The Enemy Above: Orgreave and the neoliberal police state

Zoe Cussen explores the history of the 1984 Battle of Orgreave and its lasting repercussions on the nature of British policing.

On the 15th of June, the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign and their supporters will take to Sheffield City Centre, demanding a long-overdue government inquiry into the brutal events of the 18th of June 1984. Commonly dubbed the ‘Battle of Orgreave’, the infamous clash between striking miners and police at the Orgreave Coking Plant in South Yorkshire is perhaps the bloodiest incident in the recent history of Britain's industrial relations. The events that took place 40 years ago, and the failure of subsequent governments to deliver any meaningful justice to those affected, reveals much about the nature of state-sanctioned police violence and the repression of protest in Britain today.

The decision by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) to picket the Orgreave Coking Plant in June 1984 was made in part due to the collapse of an agreement between the NUM and the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation at Scunthorpe steel plant. This made the coke works at Orgreave a target for picketing in order to prevent coke and coal being delivered to Scunthorpe. Furthermore, the NUM had historically found success in picketing similar facilities during previous strikes. During the miners’ strike of 1972, the mass picketing of the Saltley Gate fuel storage depot in Birmingham had led to the police ordering the plant's closure, securing a victory for the NUM . This history of success inspired support for the Orgreave action; to NUM leader Arthur Scargill, the picketting of Orgreave was to be a massive event in the dispute, one which could significantly impact the course of the broader strike.

For Thatcher, who was aware of the NUM successes in 1972 and their role in the subsequent fall from power of her predecessor Ted Heath, the indisputable defeat of the miners in 1984 was essential to her political survival. As Fine and Millar illustrate, her and her government employed a two-part rhetoric to combat the strike and control the public discourse surrounding it. Firstly, the dismantlement of the British coal industry was framed as an economic rationality and subsequently, the miners could be framed as demanding ‘what could not be conceded’. Secondly, Thatcher’s government and pro-government media mounted an unassailable emphasis on the rule of law in Britain. The state and its propagandists conjured a false portrayal of striking miners as criminals, mobs and ‘the enemy within’. Painting the striking miners as criminal threats — and even suggesting that they were being funded by the Soviet Union to subvert Britain — allowed Thatcher’s state police to become the ‘defenders of democracy’. Thus, the use of violence to defeat these ‘criminal mobs’ by any means necessary was legitimised. With thousands of strikers expected to attend, Orgreave was as much an opportunity for Thatcher to demonstrate her willingness to ruthlessly crush the strike as much as it was for the NUM to advance its cause.

As McGahey notes, the 1984 miners’ strike as a whole was characterised by ‘police operations more controversial than any previously seen in Britain’, with liberal police use of road blocks, riot squads and restrictive bail conditions, along with the emergence of the National Reporting Centre as a nationally-centralised policing strategy. However, the NUM’s plan to picket Orgreave was met with an especially unique police response than that which previous efforts had faced. While the police would normally patrol roads, close them, and turn vehicles around to prevent miners from travelling to pickets, on the 18th of June many miners had uninterrupted journeys to Orgreave . As one Merseyside police officer present at Orgreave recounted to the BBC in 2016, there was a sense that senior South Yorkshire Police officers were ‘anticipating trouble, and in some ways relishing it and looking forward to it’. As up to 5000 miners arrived at the field next to the coking plant, there were police lining the bottom of the field on foot with riot shields and batons, with mounted police and dogs lining each side. Preparing for a battle, South Yorkshire Police had deployed 6000 police officers from eighteen different forces to Orgreave that morning.

The confrontation at Orgreave was described by historian Tristram Hunt as ‘almost mediaeval in its choreography…at various stages a siege, a battle, a chase, a rout and, finally, a brutal example of legalised state violence’. Upon the arrival of the first convoys of lorries, the picketing miners naturally surged forwards — an action met by the overreaction of SYP Assistant Chief Constable Anthony Clement, who sent a charge of mounted officers into the picket line. Some pickets responded to the immediate brutality by throwing stones at police lines in defence, an act that would later be twisted by media and police narratives to misrepresent the miners as the source of violence. Two subsequent ordered charges of mounted officers then followed, with the final one followed by officers on foot armed with batons. This final charge drove the miners up into the village of Orgreave, where the violent clashes between miners and police continued . At least 52 pickets were injured at the hands of the police, with miners presenting bloody faces and, in the worst cases, fractured skulls. Many had to retreat to residents’ gardens to escape the violence.

A total of 93 strikers were arrested at Orgreave. 71 were charged with ‘riot’, rather than the usual charge of ‘violent disorder’ that was commonly used in picket actions. This charge bore much stricter consequences — warranting a potential life sentence for those found guilty — and had rarely before been used in cases of protest, and particularly not within industrial disputes. Determined to crush the strike by any means necessary, Thatcher personally pushed for the charge of riot to be used more liberally against the strikers — a prospect which would both worsen legal consequences and aid her villainisation of the miners as a criminal mob. Legally, a riot charge must relate to significant disruption to civilian life, which the police alleged had occurred at Orgreave village — despite this being a result of their own actions driving the miners away from the plant and towards civilians. This led to speculation as to whether pushing the miners into the village was a premeditated attempt by the police to permit harsher sentences. Riot charges dealt a huge blow to the miners arrested, who, after being subject to severe police brutality, were now potentially facing life imprisonment.

This manipulation of the narrative continued, as police officers involved in Orgreave were reportedly ordered by their superiors to not make any of their own notes and to instead use pre-written witness statements describing the events that day. BBC News coverage also actively perpetuated the lie that police violence was only a reaction to violence initiated by the strikers. Most notably, the BBC edited the footage from the confrontation to display events in reverse, deceptively airing clips of miners throwing stones before footage of the police stampede. In 1991, the BBC addressed this dishonesty, stating that it had ‘acknowledged some years ago that it made a mistake over the sequence of events at Orgreave. We accepted without question that it was serious, but emphasised that it was a mistake made in the haste of putting the news together’. Many however doubt that the incident was a mistake, but speculate it was a deliberate response to an official order.

After a gruelling 48-day trial, the charges of riot against the miners were dropped, owing to police evidence being deemed unreliable in court. Nevertheless, having to mount a legal defence under the threat of potential life imprisonment had damaging effects on the mental wellbeing of those wrongly accused, and generally set the miners’ cause back. Some miners accused of riot subsequently reported PTSD-like symptoms, resulting from both the brutality of Orgreave and the trial that followed . Strict bail conditions also meant that many of those arrested at Orgreave were unable to continue picketing as the trial went on, leading to a loss of momentum at pickets at strikebreaking pits in Nottinghamshire.

No formal government inquiry has ever taken place into what happened at Orgreave. A 2015 report from the Independent Police Complaints Commission did state that there was ‘evidence of excessive violence by police officers, a false narrative from police exaggerating violence by miners, perjury by officers giving evidence to prosecute the arrested men, and an apparent cover-up of that perjury by senior officer’. However, these reports have never been fully investigated by the state, nor has any kind of inquiry been launched, despite numerous calls for one both inside and outside of the Commons. 

Many of these calls came as a result of the new inquests which took place between 2014 and 2016 into the Hillsborough Disaster, with grave comparisons having been drawn between the actions of the same police force at both events. Following the tragic deaths of 97 Liverpool supporters at Hillsborough due to gross police negligence, South Yorkshire Police cowardly falsified the narrative of the day, suggesting that the fatal crush was caused by rowdy, intoxicated football fans who had broken in to the stadium, while in actuality, the police had ordered a gate to be opened in a total mismanagement of crowd control. Just as officers had been instructed to not report anything in their pocketbooks at Orgreave and to follow a pre-written witness statement, these deceitful practices were repeated by South Yorkshire Police at Hillsborough five years later. Andy Burnham, amongst others, drew parallels between the ‘underhand tactics’ used during both events, while highlighting that uncovering the ‘full truth’ about Hillsborough required a proper investigation into the events at Orgreave. In 2016 the then- Home Secretary Amber Rudd responded to these calls by stating that there would be no inquiry into Orgreave due to there being ‘no deaths or wrongful convictions’. This only affirmed a disturbing truth that in Britain, the police can inflict brutal violence and cause enormous physical, emotional and psychological suffering and be held completely unaccountable, so long as nobody is killed.

The lack of a full inquiry into Orgreave was and is a political choice. This choice has been upheld for four decades, to avoid confronting the bitter reality about the brutal neoliberal style of policing in Britain that was birthed in the 1980s and pervades today. South Yorkshire Police, while carrying out their violent repression of strikers at Orgreave, were not acting in isolation. Instead, they were heeding the call of Thatcher and her government to respond to the miners with a heavier hand and to impose disproportionately serious charges. As Thatcher’s Trade Secretary himself stated, ‘an inquiry would have been used as a stick with which to beat the Thatcher government’. Allowing the police violence and deception of the past to go unchecked, as a means of protecting the image of the historical government behind it, deepens the police’s immunity from accountability and can only lead to further policing failures and miscarriages of justice. 

Following on from Orgreave, the same repressive police practices of the 1980s have continued into the 21st century, with an especially negative impact on marginalised groups, particularly those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and ethnic minorities. The increase in stop-and-search policing (which disproportionately targets people of colour) under Thatcher was augmented by the Blair, Brown, and Cameron governments in the post-9/11 War on Terror. In this era, police in England and Wales searched an average of 60 people a day as suspected terrorists, with an arrest rate of just 1.7%, most of those on non-terror related grounds. During this time, Black and Asian people were four times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people in Britain. 

More recently, despotic restrictions on protest in the name of ‘public order’ have been legislated, supported by calls from the right for more robust clampdowns on protesters. This fierce call for the repression of protest has escalated since the countrywide Black Lives Matter marches in 2020 and the increase in direct action by anti-climate change groups such as Just Stop Oil. Following the highly controversial Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022, the newly passed Public Order Bill sets a much lower threshold of distinction for ‘disruptive protesting’, allows police more significant powers to prevent protests, introduce protest banning orders, extend stop-and-search (including suspicionless stop-and-search) to protests, and criminalise acts like ‘locking-on’. Mirroring the discourse-control around protest and protestors that Thatcher deployed against striking miners, the right-wing reaction to new waves of protest features an emphasis on arbitrary notions of criminality, seeking to position protestors as enemies of British democracy. The dangerous new legislation and the discourse accompanying it not only restricts the fundamental right to protest, but also heavily obscures the lines between proportionate and brutal policing, thus ensuring police malpractice and unaccountability.

At a time when the policing of protest in Britain is only becoming more severe, the history of Orgreave and the continued demand for justice is ever more relevant. 40 years on, it is still crucial that we hold police accountable for brutal malpractice, regardless of the time elapsed or the supposed severity of the outcome. We must defend our right to strike, protest and live peacefully without tyrannical restrictions, state-sanctioned brutality and police malpractice – and we must hold those responsible for the infringements of those rights to account.

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