18.06.2015

Forget police violence

Too late to worry about all that, says the IPCC. David Douglass looks at its conclusions on the Battle of Orgreave

Last week the media widely covered the Independent Police Complaints Commission report on the brutal actions of the police during the miners’ Great Strike. The IPCC declared it would not mount a formal investigation into numerous allegations of violent criminal acts perpetrated by police against striking miners at Orgreave on June 18 1984.

In the past the question of the tactics employed at Orgreave and elsewhere has been much discussed by me in this paper and I do not intend to restate my views - except to say it was my one major disagreement with Arthur Scargill’s strategy during the strike. Whatever the disagreements over tactics, however, it is the IPCC report and the strategy of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and their actions that day I will be looking at in this article.

This whole new re-exposure of the questions round Orgreave came about when BBC TV’s Inside out team, in the wake of files released under the 25-year rule, exposed Acpo’s appointment of a chief constable whose sole job it was to find ways of arresting Arthur Scargill. So here we had what was supposed to be a neutral, impartial force being directed to legally set up the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers under entirely political and partisan instruction. Of course, we know that since the inception of the strike that was precisely the way Acpo ran its whole operation - it had drafted an entirely new constitutional role for itself entirely off its own bat. In the process it wrested control of regional constabularies from the supervision and constraints of the local authority police committees, to whom they were supposed to be responsible for operational tactics and priorities. When South Yorkshire Police Authority, for example, withdrew funding for the mounted section, which was being used with great vigour in prosecuting the miners’ strike, Acpo simply had it restored via the home office, thus decapitating the element of democratic control over police policy the councils had.

Within weeks of the strike starting, the pickets had closed down all bar 10-12 collieries and severely dinted their production efforts too. Ian MacGregor, the chairman of the National Coal Board, went crying to prime minister Margaret Thatcher, saying the cops were yellow-livered and ‘If you want me to fly you over some real red-neck American cops to show you how to sort out the miners, I can.’ Thatcher in turn had called the Acpo chiefs together and berated them for their ‘lack of vigour’ in policing of the strike.

Actually Acpo had already been well briefed on how to sort out the miners, having called in counterinsurgency experts from Hong Kong and Ulster and run numerous courses across the country in how to dish out brutality in an organised fashion. However, with Thatcher’s words ringing in their ears, and weekly briefing meetings from her on what needed to be done, the police were basically given their head. They deliberately implanted a culture of impunity which was to resound from Orgreave to the ‘Battle of the Beanfield’, when over 1,000 police attacked New Age travellers in 1985, and culminated in the Hillsborough football disaster in 1989.

In October 2012 Inside out re-examined all the police statements and evidence from the Orgreave trial and discovered around 180 statements with the exact same phrasing, which had been dictated to the officers concerned by chief superintendents. One cop complained that his arresting statement was rejected by the force and he was ordered to add an identical paragraph to everyone else’s, which was essential to get a conviction.

Once this was made public, it kick-started the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign into existence. The OTJC had already started to campaign for a full public enquiry when South Yorkshire police referred itself to the IPCC. This had the effect of sending us down a cul-de-sac, since all legal appeals must be exhausted before a public enquiry can be launched.

That was two years ago, and 28 years after the event itself, so it is rather incredulous to state now that matters cannot proceed because it took place too long ago. Why did it take two years to realise that? We agree that the IPCC can only take action against serving officers - that is the case now, but was also the case two years ago. However, it is also true that the IPCC can investigate policing itself and investigate whether any wrongdoing has occurred during particular policing events - this is a stand-alone feature, separate from the prosecution of an errant police officer or police chief. The IPCC has observed that people have sought to uncover the political paper trail leading from that field in Orgreave back to Thatcher and the cabinet, and have alleged that the police violence had in fact been a policy decision - a conscious strategy aimed at breaking the back of NUM picketing, if not literally the backs of pickets. This they did not feel competent to explore - although, again, they knew that two years ago.

But what is interesting to record is what the IPCC did feel competent to say. For example:

It is, however, of particular concern that our review found evidence that the senior officers became aware, after the event of instances of perjury by [South Yorkshire Police] officers, but did not want to proceed ... The unwillingness to disclose evidence of wrongdoing by officers does raise doubts about the ethical standards of officers in the highest ranks at SYP at that time.¹

Then there is: “The evidence from hospital records was that more pickets than police officers required treatment. Some injuries to pickets were serious, including head injuries” (para 57). And: “Some of those documents disclose that SYP acknowledged privately to their solicitors that many officers did overreact and there was evidence of perjury.” (para 36).

The police evidence in the first 10 cases of the 92 miners charged with riot and unlawful assembly collapsed after police were shown to be lying, and police photographs demonstrated that the arresting officers were not those claiming to have made the arrests, which meant the latter had invented statements as to their actions that day. Other photographs showed that arrested pickets were not in the places doing what police had alleged. The prosecution then refused to present any further evidence against the rest of the accused and the whole case collapsed in ignominy, with £500,000, including costs, awarded to 39 who had sued.

Finally, there are hints in the IPCC report that an independent public enquiry is a possibility and the campaign is likely to refocus on that original plan. But what would such an enquiry tell us that we do not actually already know? We know that the whole pit closure programme was aimed at smashing the NUM for entirely political reasons. That energy policy and the war against coal is dictated by attitudes to organised labour and to the politics and class culture of the miners, who had to be defeated (as outlined in the original Ridley plan of 1979). That the ‘gloves off’ policy of the police at Orgreave, and within the pit villages themselves, was a sort of scaled down ‘shoot to kill’ policy imported from Ireland. That Orgreave was a mini-version of Bloody Sunday without the deaths (rather by luck than by design) aimed at breaking the resistance and the strike.

Well, yes, an independent and impartial enquiry could indeed identify these things, but by then their aim would have been fulfilled. A humble apology at the dispatch box, such as the one given to the people of Derry, with no charges and no punishments is the very best we could hope for. But making the call for an enquiry and keeping the issue alive will receive no objection from me.

Meantime the reason we were in that field at Orgreave in the first place - to stop the massacre of the coalfields and prevent the breaking of the miners’ union - has been lost in the furore over the events in the field itself. Hatfield Main, my own colliery and the last mine in Britain, is now being lined up for the final act in the bloody, 31-year drama. Battered from all sides, with power generators demanding coal prices below the cost of production, a thinning seam which requires re-equipping with new smaller roof supports, Hatfield went to the government for interim support and was told it could have £18 million ... to close the pit. It would not be capped with temporary covers, making it capable of redevelopment, but filled in; the site would be cleared and all evidence of mining destroyed. Not one penny to save the pit.

Thirty-one years or not, ruling class attitudes to the miners have not dulled one bit.

David Douglass

Notes

1. Independent Police Complaints Commission IPCC decisions on matters relating to the policing of events at Orgreave coking plant in 1984: www.ipcc.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Documents/investigation_commissioner_reports/Ogreave_Decision_12-06-2015.pdf, para 55.