THE Independent Police Complaints Commission issued a report on Friday detailing the findings of its two and a half year long inquiry into the actions of the police at the notorious ‘Battle of Orgreave’ during the 1984-85 miners’ strike.
On 18 June 1984, a miners’ mass picket of British Steel’s coking plant at Orgreave in Yorkshire was attacked by 6,000 riot police drawn from forces across the country. Towards the end of the picket, when miners were dispersing, mounted police in full riot gear charged those that remained with no warning.
Subsequently, the police were to claim that the mounted charge, accompanied by an attack by riot police on foot, was in response to missiles being thrown at them by striking miners, producing BBC news footage to substantiate this claim. 95 miners were arrested and charged with riot and unlawful assembly – charges carrying a potential life sentence.
The trial of these 95 collapsed when evidence before the court proved that it was the police that rioted on that day, not the miners. South Yorkshire Police was forced to pay out £425,000 compensation for unlawful arrest and malicious prosecution but not a single police officer of any rank was ever charged and no inquiry was held.
In 2013, the BBC broadcast a programme on Orgreave which produced clear evidence that the police had fabricated evidence against striking miners, falsifying official statements, with senior officers instructing subordinates to beef up accusations to make the charges as serious as possible. As for the news footage, it turned out that they had reversed the sequence of events – missiles had only been thrown after the police charged.
Faced with the damning evidence of the programme and reeling from the revelations that exactly the same cover-up had been used by them over the death of 96 Liverpool fans at Hillsborough just five years after Orgreave, South Yorkshire Police referred themselves to the IPPC, secure in the knowledge that this ‘independent’ body would do absolutely nothing to bring any police officer to account. This is exactly what has happened.
Despite finding that the police lied and fabricated evidence, the IPPC has decided that there can be no prosecutions because of the time that has elapsed and the fact that many of the officers concerned have left the police and therefore can’t be disciplined. This is scarcely a surprise – the police at Orgreave were not some out-of-control force, they were acting on the instructions and under the directions of the Thatcher government.
Under her Tory regime, the entire capitalist state apparatus – the police, security services, courts and judges – was mobilised to one aim, to smash the powerful miners’ union and inflict a huge defeat on the working class. To achieve this, every law was ripped up, judges created no-go areas throughout Britain to prevent pickets moving about the country, spies were placed inside the union and a national police force was created and instructed to use whatever violence was required to break the union. With their decision that prosecution of the police for the crimes committed at Orgreave is not ‘in the public interest’, the IPCC have served notice that the police are above the law.
Far from being a neutral force operating with the consent of the community they are supposed to serve, the police are an arm of the capitalist state whose only function is to preserve capitalism at all costs. Today, 30 years on from Orgreave, British capitalism is in its death agony. Sinking under the weight of huge debts run up by the banking collapse, the capitalist state is gearing itself up for an almighty confrontation with the working class that will dwarf anything that has gone before.
It is no accident that at this years’ conference of the Police Federation their leaders openly talked of the police being transformed into a ‘paramilitary’ force under the new Tory government. For the working class the lessons are clear – there can be no reform of the police force. It must be smashed along with the entire capitalist state, so that the bankrupt capitalist system can be replaced by socialism.
