Thu 21 Jun 2018, 10:11 AM | Posted by editor
Letter from Mic Craig, Labour Party Northern Ireland
As the 34th anniversary of the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ passed this week, an inquiry into the events of that day remains elusive.
Should the campaigners eventually manage to obtain a public enquiry, what questions will be asked, and what conclusions will be drawn from the answers?
We’ve all had long enough to think about this, although many of the revelations, which have added to the evidence against the official narrative of what happened at the coking plant, on June 18th, 1984, have only emerged in relatively recent times.
Such an enquiry will deal with the question of whether the police instigated the violence, as opposed to keeping the peace. It will question if the attack on the pickets were part of a pre-conceived plan by senior officers and if there was a co-ordinated cover up by the police at all levels.
One question which will be studiously avoided at such an enquiry will be, ‘what role did the State play in this event?’
Just as in the Bloody Sunday Inquiry in Northern Ireland, which placed most of the responsibility for killing of 14 unarmed protesters, onto the soldiers who pulled the triggers, and their immediate commanders, this inquiry will focus on those cops wielding the batons. As in the Derry case, senior officers will have questions to answer, but similarly, it is unlikely that any legal action against them will be recommended as a result.
Not only will the role played by the State in this event be off-limits, but the laws which were used by the police in order to try and frame the strikers will not be questioned either. The only issue will be the method of the application of these laws.
These laws need to be questioned because they are at the very core of everything that is wrong with the way this society is organised. The Public Order Act of 1936 (replaced in 1986, with its scope widened), was the law which applied in the Orgreave case. On the face of it, this law appears to protect the public from ‘aggression by mobs’ – a term used by Norman Tebbit MP, to describe the actions of striking miners.
The real purpose of this law was to protect private property. This Public Order Act is not about preventing pub brawls or a few tanked-up teenagers from breaking a park bench. It derives from laws in the 18th Century which were designed to prevent an uprising against the State and its landowners and industrialists.
In 1984, the facility at Orgreave was part of the nationalised coal industry, so it wasn’t private property in the true sense; nevertheless, it wasn’t owned and managed by the workers whose labour was essential for its existence, as would be the case in a socialist society. In practical terms, especially under the control of a Tory government, nationalised industries might as well have been private, because the workers were equally as alienated from both. Were this not so, it’s highly unlikely that a situation would have developed which necessitated strike action by the miners in the first place.
The Tories treated the nationalised industries as if they owned them because in their plan, they and their friends soon would, and the culling of some of the mines was part of that plan.
Picketing the gates of a processing plant to dissuade hauliers from entering is not a threatening or aggressive act, it is not as likely to lead to a breach of the peace as would a dispute between opposing groups of football supporters, yet the police always turn up.
Scab workers do run the risk of being assaulted, that’s a risk they take when they decide to work against the common interest. If the police intervene on the pretext that they’re preventing violence, they are taking sides with the employer and in so doing cease to be peace keepers.
Are the police ‘keeping the peace’ or protecting private property? Of course, the private property in question is not the actual structure of the plant or factory, but the production process itself, which includes collections and deliveries of materials. The police are there to protect this process.
In the Thatcher government’s plan for a neo-liberal economy, the laws which controlled workers in the interests of private property didn’t suffice, if applied by the book, especially when it came to dealing with powerful trade unions in the coal industry. The government colluded with police and military chiefs, the BBC and the mainstream press to first, set up a decoy -the Orgreave plant. Then it created the conditions which would lead to a strike, trapped pickets and violently attacked them, falsely arrested and attempted to frame them, meanwhile disseminating a false narrative that slandered the strikers, then covered up the crimes.
If the government does not respect the law, why should we? Whether we do or not is a choice which we could be forced to make soon enough.
