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One summer morning 41 years ago, I stood in a field overlooking the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire, near a line of police. I was surrounded by striking miners who wanted to stop the plant operating. When lorries started to arrive, they pushed towards the police, with some throwing stones.
Orgreave was the decisive confrontation of the 1984-85 miners’ strike, which ended with Margaret Thatcher’s government defeating their effort to preserve Britain’s coal industry, along with more than 180,000 jobs. The sense of betrayal felt by former miners over their loss has never faded.
An inquiry to “uncover the truth” of what happened at Orgreave was announced by the government last month after decades of pressure. Starting this autumn, it will examine how 120 people were injured there on June 18, 1984. Charges of riot and violent disorder were brought against 95 miners but the cases collapsed after accusations that police fabricated evidence.
The inquiry could provide some emotional closure, although Orgreave was long ago and has been examined before, including in a 2015 report on police misconduct after South Yorkshire police paid £425,000 compensation to 39 miners. But it must acknowledge that every battle has two sides.
The “battle of Orgreave” is better understood as a series of skirmishes that climaxed on June 18. I was there on May 29 as a young Daily Mail reporter; it was a long day of missile throwing, charges by police mounted on horseback and 40 injuries. (None of this is intended to defend the Mail’s coverage, which was patently biased against the strikers: it is simply what I witnessed.)
Having walked up the hill from the press enclosure to get a better look, I stood about 50 metres from Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, who was trying to organise a push through the police line. As more missiles were thrown, he remonstrated with his troops: “We are not going to do anything by throwing things except hit our own lads,” I heard him say.
I did not return on June 18, although I talked to several who were present for an article a decade ago, including former strikers. But it feels most plausible to me that similar pushing and frustrated stone-throwing by miners as lorries rolled up to the plant that day triggered a more ruthless counterattack from the police, who were by then better prepared.
Some campaigners prefer another story: that the miners stayed passive on June 18, apart from some ritual shoving against the line, before being attacked by the police without provocation. This was “not a battle but a rout”, in the words of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign; television news only showed them throwing missiles first because the BBC actually reversed some footage.
I don’t believe it. The miners I knew in the strike were not pacifists and did not claim to be. They were fighting for their livelihoods, mostly lawfully but some, on occasion, fiercely. The entire strike was rough on all sides — strikers, non-strikers and police — and ended in a defeat that lingers to this day. It would be inhuman, all these years later, not to sympathise.
But it would equally be wrong for the inquiry to leap from blaming everything on the miners at Orgreave to blaming everything on the police, as moral retribution for the trauma the former suffered. History does not need to be sanitised to accept that an injustice was done and that some police officers, having faced violent attacks in previous weeks, lost control.
Some 6,000 police were there on June 18, including riot police in “snatch squads” for the first time in Britain. After several police charges into the crowd, during which miners were struck with truncheons, police commanders attempted to clear the field. That escalated into a chaotic showdown in Orgreave village and thence to charges of riot, an offence carrying a potential life sentence.
It is inexplicable that the police failed so badly, having come so thoroughly prepared. That is the biggest question for the inquiry: were they provoked to excess by weeks of the treatment that I saw, or did they act on orders from above? The battle of Orgreave had the desired effect for the Thatcher government: it proved the turning point in the miners’ strike.
That it became so brutal is indefensible, but not wholly surprising given the preceding build-up of violence. The striking miners were “outnumbered, out-armed and outdone”, one of those present that day once told me. I doubt whether the inquiry will come up with a better verdict.
john.gapper@ft.com
