Blood, sweat and tears

The Miners' Strike 1984-85

For a year the miners fought to defend their jobs and communities. They fought the might of the British state. Their struggle inspired millions...

The miners stood silently in line in the snow. The early morning mist of a grey winter's day gradually rolled back to reveal a senior police officer, all in white, with coal black eyes, a long red Pinocchio pointed nose, glistening police buttons and pips and a flat inspector's cap. A snowman neatly modelled upon the figure of a self-possessed Chief Supt whose normal practice was to inspect his troops as if it were the parade ground at Sandhurst. As usual he arrived in his immaculate police Range Rover and wasted no time in demanding the immediate removal of the offending snowstatue. Not a single muscle moved. After repeated demands had fallen upon deaf ears he decided that it was time to close the show. He would do it himself and teach everyone a lesson. He mounted his four wheeled stallion, revved up the engine, and charged. Still no one moved because they all knew something he didn't. The snowman had been carefully constructed around a concrete bollard! It is not clear how the Chief Supt managed to explain the vertical indentation running from bonnet to bumper and rendering the Range Rover immobile.

An apocryphal story from 1984 and an allegory for the might of the state against a solid mining community. This solidarity would have succeeded had it not been for a fatal lack of support from elements within the TUC and Labour Party leadership. The strike was not about pay and conditions, nor was it about some fantasy from the fevered brow of Arthur Scargill as the tabloids would have it. Instead it was a struggle for the very survival and fabric of ordinary decent communities. For the Tories however this was a clearly planned confrontation between capital and organised labour, a necessary precondition for the establishment and supremacy of a laissez-faire economy. The Ridley report, commissioned by Margaret Thatcher and drawn up by MP Nicholas Ridley whilst in opposition, was a plan to combat enemies of the next Tory government. Those enemies were identified as arising within the coal industry and the unions.The report therefore recommended importing coal and building up stocks, encouraging the recruitment of non union drivers to shift these stocks, cutting off social security to strikers and most significantly the establishment of mobile police squads to counter picketing.

The years between 1984 and now have witnessed the untrammelled and unashamed excesses of asset stripping, corporate greed, bonus culture, all developed on the back of a shadow economy. Basically take the money and run. Predictably the repercussions of this meltdown will be felt most acutely by the very same communities who took a stand in 1984, and once again there has to be a collective movement which grasps the opportunity to re-evaluate the needs and priorities in the context of a fragile environment and a threatened planet.

It was with this in mind that the People's Charter was launched at the House of Commons on Wednesday 11th March 2009. Members of the Haldane Society, as they did during the miners strike, played a prominent role in this initiative. The aims of the charter are simple, to create a movement with over one million people in the United Kingdom signing up to six key principles: 'a fair and just Britain; a future without war; more and better jobs; decent homes for all; improved public services and a fairer economy for a fairer Britain'.

It has been obvious for some time that the credibility gap between government and people has been widening to almost cavernous proportions. Alienation and political exclusion is felt across the board, especially amongst the younger generations who find far more inspiration and vision from the manifold activities of single issue pressure groups. These effective forces must be harnessed and co-ordinated to bring about change.

The mobile police squads and new style public order policing tactics were tested during the strike. The legacy can be traced through the Wapping dispute, the poll tax protests, anti-war demonstrations right through to the recent G20 protest in London.

Monday 18th June 1984 was probably the high point and crucible for the whole dispute and has been indelibly etched on the minds of all those who experienced it. The miners suffered terrible physical injuries as well as long-term irremediable psychological damage. A graphic and compelling account of what happened on the day can be found in Yvette Vanson's documentary, The Battle for Orgreave, shown on Channel 4 in 1986 and now held in the archives of the British Film Institute. The media at the time unremittingly depicted the miners as violent mindless pickets hell-bent on riot. And this was the charge brought against many of them at Sheffield Crown Court before the aptly named HHJ Cole. Needless to say nothing could have been further from the truth which was established during the trial when the prosecution case was torn to shreds and collapsed after 48 days. A blow by blow account was recorded by a defendant I represented, Bernard Jackson. He was a 43- year-old craftsman miner and President of Wath Main NUM. His book, co-authored with Tony Wardle, is also entitled The Battle for Orgreave.

The battle itself was incredibly one-sided. The police had arrived in large numbers. There were long shield units; short shield units including snatch squads; riot squads (some of whose overalls had no identifying number as at the G20 demo); mounted police some of whom had long staves and police dogs. They had a plan, currently described as corralling or kettling, to surround the protesting miners by herding them into a field above and beyond the Orgreave coking plant. At the bottom of the field, slowly moving up would be lines of long shield officers. On the right-hand side was a road along which mounted police could swiftly be deployed, and to the left was a field in which more mounted police together with dogs had been positioned. The top of the field was bounded by a deep railway cutting which made any escape extremely dangerous. The rest is history.

But it wasn't just on the battlefield that new tactics were being practised. Roadblocks were set up in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and as far afield as Kent in order to prevent the free movement of protesters. What happened at these roadblocks was often unlawful. One occasion was captured by Yvette and her film crew when compiling another documentary called Taking Liberties. They were on their way to film a picket line in Nottinghamshire. The police who stopped them could not make up their minds about the basis upon which they had made the stop. Running out of ideas they finally ordered the film crew to turn around, threatening that if they failed to do so they would be arrested for obstructing the police in the course of their duty! Almost a complete replica of this situation was experienced by protesters travelling to Fairford airbase in relation to the war in Iraq. They were stopped en route, imprisoned in their coaches, and escorted back to London by a posse of police motorcycles. This too was unlawful as found eventually by the House of Lords. It too was captured on film and by sheer coincidence is the opening sequence of another documentary entitled Taking Liberties produced by another independent company - Revolver.

These films provide an important public service by exposing malpractice but at the same time there is an equally important point about the necessity for recording malpractice. One of the most significant ways in which we were able to undermine the prosecution case in the Orgreave trial derived from the critically useful material collated by an independent observer group in Sheffield called Police Watch and from a multitude of photographic material assembled by professional photographers, independent observers and protesters. The most dramatic example of this was a miner with a video camera who had secreted himself up a tree and was unseen by police below. He was able to record an utterly disgraceful arrest, in which a snatch squad of three short shield officers targeted a perfectly innocent miner, pinned him to the ground and then dragged him towards police lines by means of an arm lock round his head and neck.

After this I helped establish with a number of other lawyers an ad hoc legal observers group - LOG. This was used during the Wapping dispute. Lawyers identified by fluorescent bibs and the acronym LOG would accompany marches, demonstrations and meetings in order to monitor incidents. They would operate in pairs, one watching and making a mental note in preparation for any subsequent report, and the other carrying a means of record either a note pad and pen or a camera. It is clear that it was the production of film and photographic material in relation to G20 which has led to a Parliamentary inquiry and a criminal investigation.

There needs to be therefore an immediate reappraisal of the new offence created by section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act which criminalises 'eliciting, publishing or communicating information on members of the Armed Forces, intelligence services and police officers which could be useful to someone committing or preparing an act of terrorism'. Given potentially what is embraced by the breadth of this section and the fact that there does not have to be any intention to promote or assist terrorism, the mind boggles about how this ever slipped by our beloved democratic representatives.

Mike Mansfield QC