Battle of Orgreave: Fight for justice continues 40 years after violent day in South Yorkshire

The violence at the Battle of Orgreave on 18 June 1984 retains the power to shock even now, four decades on. Despite the passage of time, television footage of striking miners reeling from blows from police batons, fleeing charging police horses and bleeding from head wounds is still hard to watch.

For those miners who were there, what happened at Orgreave and afterwards is still hard to stomach. No police officers ever faced criminal or misconduct charges for their actions on the day or for the subsequent collapse of prosecutions over tainted police evidence.

The beautiful weather that met around 8,000 pickets converging on the Orgreave Coking Plant belied the carnage to come and what became a pivotal event in the year-long miners’ strike that had begun three and a half months earlier.

At the time, most of Britain’s 175,000 miners, bar the Nottinghamshire coalfield, were continuing to withdraw their labour in protest at planned pit closures and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), led by Arthur Scargill, and the Conservative government, led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, were locked in a fierce, uncompromising battle.

For Thatcher, the fight was central to her determination to tackle the power of trade unions, with a potential victory over the NUM, the most powerful of them all, a highly-valued political prize. For Scargill and the NUM, the fight was for the future of communities that had relied on pits for their very existence.

The NUM’s decision to mass picket Orgreave was aimed at blocking transport of coke to the steelworks in Scunthorpe but it also carried significant political echoes of mass picketing at a different coking plant during a previous national miners’ strike in 1972.

Back then, around 30,000 pickets, led by Scargill, then a Yorkshire regional NUM official, had faced down around 800 police officers and forced the closure of Saltley Gate coke works in Birmingham. The works delivered thousands of tons of coke fuel nationwide and within days the Conservative government, under Prime Minister Ted Heath, agreed to the miners’ pay demands.

Twelve years later, the Thatcher government had learnt from that particular lesson. This time there were around 6,000 police, drawn from forces across the country, in place at Orgreave, including mounted police, riot police squads and dog units. If there were to be any lessons learnt this time, it was apparent who had the power to dish them out.

The day started relatively good-naturedly. Miners used to roadblocks barring their way when travelling to picket instead encountered an unusually helpful police response on arrival, including advice on parking up. Some pickets played football on a field by the plant, a field into which a large number had effectively been corralled by police. At the bottom end, massed ranks of officers blocked the pickets’ way to the coking plant, with riot squads and mounted police as back-up.

The first bout of pushing and shoving at police lines began shortly after 8am when the first lorry convoy arrived at the plant. Police then claimed they came under attack from a barrage of missiles prompting the deployment of mounted police and riot police with short shields.

TV news crews filmed the violence that followed. Miners were seen being hit by batons, including around the head, apparently indiscriminately despite their usage only being deemed acceptable in self-defence and only for blows to the body.

Mounted police eventually forced pickets back over a bridge and into the village of Orgreave itself. Some sheltered in gardens and gennels between terraced housing as they fled from the horses.

For some, it was their first day on a picket line and an introduction they would never forget. Last year it emerged that the late Queen had seen footage from Orgreave and reportedly described images of mounted police charging into miners as “awful”.

Around 100 people were injured and more than 90 pickets arrested of whom 55 were charged with riot – an offence that carried a potential life sentence at the time. The following prosecutions brought embarrassment to South Yorkshire Police when the first of a planned series of court cases for alleged riot collapsed in May 1995 at Sheffield Crown Court and the remainder were abandoned.

Evidence did not support police claims of a barrage of missiles from pickets and indicated most of the missile throwing followed the charge of mounted police rather than preceding it.

An Independent Police Complaints Commission report in 2015 found there was evidence of potential perjury and perverting the course of justice, in relation to the content of police statements and evidence given at court, and assault.

In 1991, without admitting liability, South Yorkshire Police paid £425,000 in damages and £100,000 in costs to settle claims for unlawful arrest and malicious prosecution brought by 39 of those charged at Orgreave.

There was limited picketing of Orgreave in the wake of the violence on the 18th of June. Miners who were there believe the day’s events were effectively orchestrated by the government and police to demonstrate the power they were up against and to use media coverage to present striking miners as an unruly, violent mob.

There is also a belief that the lack of accountability in the immediate aftermath emboldened the police and led to more violence in pit villages when picketing became more focussed on the increasing numbers returning to work as the strike wore on.

The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign has been fighting for an inquiry into what happened for over a decade and believes documented evidence not yet disclosed would reveal more detail about how and why the confrontation occurred as it did.

The campaign’s previous submissions to the Conservative government fell on deaf ears but it is now expected Labour will order an inquiry if the party wins the forthcoming election.

Although the nature of the inquiry is not yet clear, it is clear that questions about what happened at Orgreave, and why, still remain for many in mining communities and beyond. And those questions deserve answers.