsequently received hate mail and was intimidated when
she went to her local police station to make a statement, causing her to drop
legal proceedings.
Chris Kitchen has also said that he feels it is important to
examine cases beyond Orgreave as: “Cases from other picket lines were very
similar: lads getting lifted, dragged into court on trumped up charges and then
offered a deal to plead guilty.” The NUM has estimated that at least 60% of the
11,000 miners arrested during the strike were apprehended on bogus charges.
Whilst Orgreave and other picket-line battles attracted TV
and press attention the reality was that only a relatively small number of
strikers and their families went near a picket line during the strike. When
they did – especially in the initial stages when many collieries had no miners
going to work – it was usually fairly boring and even when the police were
present the atmosphere was relaxed and often friendly. Before the strike,
relationships between the police and mining communities was good, but now often
remains poor, even to this day.
