Days ago, Yvette Cooper stood at the despatch box and did something that forty years of politicians before her had refused to do. After tiptoeing around the usual choreography of bureaucratic posturing and nods to the former mining community she represents, the O-word was, at last, rolled off: Orgreave.
A dirty word in British politics, one that made generations of ministers recoil in discomfort at its very mention. The moment was less a breakthrough and more a begrudging admission — the kind of procedural go-ahead that governments make when a scandal has long ceased to be containable by silence alone.
Of course, we’re yet to see what this will entail, what it will reveal, but what we can say with certainty is that this announcement brings renewed urgency to Britain’s historical tendency for state violence and institutional conspiracy.
It was a sunny June afternoon in the year of 1984, and a lingering sense of anger alongside grit and unity hummed in the air in Orgreave, near Rotherham. 8,000 miners descended to picket lorry drivers supplying coke to the steel industry and were met by 6,000 police officers drawn from all over the country, commanded by South Yorkshire Police. The force included 42 officers on horseback and was backed by the first units with short shields and truncheons ever used in Britain. Their official purpose, stated in the police’s tactical manual, was to “incapacitate demonstrators.” During the course of the day, 142 people were injured. One reporter claimed he was surprised “no one died.”
This was just one piece in the mosaic that was the ongoing, gruelling Miners’ Strike led by NUM boss Arthur Scargill, against Mrs Thatcher and her brutal campaign of monetarism, made fertile by her fierce and punitive anti-union action. If you’re familiar with Orgreave, you’ll know of the notorious images and videos that couple the memory of its very mention: the horse-backed, baton-armed police riding into crowds, officers on foot chasing unarmed miners, some visibly being beaten with truncheons. And none of it — not the riot shields, not the press lies, not the culture of impunity that shrouded the South Yorkshire police force — can be divorced from the climate in which it was all made possible.
On a brisk May morning in 1979, Margaret Thatcher stood on the steps of Number 10, waving confidently to a crowd of gleeful supporters and a nation on the cusp of change. Her ascent marked not just the arrival of Britain’s first female Prime Minister, but the dawn of a new decade. Defiant, cold and unapologetically Conservative, she ushered in an age where compassion gave way to competition, and the market reigned supreme. You wouldn’t be mistaken for sensing the entrepreneurial spirit in the air.
Guided by a Policy Unit of unwavering acolytes, the authoritarian project crept its way into the Home Office in the dawn of the 1980s. Evidence of pre-planned confrontation was etched in a document co-opted by Thatcher’s cabinet; the Ridley Report, drafted in 1977, was a biblical piece of the New Right fervour that was sweeping the Conservative Party. It spoke of explicit provocation with the trade unions and a desperate desire to prevent another “Battle of Saltley Gate” (an industrial dispute between the police force and unions in Birmingham, culminating in victory which dealt severe damage to Heath’s economic policy and was considered a colossal embarrassment to the establishment).
It stressed a need to militarise the police force in the case of a coming violent confrontation with the miners — which was sure-fire looming. A police tactics manual — controversially signed off by the Home Secretary — provided detailed guidance on crowd control tactics, including the authorised use of riot gear such as visored helmets, long shields, and body armour, as well as the deployment of baton charges, snatch squads, and shield formations modelled on military doctrine.
Thus, the events at Orgreave were not a random frenzy by a force that decided to overstep its mark, but a calculated exercise of state power executed according to pre-approved methods by a political class desperately trying to cling onto its ascendancy. It’s not fully known whether the authoritarian shifts from central government — which dangerously towed the line of breaching the constitutional cornerstone of the separation of powers — were wholly responsible for the South Yorkshire Police’s heavy-handed tactics. However, the force’s internal culture suggests that it needed little encouragement. Described by some of its own former officers as “regimented,” with morning parades, saluting of senior ranks, and ruled by “an iron fist,” it was an institution structurally resistant to scrutiny and fundamentally unable to admit fault.
But the people of Orgreave and those who were there that day refused to accept and forget the brutality they were subject to. From that day forth there has been a continuous battle for a public inquiry into the means of force used and the culpability of those who used it. Exactly 40 years on, successive governments have declined to initiate one.
Amber Rudd, Home Secretary under Theresa May in 2016, on declining the calls for a full independent inquiry stated:
“There would […] be very few lessons for the policing system today to be learned from any review of the events and practices of three decades ago.”
This may be, almost certainly, true. Has the conduct and standard of policing positively evolved since the arguably draconian culture in which the British police force was riddled with during Thatcher’s tenure? Yes. But the absence of an official independent inquiry means that questions surrounding, not just Orgreave, but the very state of the British police force of that time become ever more visceral. Its relevance today is rooted in the fact that even in contemporary Britain, these instances of state overreach — which married with media slander and stigmatisation — do not simply close the back door on their way out.
Where this is especially corrosive is not necessarily the state’s tendency for libel, but rather how slander in the aftermath of these instances embeds itself into public conscience. For fans of Liverpool Football Club, enduring Hillsboroughchants has been a painful experience since 1989. Perhaps the most ignored, darkest reality of Hillsborough was not just the deaths nor the bigoted propaganda alone, but how much of the public became blind, unwitting custodians of it; how the conspiracy turned copper-fed soundbites into popular culture.
Before long, regular people — mechanics, posties, lads in the away end — were echoing lines dreamt up in Home Office backrooms and Murdoch newsrooms.36 years ago, 95 men, women and children excitedly made their way to Hillsborough Stadium for the semi-final match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, never to return home. The 96th victim, Tony Bland, remained in a persistent vegetative state for nearly four years after suffering severe brain damage in the crush. He died in 1993, after doctors obtained a landmark legal ruling allowing his life support to be withdrawn. Andrew Devine would become the 97th victim in 2021 after succumbing to his injuries sustained 32 years prior.
Those who returned home — although it is said no one ever truly came home — and those who mourned the ones that did not would then be subjected to a brutal campaign of mockery, gaslighting on a national scale, and psychological torture from their own regional neighbours. The libel that was birthed when the nation’s most popular newspaper infamously printed headlines accusing Liverpool fans of urinating on the police and stealing from corpses didn’t disappear upon their half-baked apology. They’re still repeated today.
As a nation, we need to be honest about bigotry and ignorance surrounding Hillsborough. The holier-than-thou veneer is simply not good enough — today, social media is still littered with tired tropes in sneering manner regarding the alleged truth of Hillsborough. In June 2023, a Manchester United fan was arrested at Wembley for wearing a shirt displaying the words “97 Not Enough” — a grotesque wish that more sons and daughters should have been fed to the crush. In 2016, a man was convicted of wearing a shirt that stated that Hillsborough was “God’s way of helping out pest control.” He wasn’t an extremist, but an average bloke made monstrous by decades of institutional deception.
In the absence of official investigations, the state — in all of its clawing, scurrying, cowardly attempts to save itself from its malfunctions — not only obscures truth, but strips away the very humanity of its victims.
When Princess Diana’s life came to a tragic end in a tunnel in Paris, Britain entered an unofficial state of mourning. Though most had never met her, crowds lined the streets with flowers and spoke of a loss that felt intimate, sacred, and personal. Tony Blair referred to her as “the people’s princess,” meaning of course, that her death signalled the end of a comforting illusion; that royalty and relatability could coexist, that a symbol of privilege could also stand for the pain of ordinary people and the death of an impossible contradiction, of which she was the immaculate emblem.
But an even more striking contradiction was that eight years prior, when 96 regular, innocent people were killed, the tears and outcry didn’t seem to extend beyond Merseyside. No grand funerals. The Prime Minister of the day stood with those who took said lives — issuing no poetic eulogies for the dead. Rhymes mocking the disaster were already being crafted in Manchester and London before the bodies had even left the gymnasium that was being used as a make-do morgue in Sheffield.
Perhaps, then, this inquiry may also serve to redress our peculiar, class-driven and self-destructive approach to grief in the face of tragedy — confronting our cultural peculiarities on who gets to grieve.
The real danger is those who present a surface of clemency, then followed by a sneering trope blaming Liverpool fans for the events of the disaster. This is an all-too-common phenomenon where people attempt to veil their prejudices or dismissive attitudes under a false veneer of respect. It is those instances that speak to how deeply the state’s lies often embed themselves into the fabric of our nation.
The truly odd thing about the incessant denial of the findings of the Hillsborough Independent Panel means that our own fellow countrymen act as cheerleaders of the state — almost as turkeys voting for Christmas. Perhaps, the real horror of Hillsborough and Orgreave is twofold; to not only suffer the horror of a state-led conspiracy upon burying your children, but for your own countrymen to deny one even occurred in the first place; to actively mock your clawing attempts at pointing to the state-led nightmare that was unfolding before your eyes and rubbing their domination in your face. How shocked, though, can we really be?
Those who remember witnessing Hillsborough and the Miners’ Strike did so on the diet of Thatcher’s hyper-individualism and her incessant defence of the police — from the Toxteth riots to Brixton to Orgreave. It was cold-heartedness pumped into the psyche of the nation; we are on our own, your neighbours are your enemy, there is no such thing as society. Other people’s pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. That the police’s monopoly on violence is infallible.
And those who lived after Hillsborough and Thatcher still felt the effects of the sermons of selfishness and class warfare. The reality is that neo-liberalism destroyed the very essence of ourselves. How we view each other, how we very clearly are conditioned to following the state into their lies and abuses of state power whenever they inevitably re-emerge.
In the aftermath of the Miners’ Strike — when the miners eventually succumbed to financial starvation and military onslaught under Thatcher’s orchestration — then-Trade and Industry Secretary, Norman Tebbit said: “we didn’t just break the strike, we broke the spell.” The spell he was referring to was the unseen bond that connected us all and prevented us from state overreach and tyranny. The invisible outstretched hand to remind us of our unity — the spell of community.
Ultimately, it is unknown exactly what the inquiry into Orgreave will reveal, who it will implicate, or even its capacity to uncover vital information given how some pieces of evidence have been destroyed. However, it must be understood as a necessity, rather than a pacifying concession. A necessity for a nation who, for all of its naïve pride in scepticism and free-thinking, often overlooks its own tendency to be mobilised against each other, dog-walked by institutional conspiracy and the media who act as cheerleaders for those lies.
The history of Orgreave, like Hillsborough, exemplifies that culture. This inquiry will do more than rake over ashes — it is about confronting the architecture of deceit that allowed violence to be sanitised, allowed victims to be vilified, dehumanised, caged in like animals, treated as dogs in life and in death.
Starmer’s commitment to confronting infamous cases of alleged institutional conspiracy, such as the grooming gang scandal, Orgreave and the — albeit stalled — Hillsborough Law, ultimately signals a turning point in our country. The announcement may have been a begrudging admission rather than a moral breakthrough; the product of scandal too long buried to be ignored any longer. But intentions aside, the outcome matters.
For all the talk of unpopularity, these steps towards greater transparency and serious attempts at redressing industrial-scale societal wrongs is a government who speaks in the cadences of progress and the refusal to let justice be endlessly deferred. If taken seriously, this inquiry could mark a pivotal moment in dismantling the cultural and institutional biases that have shaped not only how Britain treats dissent, but how it decides whose grief matters.
