The Battle of Orgreave

Once again in the news today, the NUM is refusing to forget and forgive about the miners strike, which took place over 30 years ago.

They selectively forget the damage they caused, instead choosing to blame, the police this time, for their militant and aggressive stance that they chose to inflict on their community and the country.

Previously, they had managed to help bring down the Heath government in 1974 and, it seemed, they were determined to do it again.

Scargill became the NUM national president in 1981 and organised the strike by calling ballots at individual collieries.

He did something which was quite unforgiveable and asked Colonal Gaddafi to help finance the strike - this after Yvonne Fletcher, a policewoman, had been killed outside the Libyan embassy in London.

One of the discussion I heard today was on the Jeremy vine radio 2 show where a very shouty man blinded by only one view had the cheek and hypocrisy to think fascism only came from the police. He actually called one of them a liar, on air, without even listening properly. Oh, one can always hear a union voice as it bellows without pausing over the waves!

But he had obviously conveniently forgotten some of the facts.

Scargill used violence and rent a mobs, who had nothing to do with the miners, and in defiance of union rules, to try and prevent supplies from leaving a steel plant. The police were under siege. He called a strike without a ballot and used his position, with funds from Russia to try and bring down the government,

Even some of the miners themselves were against the NUM and therefore formed the Union of Democratic Mineworkers.

Mrs Thatcher was formidable and determined that the fascist left did not get to make our great country ungovernable and thank goodness she succeeded.

I'm sure the police didn't totally deploy legal means but then nor did the miners or the rent a mob and to ask the police to do yet another inquest into something that saw an unnecessary event at Orgreave instigated by Scargill, is just counter productive and nothing good will come from it. We need to move on from the anger and bitterness that still exists in some quarters, not prolong it long after.

It is the fact that the unions were cut down to their proper size that some are still angry about. When other uneconomical mines were closed down by a Labour government, of which there were more than Mrs Thatcher's era, where was the uproar then?

No this may have started out as a genuine  concern for the miners but by the time we'd reached this bloody episode it was about the bringing down of the government which Russia was hoping against hope would be the case. What type of person would go to countries like Libya and Russia. at that time. Doesn't that just tell you everything you need to know about the whole sorry episode.


Be very grateful to Mrs Thatcher that we didn't get to see the results of that, irrespective of what you think about unhealthy, uneconomical  mines being allowed to stay open to keep people in jobs