'Police targeted striking miners - now it's time for justice and compensation'
Baton-wielding police targeted striking miners, just as the Post Office and Fujitsu went for postmasters, says the TUC President.
Matt Wrack said the policing of the 1984 Miners’ Strike, with the arrests, convictions, sackings and jailings, had similarities to the Post Office scandal. And today Mr Wrack is calling on Parliament to overturn the miners’ convictions and offer compensation.
Fire Brigades Union leader Mr Wrack, who was young London firefighter during the year-long dispute, said: “The police under Margaret Thatcher behaved like Fujitsu and the Post Office with batons.”
He is discussing with Labour MPs how leader Keir Starmer could be persuaded to hold an official inquiry should, as expected, Labour win this year’s election. Scores of miners were imprisoned during the strike, close on 1,000 were dismissed and 11,000 arrested. Mr Wrack explained: “In every mining community people were stopped for things like just driving along roads. Hence these figures of 11,000 miners arrested.”
Last night Channel 4 screened the first of three documentaries entitled The Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle of Britain, which included accounts of police violence and how arrested miners were fitted up. In March it will be the 40th anniversary of the start of the confrontation that changed Britain.
Teachers, civil servants and train drivers walk out in biggest strike in decade
Injured Protestors were helped away by their comrades during clashes with police at Orgreave Coking Plant (PA)Mr Wrack said: “Thatcher used the state to crush the miners and didn’t care how they did it. There are clear echoes of the Post Office cases.”
The Scottish Parliament has already pardoned miners and Mr Wrack wants the UK Parliament to do the same after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a Bill to clear hundreds of sub-postmasters and mistresses. Some prosecutions of miners were eventually thrown out by magistrates or overturned by judges, after police evidence was challenged, but the National Coal Board refused to re-employ those it dismissed.
Mr Wrack said: “Again, like the Post Office cases, a public body behaved irresponsibly and working people paid the price.”
In 1991, South Yorkshire had to pay £425,000 to 39 miners for “assault, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution” after their prosecutions collapsed. But eight years ago the Independent Police Complaints Commission decided not to hold a formal investigation into allegations of criminal wrongdoing by the police.
FBU leader Matt Wrack says miners must be compensated (Daily Mirror)This is despite uncovering evidence suggesting that officers assaulted miners at the mass picket of the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire, then perverted the course of justice and committed perjury.
Mr Wrack said: “People’s whole lives were ruined by this. Almost 1,000 people were sacked. Many of them will have struggled to get work again – they’re all elderly and some have died. There’s a case for compensation for those people and their families.”
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