What happened at the Orgreave Coke plant in South Yorkshire on a hot June day in 1984, during the 1984-5 miners’ strike has gone down in history as one of the most infamous and controversial events of the entire dispute. Claims of a set up and an ambush by the police, of massive brutality by the police and a stitch up by the establishment of the time, including the falsifying of information by the police and the BBC notoriously switching sections of film around in the for the Evening News, have gathered momentum over the last 40 years.
There is also the small matter of no less that 95 miners being charged with offences at Orgreave and the case of every singe on collapsing.
Orgreave Inquiry announced
It was reported on 20 July that the government had established a statutory inquiry into the scandal. The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, had announced the inquiry following informing campaigners of her decision on 17 July at the site in South Yorkshire where the Orgreave coking plant was located.
It was noted that, “the inquiry into the policing on 18 June 1984 and the collapsed prosecutions marks the culmination of remarkable persistence by campaigners, who argue that the miners’ strike remains an enduring source of injustice.”
Speaking to the Guardian at the Orgreave site, now redeveloped into a retail estate, new homes, parkland and an advanced manufacturing complex, Cooper was reported as saying: “I think the miners’ strike still has deep scars across coalfield communities, and the decisions made at that time – the broadest decisions that were taken by the Thatcher government in the 1980s – the scars can still be felt across the coalfields.
“People have waited for answers for over 40 years. The scale of the clashes, the injuries, the prosecutions, the discredited evidence, all of those things – there’s still so many unanswered questions.”
The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign
This is of course very welcome news to the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, which includes activists, trade unionists, ex-miners, and others,
It is a campaign which welcomes support from anyone with concerns about what they describe as the pattern of cover up and deception that ”characterised police behaviour not only at Orgreave but throughout the coalfields during the strike”.
Northumbria Police – an interesting twist
Shortly before the announcement of the inquiry, there was an interesting twist in the story as it was reported on 18 July that numerous documents relating to Orgeave had been destroyed by Northumbria Police. The documents are said to include” a report on a notorious incident in which an officer beat a man over the head with a truncheon”.
It was also noted that, “in the ITV News at 10 report on the violent scenes at Orgreave, the officer, PC Martin of Northumbria police, was seen hitting the miner, Russell Broomhead, several times with his truncheon”.
Northumbria Police have been criticised since confirming that in April 2024 they “destroyed two boxes of documents relating to the strike and the Orgreave operation. That was just months before a general election that the Labour party, which had a longstanding pledge to hold an inquiry into what happened at Orgreave, was expected to win”.
It was further reported that in 2016 Steve Ashman, then Northumbria’s chief constable, had written to Yvette Cooper, who at the time was the chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, explaining that an incident involving a police constable was contained in the superintendent’s report.
Ashman was said to have written: “This officer was believed to have been involved in striking a ‘picket’ with his truncheon. This incident is identified as been [sic] the subject of television news reporting … the superintendent’s report details how [the PC] was ‘reported’ for the offence of assault to the director of public prosecutions (DPP). The report further outlines that the DPP subsequently decided there would be no criminal prosecution in the case.”
It was also noted that Joe Diviney, a historian at the University of Sheffield who is researching a PhD on the Orgreave events, pointed out that “this appeared clearly to be the PC Martin incident. Martin was identified, including in police documents, as the officer who struck Broomhead, and a report was sent to the DPP who decided, on the same day Martin was interviewed, not to bring charges”.
PC Martin had claimed during an interview under caution, that he had not been involved in any wrongdoing, and said of the Orgreave policing: “It’s not a case of me going off half cock. The senior officers, supers and chief supers were there and getting stuck in too – they were encouraging the lads and I think their attitude to the situation affected what we all did.”
Comment
British justice will often get there in the end, but the wheels of justice can certainly grind very slowly when it doesn’t suit establishment interests. It was 38 long years between the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry in January 1972 and the truth finally coming out in 2010. It was 27 years between the terrible events at Hillsborough in April 1989 and the truth finally coming out in 2016. Now we have seen over 40 years elapse since the events at Orgreave in June 1984. We can only hope that the enquiry will be fair minded to all sides and that the truth is finally reached and then perhaps a long-awaited healing process can begin.
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