The call by the general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, Chris Kitchen, for the investigation into the police cover-up over the Hillsborough disaster to be widened to include police actions during the miners’ strike in 1984 throws the spotlight on the role of the state and the police under capitalism.
The tragedy at Hillsborough, where 96 Liverpool supporters died in 1989 and where South Yorkshire police did their best to blame fans for their deaths, bears a striking resemblance to the way in which the same force attempted to frame striking miners after the Battle of Orgreave five years earlier.
On Monday June 18 1984, ten thousand miners from all over the country travelled to the Orgreave coke depot to stop the scab coke entering the plant and found themselves facing a huge force of police drafted in from ten counties.
The police force assembled that day comprised of 40 to 50 mounted police plus a number of dogs and their handlers.
It was not the miners who rioted on that day, it was the police themselves.
When the majority of pickets had left, and after the scab coke lorries had been and gone, the police launched a cavalry charge, an unprovoked attack designed solely to inflict physical damage on men fighting for their jobs.
As in the Hillsborough disaster, the capitalist press and the police launched a huge campaign of vilification against the miners at Orgreave, reversing the truth to claim that it was miners who had rioted on that day.
The truth, however, soon emerged as the 95 miners arrested that day were, one by one, acquitted by the courts of any criminal acts.
The police case against them collapsed as it became evident that police statements had been falsified and that they had even been dictated to them in order to ‘prove’ that the miners had rioted.
One expert found that 34 police statements used identical phrases to claim that missiles had been thrown at the police, while 22 were word-for-word copies.
In 2001 the South Yorkshire police force was ordered by the courts to pay half a million pounds damages and costs to the miners arrested that day.
Leading QC, Michael Mansfield, who represented some of the miners during the case and who now acts for the Hillsborough Family Support Group, described the police evidence as ‘the biggest frame-up ever’.
Mansfield has now stated: ‘South Yorkshire police operated a culture of fabricating evidence with impunity, which was not reformed after Orgreave, and allowed to continue to Hillsborough five years later.’
It would be a mistake, however, to ascribe this culture of fabricating evidence and framing striking miners or football fans as all down to one out of control police force, or that it is possible to reform the police.
The fact remains that during the miners’ strike of 1984-85 the Tory government under Margaret Thatcher mobilised the entire state apparatus of police, judges, courts and the secret services with the one aim of smashing the NUM and inflicting a huge defeat on the entire working class.
To this end, every law in the land was ripped up with judges creating no-go areas throughout the country to prevent picketing, the creation of a national police force and the use of spies inside the union.
At Orgreave the miners learnt at first hand that there is no such thing as a neutral police force operating by consent – it is an arm of the capitalist state whose only function is to preserve capitalism at all costs.
In periods of acute class struggle this repressive role comes to the fore and dominates.
There can be no reform of the police force – it must be abolished along with the capitalist system it serves.
