Orgreave and the Escalation of State Violence

At the dawn of the 1980s, Britain, upon its election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party, faced a revolutionary shift in policy. Thatcher’s monetarist vision entailed the decline of traditional industry, laissez-faire economic policy, and reinforcing police authority to combat strong union power. A long and arduous industrial dispute ensued, mainly with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), led by Arthur Scargill. In the summer of 1984, 8,000 miners descended to picket lorry drivers supplying coke to the steel industry in Orgreave, near the central English city of Rotherham. They were met by 6,000 police officers drawn from across the country. The miners -all 8,000 of them- hailed from all corners of Britain. From the depths of the Welsh valleys to the hills of Lancashire, from Yorkshire’s coal seams to the collieries of Scotland, they arrived with different accents, histories, and loyalties. In the minds of many, little connected them, except for a shared sense of loss.

What Was Orgreave and Hillsborough?

The force included 42 officers on horseback and the first units with short shields and truncheons ever deployed in Britain. Instructed by the 1983 Policing Manual, the force’s official purpose was to “incapacitate” demonstrators. A violent clash quickly erupted when the police chased the picketers and cavalry charged into cowering herds. 95 picketers were arrested and charged with rioting, a charge which then carried a life sentence. Five years later, 97 Liverpool fans were killed in a stadium crush in Sheffield, South Yorkshire by the same police force that oversaw the events at Orgreave.  Examining the parallel timelines and shared policing failures of these two events reveals a pattern – one that gains renewed urgency with recent legislative proposals of the currently governing Labour Party.

The Sins that Bind Them

Separated by four years and bound by the same police force, the connections between the two instances have long been a matter of speculation. Peter Metcalf, the solicitor defending the force against unlawful arrest claims after the 1984 Orgreave clash, also played a key role in reviewing statements after Hillsborough. Deputy Chief Constable Peter Hayes and Assistant Chief Constable Walter Jackson are connected to both cases. Filmmaker Daniel Gordon, who produced two documentaries on Orgreave and Hillsborough, was quoted as saying: “Without Orgreave, there is no Hillsborough.” Dr Katy Shaw, Professor of writing and publishing at Northumbria University, epitomised the connection between the two events when describing them as “twin events” that “shaped contemporary UK policing.” The connections present themselves in two major ways: the officers involved and media representation.

Manufacturing Consent: How the Media Framed Hillsborough and Orgreave

Alongside its tragic death toll, Hillsborough’s infamy is most prominent in its media misrepresentation. Four days after the disaster, as over 90 people lay in a make-do morgue in a gymnasium in Sheffield, the tabloid The Sun, published its “The Truth” article. It alleged that Liverpool fans had “beaten up police who were attempting resuscitation” and that they had “urinated on corpses and stolen from them”. In 2016, this was proven false, and then-chief editor Kelvin Mackenzie apologised but affirmed he was assisted with such libel by police officers. Where this meets cohesion with Orgeave is similar blame-shifting narratives in defence of the police. The leader of the NUM who led the strike, Arthur Scargill, was even depicted as Adolf Hitler by The Sun. It has been proven that when newsreels echoed into the living rooms around the country on that night in June 1984, what the public were witnessing was reversed footage from the BBC to depict miners attacking the police force as aggressors, rather than in self-defence. The BBC later admitted to this and apologised.

Calls for Inquiry and Parliament’s Response

The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign group has incessantly advocated to each government since its inception for a full and independent inquiry into the violence. After recurring rejection, Conservative  Prime Minister Theresa May pledged to consider an inquiry in 2015, only to be declined by Home Secretary Amber Rudd, who justified the rejection with the notion that there were “few lessons to be learnt” due to its lack of recency and further, there were no “deaths” nor proven “wrongful convictions” to warrant it. However, Labour’s 2024 manifesto pledged an inquiry paramount to its campaign, akin to the Hillsborough Independent Panel, the body that was established in 2009 to review and release documents related to the Hillsborough disaster. Similarly, a Hillsborough Law was tabled by Liverpool West Derby’s Ian Byrne, a survivor of the tragedy, to ensure greater institutional transparency and accountability for collusion.

The Legal Duty of Transparency

Legislation such as the Hillsborough Law aims to ensure equal legal representation. This is based on the experiences of how the families of Hillsborough victims were disadvantaged in their legal pursuit against better-funded legal teams assisting the police. Criminal liability for cover-ups will also be encoded in law. Moreover, public officials who obstruct justice or tamper with evidence, as seen with the 164 police witness statements changed after Hillsborough, could face criminal charges. All this seeks to increase transparency within the institutions of the state. The UK is already a signatory to Article 2 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), which aims to ensure thorough investigation where state authorities are involved in deaths from medical negligence. The Hillsborough Law seeks not only to ensure institutional transparency but also to extend its obligation to existing international legal frameworks.

The Role of Education: Assisting in Prevention?

The disaster at Hillsborough has long been laced with dismissals of the truth in British society. Tackling this was the impetus of calls made by Liverpool Labour MP Ian Byrne, frontier of the Hillsborough Law campaign, to include Hillsborough in the national curriculum. The proposal is now tabled in Parliament and signed by fellow MPs. In 2004, when Boris Johnson was the editor of The Spectator, he approved an article which repeated the mantra of “drunken, ticketless” Liverpool fans causing the deaths of their fellow fans, friends, and family members. Evidently, education on the truth around Hillsborough, and by extension, Orgreave, remains central. In 2016, a jury found that 96 of the 97 victims of Hillsborough were “unlawfully killed“. A verdict that speaks for itself.