Remembering the Battle of Orgreave
Almost 40 years later, British miners are still seeking justice
IT began as a balmy summer day with no hint of the violence that was to come. But by the end of Monday, 18 June 1984, it had a name: the Battle for Orgreave.
Thirty years later, the events of that seminal day during the British Miners’ Strike are as disputed and contentious as they were at the time.
Picketing miners are still seeking justice with renewed calls on the 30th anniversary of the battle for a full investigation of allegations that police officers assaulted striking miners in a planned and unprovoked attack, then committed perjury and cover-ups to pervert the course of justice.
Last weekend, striking miners and their families held a mass picnic and festival at Catcliffe, near Orgreave, and other commemorations are planned for today.
The Battle of Orgreave was a key event in the year-long miners’ strike of 1984–85, that ultimately resulted in defeat for the miners and the British coal industry.
Buoyed by that victory, Margaret Thatcher was able to advance her political and economic agenda virtually unhindered throughout the rest of the 1980s. Modern Britain is still attempting to recover from that legacy of unemployment and social division.
The miner’s strike also politicised a generation of Britons.
“It really was like a civil war, a class war, in a way that young people now I don’t think would recognise,” musician and activist Billy Bragg told me back in 2012.
“And Margaret Thatcher’s government was such a threat to us, such a real threat, that some of it had to be confronted.”
The ‘enemy within’
The miners’ strike began in March 1984, when the Thatcher Government announced plans to close 20 working coal mines, beginning with Corton Wood, in Yorkshire.
With coal mining one of the traditional heartlands of the British labour movement, the miners’ strike became a test of Thatcher’s determination to destroy the British union movement — who she described as “the enemy within”.
To break the National Union of Mineworkers, her government used the entire apparatus of the state, employing military and policing tactics honed in Northern Ireland, including specially trained riot police, and phone tapping and surveillance by the MI5 secret service, in conjunction with legal strategies, to break the pickets.
Striking miners and their families were also prevented from accessing the welfare system in an attempt to starve them back to work, and a hostile media, led by Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, was employed to turn public opinion against the miners.
“It really was like a civil war, a class war, in a way that young people now I don’t think would recognise.” — Billy Bragg
“In the end the miners were defeated although at least half of Britain supported them and sent money and goods to help them maintain the strike,” says Lynn Beaton, a Melbourne author who in 1985 wrote a book about living in a Nottinghamshire mining community during the strike.
“In the end what they needed was the rest of the union movement to take industrial action in support of them.
“The pivotal moment of the strike took place in August when the union covering the Deputies [foremen in the mines] promised they would strike but at the eleventh hour voted to stay at work.
“After that demoralisation began in the striking communities and that was what defeated them in the end.”
But the doctrinaire refusal to compromise of the polarising NUM leader Arthur Scargill alienated the broader union movement, and was also responsible for the strike’s failure. The strike dragged on another seven months until March 1985, when the NUM voted to return to work.
Margaret Thatcher had won, cementing her reputation as the ‘Iron Lady’.
Picnic turned nasty
The Battle of Orgreave, on this day in 1984, is the most infamous single event of the miners’ strike.
On that day, an estimated 10,000 strikers descended on the British Steel plant at Orgreave in South Yorkshire as part of an organised picket to stop coal being delivered. They were met by about 5000 police.
On a hot and sunny day, the picket began with a picnic-like atmosphere, and in between the arrival of trucks, picketers removed their shirts to sunbathe and played football in the nearby open fields.
But it turned nasty later in the day as police corralled the picketers into a cornfield, then penned them in from all sides. The strikers were then repeatedly charged by mounted police with batons, and riot police on foot with truncheons and dogs in what was later described as a military operation.
Survivors recalled being trapped by the police tactics. Seven-two police and 51 miners were injured.
Following the battle, 95 miners were charged with riot, which carried a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. But the trials all collapsed in 1985 following grave doubts about the police evidence, including allegations of forged signatures and concocted statements.
In 1991, the South Yorkshire police paid out £425,000 to 39 miners who had sued the police for assault, wrongful arrest and malicious prosecution.
Since then, the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign has tirelessly pushed for a full inquiry into the conduct of police during and after the Battle of Orgreave.
Their campaign has much in common with that of Liverpool Football Club supporters who have also claimed South Yorkshire Police covered up their role in the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 fans were crushed to death.
British Labour leader Ed Miliband has also recently added his voice to calls for a “proper investigation”, describing the miners’ strike in a recent speech as a “just cause”.
“You were fighting for justice, for your community, for equality, for all the things that mattered,” he said.
First published in Working Life on 18 June 2014.
