The Battle of Orgreave during the 1984 British miners strike took place exactly 40 years ago today, when police attacked pickets at a coking plant outside Sheffield.
Cameras: Cathy Vogan & Joe Lauria; Interviewer & editing: Cathy Vogan. Text by Joe Lauria.
Marking the occasion at Sheffield City Hall on Saturday were miners who were on strike, some of whom were beaten by police on June 18, 1984. They were addressed by Arthur Scargill, who led the miners’ union during the strike, Gareth Pierce, an attorney who represented arrested Orgreave strikers, and a host of other speakers.
On this day 40 years ago, 8,000 picketing miners were confronted by 6,000 police officers at the Orgreave coking plant. Historian Tristram Hunt wrote in The Guardian the confrontation was “almost medieval in its choreography … at various stages a siege, a battle, a chase, a rout and, finally, a brutal example of legalised state violence.”
A report by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) in 2015 cited “evidence of excessive violence by police officers, a false narrative from police exaggerating violence by miners, perjury by officers giving evidence to prosecute the arrested men, and an apparent cover-up of that perjury by senior officers.”
Nearly 100 picketers were charged with riot or violent disorder, which carried potential life sentences. All of them were acquited. The human rights lawyer Michael Mansfield told The Times it was “the worst example of a mass frame-up in this country, this century.”
The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC), formed in 2012, is demanding a formal inquiry. The Labour Party backs one in their manifesto, but the miners on Saturday remain skeptical.
The 1984-85 British miners’ strike was the major battle of the neoliberal revolution in Britain led by Margaret Thatcher: her war against the politically powerful National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), forcing a strike that lasted more than a year.
When it was over, more than 100 mines were closed, the union’s back was broken and the hallmarks of economic neoliberalism — privatization, erosion of social services and escalating income inequality — were entrenched until this day.
On this day in 1984, thousands of picketing miners were attacked by riot police in the Battle of Orgreave.
40 years on, we are still fighting for the truth, for justice, and for our right to strike.
Workers had my support then, and they have my support now. pic.twitter.com/8qZ9wVAvoG
— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) June 18, 2024
Please Donate to the
Spring Fund Drive!
In July 1991 the BBC admitted that it had ‘inadvertently’ misled its viewers by showing footage in the wrong sequence:
“The BBC acknowledged some years ago that it made a mistake over the sequence of events at Orgreave. We accepted without question that it was serious, but emphasised that it was a mistake made in the haste of putting the news together. The end result was that the editor inadvertently reversed the occurrence of the actions of the police and the pickets.”
Two people responsible for the destruction of the UK coal mining industry: Thatcher and Scargill. Both were more concerned with their idealogy than they were for UK industry or the miners.
May Jeremy Corbyn rise again, more powerfully than before. A steadfast voice for the common and greater “good.”