(Part 2)
When the titanic strike by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) ended in defeat in March 1985, Britain’s media moved on to cover the Conservative government’s subsequent privatisations of nationalised industries, the stock market “big bang” and the rise of the “yuppie”. By the time the trial of the first 15 miners arrested at Orgreave and charged with riot began on 8 May 1985 at Sheffield crown court, little notice was taken – even though the police narrative completely collapsed at this point. In fact, until now, the trial and the extent of police malpractice alleged in court has never been prominently reported in detail.
Unlike the media, the accused miners had been unable to move on. Still on strike, their lives were placed on hold as they waited to see if they would be thrown in prison. All loyal union members, the men had gone to Orgreave from elsewhere in Yorkshire, and from the Nottinghamshire, south Wales, north-east and Scottish coalfields. They presented an unlikely collection of rioters. Three of them, David Bell, David Moore and Kevin Marshall, were young men. Most of the other 12 were married with children; the oldest, Bill Greenaway, from Blackwood in south Wales, was 51. All had spent their working lives in the hardest of occupations, underground or on the surface of coal mines. Bernard Jackson, 43, was a father of two teenagers, president of the NUM branch at Wath Main colliery in South Yorkshire, and the governor of two schools.
The full transcripts of the trial, in which the South Yorkshire police prosecution disintegrated, are now publicly available on the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC) website.
It was opened by the prosecuting barrister, Brian Walsh QC, portraying the events at Orgreave as a sustained, vicious and unprovoked assault by miners on the police. In the witness box, Clement claimed that the conduct of the miners at Orgreave had been “the most serious disorder seen in this country this century” and that the police had responded reasonably. But he and the South Yorkshire police force’s version of events were to face an altogether less comfortable reception than at the congratulatory drinks with Margaret Thatcher.
Clement described mass ranks of “demonstrators” at the bottom of the field in front of the works before the lorries arrived to take the coke away. He said Scargill did a mock inspection of police lines at 8am, after which the police were subjected to a “terrific increase in violence”, a hail of stones, bottles, metal objects and bricks. As a defensive measure, Clement said he had sent horses into the miners at a walk, although he admitted that he gave no warning. Then from 10.20am, he said that he decided to clear the field to avoid a similar attack when the lorries arrived again, mounting a three-stage operation, advancing with horses, short-shield units, and officers with long shields behind. That pushed the miners up to a bridge that led to the edge of Orgreave village.
Clement said the miners had fought with a level of violence he had never seen in all his 33 years in the police force. Each of the men on trial was accused by two police officers, who had stated in mostly identical terms that they had seen him, within the context of a riot, throw stones. That could be enough to condemn the men, if convicted, to life in prison.
One of the trial’s many astounding elements is that the police had a camera close to the plant on the day, but the prosecution did not present the film in evidence. It was the accused miners and their lawyers who insisted on it being shown to the jury, against objections from the prosecution. According to Michael Mansfield QC, the film contradicted key aspects of the prosecution’s lurid description of events.
Police and miners clash at Orgreave. Photograph: Photofusion/Rex/Shutterstock
Mansfield, who represented three of the men, said it showed a generally orderly scene as miners arrived in the field in the sunshine, before massed ranks of police. Scargill did not perform a mock inspection of these lines at 8am; he did so much later, and it had not prompted violence. When the lorries went in at 8.10am, the miners made a short push against police lines, as if attempting to break through. Lasting for just 58 seconds, it was a standard ritual on picket lines that no miner expected to succeed. But immediately after that, the police lines parted and the horses charged. Then short-shield units and other police officers ran into the field and set about the men.
None of the miners denied that a small minority of people had thrown stones before the police charged. Mansfield even pointed out a group of around a dozen in the film, and challenged Clement as to why he had not sought to arrest them, rather than attacking miners in the crowd indiscriminately.
Clement defended the police actions as a reasonable response to a riot, and did not accept that they were at all excessive. He was accused of encouraging his officers to attack miners, because a senior officer could be heard on the film shouting into a megaphone: “Bodies not heads!” Clement argued this was not urging officers on with their truncheons, but merely reminding them not to use them on people’s heads.
This was when one of the miners, Russell Broomhead, was truncheoned repeatedly over the head, a scene filmed by news cameras behind the police lines. The officer who beat Broomhead was later interviewed under caution, although he was never disciplined. He said: “It’s not a case of me going off half-cock. The senior officers, supers [superintendents] 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.”
In his book about the trial, The Battle for Orgreave, written with the journalist Tony Wardle, Bernard Jackson said that many miners were struck at random with truncheons at that time, on their heads and faces.
Jackson wrote that there was a lull after the lorries left: many miners had run away up towards Orgreave village, where there was an Asda; some stayed in the field, lounging in the sunshine. But then the police suddenly charged again, in the first of Clement’s three-part manoeuvre to clear the field, pushing them up to the bridge. The police horses and short-shield units chased the fleeing miners up to the road, Highfield Lane.
The only other escape was down an embankment across live railway lines, and hundreds of people did run across to escape the police charge. The missile-throwing from some miners after that – mostly over the bridge – was in defence, the lawyers argued, and a reaction to police brutality. None of the defendants admitted any wrongdoing or participation in violence. They had all been in that area and said that Police Support Unit (PSU) “snatch squads” were attacking people within easy reach or who did not run away, then arresting them. Their lawyers argued that there was a pattern in which these miners were fitted up with false evidence presented by two police officers.
Clement, asked about Broomhead, said that police had later gone to his home and found him working on his allotment – where he was arrested for riot. That prompted an outburst of disbelieving laughter from the accused men in the dock, who were warned by the Judge Gerald Coles QC to be quiet.
The barrister Peter Griffiths, representing James O’Brien – a Welsh miner who was shown in press photographs in the custody of police, bleeding down the right side of his face, torso and jeans from a gaping cut above his eye – put it to Clement that police officers over the bridge “went berserk” and lashed out at people at random. “If that happened, it is wrong,” Clement replied. “Officers should never go berserk. But I am not accepting they did.”
Yet as the prosecution moved on to the evidence against the individual men, it became apparent that all 15 defendants said the police had seriously assaulted them. Bill Greenaway’s wrist had been broken with a blow from a truncheon, David Bell’s leg was broken by, he said, a police officer kicking or stamping on it. David Moore said he was knocked to the ground, beaten, handcuffed, and then, when he was taken through the police lines, kicked and hit with truncheons.
Bernard Jackson’s account was that during the lull after the lorries had left, he had gone to the Asda to buy biscuits, then went and sat on a wall. He was unscrewing his flask to pour some tea when the PSUs charged. Ernie Barber, another of the defendants, 44 at the time, recalls it now and scoffs: “Bernard Jackson had a flask on him when he was arrested. Who takes a bloody flask to a riot?”
Jackson said that a police officer, unprovoked, smashed him in the face with a riot shield. He was then arrested, and nearly throttled with a truncheon.
“As I was dragged through the cordon, the coppers nearest lashed out with their truncheons,” Jackson wrote in his book. “‘Bastard miner,’ ‘Fucking Yorkie miner.’ Fists, boots or truncheons, it didn’t matter, so long as they could have a go at you.”
The South Yorkshire police force’s version of events had already begun to unravel under questioning. But when the arresting officers were called as witnesses to present their evidence against the individual miners, the full scale of alleged police malpractice became clear.
Cross-examination of the officers by the miners’ lawyers revealed that there had been an orchestrated operation by South Yorkshire police to dictate identical opening paragraphs for separate statements by dozens of different police officers. Furthermore, the evidence against the accused individuals was then shown to be unreliable, often contradicted by film or photographs of where they were – and there were to be worse embarrassments for some police witnesses.
The first of the accused to be considered was David Moore, who worked at Wath Main colliery with Jackson. According to Jackson’s book, Moore was “a fervent chapel-goer” from a religious family.
PC Fred Browning of the Merseyside PSU, which had been heavily involved in the charges over the bridge and arrests, told the court he had volunteered for miners’ strike duties because of the overtime, which paid an extra £300 per week. In court, he said that he had seen Moore throw a single missile at police. That contrasted with his written statement, in which he said he had seen Moore throw “a number of missiles”.
Challenged by the judge about this discrepancy, Browning replied: “I don’t know. I just put down that. Just the first thing that came to my head.”
At first, Browning said he had written the statement out on his own. Mansfield then read out the first four paragraphs. They did not relate to Moore at all, but were a general description of a riot taking place. They included this account: “As we stood there in the line, a continuous stream of missiles came from the pickets into the line. There were no shields being used at this time, and I saw a number of police officers were struck by these missiles.”
Asked about these paragraphs, Browning admitted that he had not witnessed “the bulk of that” himself. Then he acknowledged that 15 or 20 officers sitting at desks in police cabins set up at Orgreave “helped each other” to write these paragraphs. Pressed on whether these were his own words, Browning said: “Some of it is.”
Mansfield then read a list of other officers who had used identical words in their statements. Browning first said he did not know how that could be. Mansfield put to him that this account must have been dictated or written down for them to copy. Browning then admitted that a plainclothes detective, whom he said he did not know, dictated the first four paragraphs.
Mansfield confronted Browning with the fact that he could not have witnessed the events in those paragraphs, because he had not gone on active duty until 11.30am: “The truth is you weren’t there when no shields were being used, were you?”
“I can’t recall being there, no,” Browning replied.
“All you were doing was writing out what you were told, that’s right?”
“Yes,” he said.
Subsequent officers giving evidence denied at first that the introductory paragraphs had been dictated, but gradually it was established that they had. This had been planned in advance, on Peter Wright’s orders, to charge miners with the offence of riot, in which three or more people gather together with a common violent purpose.
Arthur Scargill being assisted by medics at Orgreave. Photograph: Manchester Daily Express/SSPL via Getty
Detectives from the South Yorkshire police serious crime squad, in plain clothes, were present at the command centre. Officers who had arrested miners would book them into custody, then go up to portable buildings to make their statements, where this introduction was dictated to them. It described the first element necessary for a conviction: that a riot was taking place. The individual miners were then accused, by two officers, of throwing stones in that context – ie, of participating violently in the riot.
“All of us believed this was a show trial, and the life term was going to be handed down,” says Arthur Critchlow, one of the defendants, who was 26 at the time and married with two young children. “It was extremely stressful for all of us and our families.”
Brian Moreland, from Durham, who had suffered severe stress awaiting the trial and whose marriage had broken down, was accused of throwing stones in identical statements by two officers. The statement made by one of the officers, PC Thomas Brophy, was handwritten, and the signature of the other, PC David Moore, was on it as a witness. Moreland’s barrister, Vera Baird, who is now the Northumbria police and crime commissioner, accused Brophy of having simply copied the second officer’s statement the following day, and then forging the witness signature on it. Both officers denied this, but Baird called for a handwriting expert to be appointed by the court.
Just before the expert’s report was due back, the prosecution suddenly offered to stop the whole case if the miners would accept being bound over to keep the peace. Although that would mean they would serve no jail time, they felt it would be accepting guilt. All 15 turned the offer down.
Critchlow explains: “It was the pure sense of injustice, that the police were lying. We unanimously refused the bind over, risking doing time.”
The prosecutor, Brian Walsh, then revealed the report of the handwriting expert, Richard Totty. He had concluded that the witness signature on Brophy’s statement, purporting to be that of PC Moore, was not written by Moore. It might have been written by Brophy, Totty said, although that was more difficult to determine.
Walsh then told the judge and jury that the prosecution was not proceeding against Moreland. There were roars of jubilation. Still, despite this scandal, the prosecutions pressed on against the other men.
In these cases – compiled before the 1986 Police and Criminal Evidence Act would require police interviews to be tape-recorded – many of the arresting officers included confessions from the miners in their statements or notes, along with admissions by the miners that their injuries had been self-inflicted.
Critchlow had been struck almost unconscious by a blow to the head, which had blood pouring from it. He would spend two weeks in hospital having his head drained of fluid, and experience continuing health problems, including double vision. PC Paul Norris, who arrested him, said in evidence that even in that condition, Critchlow had admitted throwing stones; that he had told the officer: “If Arthur Scargill says ‘Rush the police,’ I do. If he says ‘Throw stones,’ I do.”
Regarding the alleged naming of Scargill, Critchlow’s barrister ridiculed Norris in court, saying: “You might have had the first miner supergrass, mightn’t you?”
Both Norris and the other arresting officer, PC Robert Abson, explained Critchlow’s injury, saying he had been walking backwards, throwing stones, and tripped on a kerb and banged his head on a wall. George Foster, who also said a policeman hit him over the head with a truncheon, was stated by his arresting officer to have said at the time: “I got bricked by mistake by my friends.”
David Bell, a teenager at Orgreave, was said to have fully confessed to throwing stones by signing a police officer’s notebook, while lying in hospital under medication, having just had his broken leg put in plaster.
On the 47th day of the trial, which would be the last before the prosecution surrendered, the evidence against Ernie Barber was heard. Barber’s account, which his barrister, Marguerite Russell, put to the arresting officer, PC Gary Gray, was that he had not been doing anything wrong, so had not run away when the PSUs charged. An officer then smashed him across the face with a truncheon, and he crumpled into a thicket of nettles. Three police officers then set about him, beating him on the head and right arm, then a fourth arrived and beat him on the legs and feet. Barber was left with blood dripping down his face and body, but he was cleaned up for the police custody photograph – and the only injuries noted on the arrest record were nettle stings.
Gray, cross-examined by Russell, admitted that officers punched and pushed Barber, even though he had been offering no resistance. Russell put to Gray that the arresting officers at Orgreave, having had the introduction of their statements dictated, were simply told to say that the people arrested were throwing stones. He denied that. Asked to explain why he had said in his statement that Barber was throwing stones, when in court he said it was a single stone, Gray replied it had been “quite bad grammatically”.
Cole, the judge, made another rare intervention: “It is not a question of grammar, is it? … It is just inaccurate, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” Gray replied.
The following day, Walsh rose and said the prosecution was withdrawing. The miners, described as a mob and “the enemy within” by the prime minister herself on national television, were acquitted.
Jackson’s book recalls the men’s joy and their resentment of the way that the police, the government and the media had behaved. “So that was it,” he wrote. “‘The worst case of public disorder this century.’ I wanted to get up into that witness box from which I had heard so much drivel spoken and tell the truth. I wanted to have my say. I felt completely and utterly cheated.”
After the trial collapsed, the defence barristers held a press conference. This was when Mansfield denounced the police evidence as “the biggest frame-up ever” and called for an inquiry. But compared to the overwhelming coverage of Orgreave a year earlier, reporting of the trial was scant.
The Thatcher government did not acknowledge that the Orgreave narrative had been reversed, or withdraw its support for South Yorkshire police – nor was it put under media pressure to do so. Home Office files seen by the Guardian show that Thatcher had prepared a statement supportive of the police, in which she would say: “I see no ground for a public inquiry.”
Government papers also show that Leon Brittan resisted calls for an inquiry into the policing of the miners’ strike arguing that it would turn into a “witch hunt” and be characterised by “anti-police bias”.
Free from outside pressure or scrutiny, Peter Wright did not accept responsibility for the trial’s collapse, or for the malpractice it had exposed. Neither he, for masterminding this operation, nor any individual officer, was ever held to account for anything related to it. In August 1985, Wright presented self-justifying explanations to his police committee, portraying the dictation of the introductory paragraphs as a matter of “assisting” officers from outside forces with “local knowledge and detail”.
“There was nothing sinister in this procedure,” he said.
Wright added that the “alleged forged signature” was being investigated. (Ultimately the director of public prosecutions accepted that there was evidence of perjury, but decided it was not in the public interest to prosecute.) The officer who truncheoned Broomhead was interviewed by South Yorkshire police on 20 June 1984, and the DPP advised on the same day that no charges should be brought. The Police Complaints Authority, the forerunner to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), decided that no disciplinary charges should be brought against any officer.
In September 1986, South Yorkshire police produced its own internal report on the Orgreave prosecutions, titled “The Methodology of Evidence Gathering during the NUM Dispute”. It was compiled by the force’s assistant chief constable, Walter Jackson, for the deputy chief constable, Peter Hayes. Both these men still held those senior positions two-and-a-half years later, at the time of the Hillsborough disaster on 15 April 1989. Jackson was at the match, but not on duty. After Hillsborough, Peter Wright put Hayes in charge of gathering the evidence to make the South Yorkshire police case to the official inquiry by Lord Justice Taylor, and in subsequent legal proceedings, at which the force denied responsibility and blamed the fans.
Protesters in London last month calling for an inquiry into Orgreave. Photograph: Rob Pinney/LNP/Rex/Shutterstock
Jackson’s 1986 Orgreave report has still not been made public, but extracts were quoted by the IPCC in its 2015 review of the Orgreave scandals, which described it as “at best, self-justificatory”. The report does not appear to have accepted that there were any irregularities or malpractice in the police evidence at the Orgreave trial. No reform of Wright’s force was prompted.
“The report does not expressly address the issue of whether there was a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice,” the IPCC said in its 2015 review, “and so no reliance can be placed on it to dispel suspicions about there having been one.”
Thirty-nine miners then sued South Yorkshire police for assault, false arrest and malicious prosecution in a case brought by their solicitor, Raju Bhatt, based on the evidence presented at the trial.
The result was that the force, eventually, in 1991, settled the civil claims – paying a record £425,000 in compensation – to men it had accused of the century’s worst civil disorder. But it never admitted liability. The IPCC had access to the internal correspondence that led to the settlement. It showed that South Yorkshire police recognised that officers had committed assaults, and that there had been perjury at the trial, and that it settled because it did not want that to become public. The IPCC highlighted a note dated 29 June 1988, by Peter Metcalf, the solicitor advising the force on the civil claims. A police inspector had told him that film of Orgreave showed that officers’ evidence about Russell Broomhead had been wrong. Metcalf asked for a written report.
“But [the inspector] is rather reluctant to do this,” the note recorded, “because there would appear to be some opposition at [South Yorkshire police headquarters] to our providing evidence which could cause the case to be lost.”
Metcalf did not ask the inspector for a report. The IPCC commented: “The note … raises further doubts about the ethical standards and complicity of officers high up in the organisation.
“Withholding this information and failing to have the evidence of perjury and improper treatment investigated may, of itself, indicate that offences in relation to perverting the course of justice and/or misconduct in a public office may have been committed.”
Yet at the time, the force presented the settlement, publicly and even to its own police authority, as a means of reconciliation and moving on.
In April 1989, 54,000 people arrived in Sheffield to attend the FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough. By then, as a succession of officers at the new inquests into the disaster testified, South Yorkshire police was a hardened, hierarchical force, ruled with an “iron fist” by Wright. Within that culture, the series of decisions that led to the deaths of 96 people began on 10 October 1988. That night, officers from F Division, which covered Hillsborough, played a prank on a probationary constable, posing as hooded armed robbers, luring him to an alleyway, terrifying him by holding guns to his head, pulling his trousers down and taking pictures of him, before unmasking themselves.
Many F Divison officers believe Wright overreacted to this episode because it was reported in the Sheffield Star and attracted the attention of local MPs. Wright took personal charge of a disciplinary procedure, and on 20 February 1989 sacked an inspector, a sergeant and two constables, demoted two more sergeants, and fined two other officers.
This remains a devastating reflection of Wright’s regime: not a single police officer was disciplined for the brutality at Orgreave, the alleged perjury and the failed “frame-up” that followed, nor for the horror that would descend on Hillsborough, or the lying and alleged cover-up after that. Yet Wright took severe action against eight officers for an internal prank that did not affect a single member of the public.
Disastrously, Wright then also moved the chief superintendent in charge of F Division, Brian Mole, a popular “gaffer” and nationally renowned football match commander who had extensive experience of policing Hillsborough. Mole was moved on 27 March, less than three weeks before the semi-final. Wright promoted in Mole’s place David Duckenfield, a disciplinarian who had never commanded a match at Hillsborough before. Wright said Duckenfield’s inexperience might be an advantage, because he would be “more on his mettle”. No senior officer questioned this decision; several testified that Wright’s orders were not to be debated.
In his evidence, 26 years later, Duckenfield admitted that he was grossly inexperienced, that he failed to prepare adequately for the semi-final, and that his failings at the match had caused the 96 deaths. Yet back in 1989, even as people were dying from horrific crush injuries, he lied, and said that Liverpool supporters had gained unauthorised entry through an exit gate, which in fact he had ordered to be opened, to relieve a crush he had allowed to build up outside. But in a 9am meeting on 16 April 1989, the morning after the disaster, Wright absolved his officers of responsibility and described the supporters as “animalistic”. Like his force’s immediate statements in 1984 that they had responded reasonably to a riot at Orgreave, Wright briefed this narrative of supporter misbehaviour to Thatcher and Sir Bernard Ingham later that day. In the legal proceedings, South Yorkshire police continued ruthlessly to make that case.
David Duckenfield arriving to give evidence at the Hillsborough inquest in 2015. Photograph: Dave Thompson/Getty Images
Peter Metcalf, the solicitor who was still advising the force on its response to the Orgreave civil claims, took on the Hillsborough case, too. He oversaw the process of officers’ statements being amended, removing crucial evidence about the police operation and criticism of senior officers.
Taylor, in his August 1989 report, saw through the police lies and determined that the principal cause of the deaths was police mismanagement. Government documents released to the Hillsborough Independent Panel in 2012 show that Thatcher toned down the response planned by her then home secretary, Douglas Hurd, to say that the government “welcomes unreservedly the broad thrust of the report”. Hurd also expected Wright to resign, although a home secretary could not call for him to do so.
Within No 10, remarkably, the police culture of denying blame and covering up was recognised. Carolyn Sinclair, an adviser in Thatcher’s policy unit, wrote of the Taylor report that the “defensive – and at times close to deceitful – behaviour by the senior officers in South Yorkshire sounds depressingly familiar. Too many senior policemen seem to lack the capacity or character to perceive and admit faults in their organisation.”
Yet despite so many people having died as a result of police failures, Thatcher responded by noting on a memo: “What do we mean by ‘welcoming the broad thrust of the report’? The broad thrust is devastating criticism of the police. Is that for us to welcome? Surely we welcome the thoroughness of the report and its recommendations.”
Wright did, in fact, offer to resign, but his police authority refused to accept it. He stayed on until 1990, having set in motion the force’s campaign to fight the Taylor report’s findings. At the first inquest into the deaths, South Yorkshire police blamed supporters again, and the jury returned the verdict, in March 1991, of accidental death. The families’ campaign for justice was concentrated on seeking accountability from those responsible for the deaths of their relatives and on overturning that inquest. They had to wait 21 years before it was finally quashed, after the HIP report of September 2012. Peter Wright died a year before that, in 2011, at the age of 82.
The verdicts of the jury at the new inquests last April – that the 96 people were unlawfully killed owing to the failures of South Yorkshire police and Duckenfield’s gross negligence – vindicated a 27-year fight to overturn the force’s lies. In January, two new criminal investigations into the disaster and the alleged cover-up sent files on 23 individuals and organisations to the CPS, to determine if any should be charged with offences including manslaughter, perjury and perverting the course of justice.
Margaret Aspinall, the chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, has become increasingly convinced that the roots of the disaster can be found at Orgreave, and the failure to hold South Yorkshire police to account afterwards.
“Ninety-six people died as a result of Orgreave,” she says. “This police force was brutal and corrupt, and if they had been brought to task after that, Hillsborough might not have happened. But my son and all those innocent people went to a football match and died horrible deaths, and we had to fight lies for so many years.”
The Guardian emphasised the connection between the events at Orgreave and the deaths at Hillsborough – which had previously been barely recognised – in April 2012. A BBC documentary in October 2012 then highlighted the dictation in the Orgreave statements. A month later, the South Yorkshire police force took the remarkable step of referring itself to the IPCC for possible brutality at Orgreave and malpractice in the evidence against the arrested miners.
In June 2015, the police watchdog produced a damning report, stating that it had found evidence of assault, a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, perjury and a cover-up. Despite this, the IPCC decided that it could not undertake a new investigation, owing to the amount of time passed and the resources that would be required.
As home secretary, Theresa May received this report, and could, as expected, have left it alone. Instead, she invited submissions for a public inquiry from the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign. In the weeks following the Hillsborough verdicts, May and her current chief of staff, Nick Timothy, encouraged campaigners to believe that there would be an inquiry. In May 2016, she delivered her lecture to the Police Federation on the need for historic investigations to redress injustice. The same day, Timothy – who was at the time on a break from working for May – published his article on the Conservative Home website arguing strongly for an Orgreave inquiry.
Two months later, May was prime minister. But once she had arrived in No 10, her principled stance on the need to redress historical wrongs appeared to change – just as she transformed herself from a supporter of remaining in the EU to a zealous advocate of Brexit.
In July, Labour’s Andy Burnham challenged May’s newly appointed home secretary, Amber Rudd, about whether the commitment to an Orgreave inquiry was wavering. Rudd promised that the Orgreave question was “one of the most important issues in my in-tray”, and that she would read the OTJC submission, to which May, for all her bold speeches, had never actually responded.
On 13 September, Rudd met the OTJC, supportive Labour MPs including Burnham, and Margaret Aspinall. Arthur Critchlow was there, seeking government recognition 31 years on. They questioned whether Rudd had, in fact, read the submission and believed that she was ignorant of the basic facts. Nevertheless, two days later, the Times splashed on its front page that the government was indeed to hold an inquiry. The report cited Whitehall sources – believed to have included a close advisor to Rudd – saying the only question was what form an inquiry should take.
But the sudden, greater publicity given to the prospect of a Conservative government holding an inquiry into an episode that many in the party had mythologised as a great victory drew a fierce backlash, with critical articles in the Telegraph, Daily Mail and elsewhere. Lord Tebbit, Thatcher’s minister for trade and industry during the miners’ strike, was a prominent and particularly scathing opponent. Delivering the conventional, one-sided depiction of the period, he told the Times: “The only problem at Orgreave was that Scargill and his thugs held a mass, violent picket to stop people from going to work.” The police, Tebbit has said repeatedly, “behaved properly”.
A banner for the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign. Photograph: Dinendra Haria/Rex/Shutterstock
In common with most of those speaking out against an inquiry, Tebbit concentrated solely on the violent events of 18 June 1984 itself, not the allegations of perjury and perverting the course of justice in the subsequent collapsed trial. Speaking to the Guardian more recently, Tebbit said of the trial that it was “a cock-up”, and that he rejected the connection to Hillsborough, although he said he knew little about the disaster. “The only link with Hillsborough is that it involved the same police force,” he said.
This reaction seems to have worked on May, who was preoccupied with reassuring the party’s right wing of her commitment to Brexit. On 31 October, Rudd announced that there would be no inquiry at all.
“My view,” said Burnham, “is that it suited Theresa May’s political positioning as the home secretary to take on the police, and to seem like she was on the side of working people by considering an Orgreave inquiry. But after the Brexit referendum she became prime minister by doing a deal with the Tory right, and they regard Orgreave, against all the evidence, still as a sacred victory. When the Conservative rightwing backlash to an Orgreave inquiry came, Theresa May reverted to type. She showed that what she said about the need for historic inquiries, then on the steps of Downing Street, about addressing ‘burning injustice’, was empty rhetoric.”
Neither No 10 nor the Home Office was prepared to answer questions from the Guardian about how and why their stance on an Orgreave inquiry changed. Nick Timothy did not respond to requests for comment or an interview. Rudd herself turned an interview down. Freedom of information requests for the policy considerations leading to Rudd’s decision were refused by the Home Office, on the basis that advice to ministers is exempt.
The Home Office sent a stock response repeating the argument Rudd made in her statement to parliament, namely that “the policing landscape has changed fundamentally since 1984” and that “there would be very few lessons for the policing system today to be learned from any review of the events and practices of three decades ago”.
The Guardian asked No 10 if this means there has been a reversal of May’s policy as home secretary, that historic inquiries were “not archaeological excavations”, but “about ensuring justice is done”, and that “difficult truths, however unpalatable they may be, must be confronted head on”. Now, the passage of time was being presented as the very reason not to have an inquiry.
In November, when pressed by Yvette Cooper, chair of the home affairs select committee, Rudd admitted that in the 16 months between inviting a submission for an Orgreave inquiry in June 2015, and rejecting it in October, the Home Office did not consider the police files or trial transcripts – the actual facts of what happened. Instead, under May, then Rudd, they looked only at the original Thatcher government files from 1984 and 1985. It was after considering them, and what they revealed about that Conservative government’s actions, that they decided against an inquiry.
So Theresa May, who had lectured about the principled need for historic inquiries – at the same time as she argued for Britain to remain in the EU – reverted to the old nasty politics as she led the Brexit charge. She left intact Margaret Thatcher’s unconditional support for Peter Wright’s South Yorkshire police in 1985, and sealed the Orgreave scandal up again, like the coal still buried beneath Britain.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/18/scandal-of-orgreave-miners-strike-hillsborough-theresa-may