'The Tories must live up to their words with an inquiry into Orgreave'

22 August 2023 , 19:21

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the Battle of Orgreave (Image: EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS)

The brutal truth of the Battle of Orgreave has finally been revealed – by the Queen.

So when will the Tories, who instigated the police attack on the striking miners, admit it? They know what really happened that day in June 1985 at the height of the year-long miners’ strike. Then-Home Secretary Amber Rudd met members of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign in November 2016, and signalled her readiness to accede to their demands for an inquiry.

Under pressure from Cabinet hard-liners, she later backtracked but since then, fresh damning evidence has emerged from police and government records. Reinforcement came yesterday from the disclosure that Queen Elizabeth II had been appalled by the “awful” scenes of mounted police charging into fleeing pitmen.

Those were her words to a courtier and a top Tory, disclosed yesterday in a recorded interview with the late Julian Haviland, former political editor of The Times. I trust his word because I knew him, and as the paper’s Labour Editor, I stood alongside him when the Queen visited our London offices in February 1985.

I was introduced as the journalist who was covering the Strike For Jobs – then in its last few days. She said she had been down a coal mine in Scotland, which had closed soon after. I asked Her Majesty what her feelings were about the strike and she said it was all “very sad.”

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I repeated this in a radio interview after the event – an apparent breach of royal protocol that brought a storm of abuse down on my head. Orgreave was a set-piece conflict with the miners sought by the National Coal Board and Tory strategists, aimed at drawing flying pickets away from the working coalfield of Nottinghamshire.

Arthur Scargill saw it as a re-run of the Battle of Saltley Gate, in which strikers closed a coke depot in Birmingham in 1972. It was, in fact, a trap deliberately set for a showcase defeat. It turned the scales against the strikers. The Queen’s words show she understood the horrors of that titanic struggle. The Tories have to live up to their words with an inquiry into Orgreave. It’s not too late.

Paul Routledge