:00:13. > :00:18.Welcome to Inside Out. I am Toby Foster. I am at Orgreave, the scene
:00:18. > :00:23.of the bitter minor battle in 1984. There are two accounts of what
:00:23. > :00:26.happened that day, one from the miners and one from the police. We
:00:26. > :00:31.have got evidence that suggested the police doctor statements which
:00:31. > :00:41.could have led to the culture which five years later on would see the
:00:41. > :00:46.
:00:46. > :00:52.In September the Hillsborough Independent Panel released its
:00:52. > :00:54.report into the stadium disaster of April 1989. It revealed a catalogue
:00:54. > :01:01.of accusations against South Yorkshire Police, the Ambulance
:01:01. > :01:03.Service, Sheffield Wednesday and many others. But of all its
:01:03. > :01:06.shocking findings, what stands out is the evidence that 116 police
:01:06. > :01:14.statements were changed in an attempt to put the blame for the
:01:14. > :01:17.disaster onto Liverpool supporters. The new evidence with which we are
:01:17. > :01:20.presented today makes it clear, in my view, that these families have
:01:20. > :01:23.suffered a double injustice. The injustice of the appalling events,
:01:23. > :01:26.the failure of the state to protect their loved ones and the
:01:26. > :01:29.indefensible wait to get to the truth, and then the injustice of
:01:29. > :01:39.the denigration of the deceased, that they were somehow at fault for
:01:39. > :01:40.
:01:40. > :01:44.their own deaths. On the face of it there seems little connection
:01:44. > :01:47.between the miners' strike in the 1980s and what happened on the
:01:47. > :01:53.Leppings Lane that terrace but tonight we will reveal that
:01:53. > :01:56.Hillsborough, far from being an isolated event, was, in fact, part
:01:56. > :02:00.of a pattern of senior South Yorkshire officers manipulating the
:02:00. > :02:05.statements made by junior officers and while Hillsborough resonated
:02:05. > :02:15.around the world, what happened at Orgreave in June 1984 has been left
:02:15. > :02:19.
:02:19. > :02:21.as a footnote in history. In the aftermath of Hillsborough
:02:21. > :02:24.South Yorkshire police systematically altered the witness
:02:24. > :02:26.statements of its own officers. Tonight we'll reveal how five years
:02:26. > :02:29.earlier the same force deliberately moulded statements so it could
:02:29. > :02:33.prosecute miners at Orgreave for riot, an offence that potentially
:02:33. > :02:36.carried a life sentence. They wanted to teach the miners a
:02:36. > :02:38.lesson, a big lesson, so that the miners wouldn't come out in force
:02:38. > :02:43.again. I was punched, kicked, prodded, you
:02:43. > :02:47.name it. I walked in, and I was nearly carried out.
:02:47. > :02:50.You can see in a way that they were trying merely to set the scenario,
:02:51. > :02:55.but actually what they were doing was teeing up, perverting the
:02:55. > :02:58.course of justice. I was a bit surprised when I came
:02:58. > :03:01.in and someone said we need to have this as a starting paragraph.
:03:01. > :03:04.However I'd never been involved in a situation where so many people
:03:04. > :03:07.were arrested. The violence and intimidation that
:03:07. > :03:14.we have seen should never have happened. It is the work of
:03:14. > :03:18.extremists. It is the enemy within. Oh, what a lovely summer.
:03:18. > :03:20.Oh, what a long, long strike. But if we have to go through it all
:03:20. > :03:25.again, We would still stand up and fight.
:03:25. > :03:30.Convoys of coal going from Orgreave. Men standing side by side.
:03:30. > :03:37.Women serving the soup for them, Watching lories of coal go by.
:03:37. > :03:44.Rows and rows of men in blue. Horses, dogs and truncheons too.
:03:44. > :03:48.Hitting miners, they didn't care who.
:03:49. > :03:54.It's not so long ago that Yorkshire was synonymous with mining. Before
:03:54. > :03:59.the 1984 strike, this region was dotted with 60 collieries. Each of
:03:59. > :04:04.them supporting a community and giving thousands of miners jobs.
:04:04. > :04:06.Coal kept the lights on and powered industry. But now only three
:04:06. > :04:12.underground pits remain in Yorkshire, like this one at
:04:12. > :04:16.Hatfield near Doncaster. The strike was the turning point
:04:16. > :04:20.for the industry. The miners, led by Arthur Scargill, believed that
:04:20. > :04:24.the government planned to shut down hundreds of pits. Faced with the
:04:24. > :04:27.loss of their jobs, most Yorkshire miners came out on strike. They
:04:27. > :04:37.hoped to choke the country's supply of energy and force Mrs Thatcher to
:04:37. > :04:43.
:04:43. > :04:47.back down. No way. Move! crucially most Nottinghamshire
:04:47. > :04:49.miners kept working, believing their pits would be safe. The year-
:04:49. > :04:52.long dispute pitched miner against miner, and against the government.
:04:52. > :04:55.But they'd planned ahead. Power stations had stockpiled coal and
:04:55. > :04:57.tough union laws had made it harder for other workers to support the
:04:57. > :05:00.miners. Throughout the dispute, pickets and police clashed
:05:00. > :05:06.regularly. The most notorious flashpoint was at the Orgreave
:05:06. > :05:09.Coking Plant on the outskirts of Sheffield. The coke produced at
:05:09. > :05:12.Orgreave fuelled the British Steel mill in Scunthorpe. During the 1972
:05:12. > :05:14.miners' strike, the National Union of Mineworkers had famously shut
:05:14. > :05:21.the Saltley Coking plant in Birmingham by sending in flying
:05:21. > :05:28.pickets. Arthur thought what we should
:05:28. > :05:32.really do is to have one big pitched battle. Like the one he had
:05:32. > :05:35.at Saltley Gate. At Saltley Gate, we won.
:05:35. > :05:40.Saltley acted as the template for the picketing at Orgreave 12 years
:05:40. > :05:44.later. Only this time, the miners faced a police force and a
:05:44. > :05:47.government determined not to be beaten.
:05:47. > :05:52.Almost from the start of the strike in March 1984, there had been
:05:52. > :05:55.pickets at Orgreave. We shall be coming here until we
:05:55. > :06:04.stop them wagons. We want that plant shutting down. We want them
:06:04. > :06:09.stopping them wagons going in. Over the weeks tensions grew and
:06:09. > :06:14.things finally came to a head on June the 18th. That day up to
:06:14. > :06:16.10,000 pickets turned up. There to try and stop the miners shutting
:06:16. > :06:22.the plant were at least 5,000 policemen from many different
:06:22. > :06:24.forces across the country. The man in overall command that day, was
:06:24. > :06:34.the South Yorkshire Police Assistant Chief Constable Anthony
:06:34. > :06:34.
:06:34. > :06:39.Clement. The miners' strike is 100 days old tomorrow and today brought
:06:39. > :06:44.the worst scenes of violence of the dispute.
:06:44. > :06:49.The violence lasted most of the day. By the end 93 miners had been
:06:49. > :06:54.arrested. The official police report said 51 pickets were injured
:06:54. > :06:59.along with 72 police officers. But, as with Hillsborough, two very
:06:59. > :07:02.different accounts of what happened emerged.
:07:02. > :07:06.We were like a phalanx of Roman legionnaires, lined across the
:07:07. > :07:13.field. Obviously the coke lorries were coming through, infuriating
:07:13. > :07:19.the pickets and so the level of missiles appeared to increase.
:07:19. > :07:22.Police horses were deployed. And then on the date in question, the
:07:22. > :07:26.decision was taken, we were taken from long shields and told we were
:07:26. > :07:30.to deploy as short shield snatch squads.
:07:30. > :07:34.It was like a military plan. And when miners arrived in June
:07:34. > :07:38.sunshine, bare chested. They'd been picketing there for weeks and weeks.
:07:38. > :07:41.They expected it to be kind of the same ritual. You arrive and the
:07:41. > :07:45.police are there in a great long line and we push against it and
:07:45. > :07:48.then it's sort of over with really. And lorries go into the coking
:07:48. > :07:51.works. There was an understanding and
:07:51. > :07:54.acceptance that protest was their lawful and legal right but these
:07:54. > :08:00.idiots who wanted to use the police as Aunt Sallys, the anonymity that
:08:00. > :08:03.their numbers gave them caused the problem.
:08:03. > :08:06.It started with the usual pushing and shoving and it was fairly much
:08:06. > :08:13.OK, but it started to escalate where one or two bricks and bottles
:08:13. > :08:16.came across. They had dogs on one side. They had
:08:16. > :08:21.police on horse-back in the field. It was like a medieval battlefield.
:08:21. > :08:25.The rows upon rows of great long shields. And up on the bridge and
:08:25. > :08:30.into the village, there were horses and cops across the road. So they
:08:30. > :08:35.were surrounded. And there were 10,000 miners. And there were a lot
:08:35. > :08:41.of police. And it was like, click. The decision came from Clements and
:08:41. > :08:46.off they went. Horses charged straight into the miners. They
:08:46. > :08:56.could have been trampled to death. The short shield units went in
:08:56. > :09:03.
:09:03. > :09:06.afterwards. They grabbed people, So that charge by the horses,
:09:06. > :09:09.Norman, do you think that was justified by the level of violence
:09:09. > :09:13.that you were encountering? I was a bit surprised to see the horses.
:09:13. > :09:16.But quite pleased. Cos they'd stopped the bricks being thrown.
:09:16. > :09:20.You know if the horses are coming charging towards me, swinging them
:09:20. > :09:23.big night-sticks. You know, I might be built like Gandhi, but I'm not
:09:23. > :09:26.going to sit down in the road singing, we shall overcome, baby.
:09:26. > :09:32.I'll you that. So of course we launched bloody bricks at them to
:09:32. > :09:34.try to stop the charge. These days Michael Mansfield is one
:09:34. > :09:37.Britain's most famous defence barristers, specialising in
:09:37. > :09:40.miscarriages of justice. But in 1984 he was only starting to make a
:09:40. > :09:44.name for himself when he represented several miners in the
:09:44. > :09:47.first trial which took place in Sheffield in 1985.
:09:47. > :09:51.The video footage the police themselves took showed a completely
:09:51. > :09:54.different story. Not the one the BBC put out, but the police footage
:09:54. > :09:57.was quite different. There were a lot of independent monitors, some
:09:57. > :10:06.with notebooks, some with cameras and one with a movie camera stuck
:10:06. > :10:12.up in a tree. The police had no idea to which the extent of what
:10:12. > :10:15.they were doing, their unlawful activities were being filmed. So if
:10:15. > :10:17.you put the combination of that package together, you had a record,
:10:17. > :10:26.a really almost unchallengeable record of a completely different
:10:26. > :10:28.version of events. The police account reported at the
:10:28. > :10:33.time was that miners had massed together and launched a violent
:10:33. > :10:36.assault on the Police. South Yorkshire police claimed there'd
:10:36. > :10:43.been no choice but to send in mounted policemen and snatch squads
:10:43. > :10:46.with short shields in order to regain control.
:10:46. > :10:50.A lot of miners think that there was a concerted attempt at Orgreave
:10:50. > :10:53.to send them a message that they weren't going to win. Did you see
:10:53. > :10:56.evidence of that? Yeah, I would say so. The comment, we weren't going
:10:56. > :10:58.to lose, was upper most in a lot of our minds. Coming from Birmingham,
:10:58. > :11:03.the previous miners' strike in Birmingham, Saltley Gate,
:11:03. > :11:06.effectively the pickets had won by pushing through the police lines.
:11:06. > :11:09.And I wasn't there, I don't think many of the officers I knew were
:11:09. > :11:13.there because it happened in a previous decade, but it was
:11:13. > :11:16.something for us professionally, we weren't going to lose.
:11:16. > :11:20.The miners' maintained that they'd been peacefully picketing and it
:11:20. > :11:30.was the police who'd attacked them. The video evidence produced in
:11:30. > :11:38.
:11:38. > :11:41.court contradicted the police So it had two stages. Get em all in
:11:41. > :11:43.a field and charge and generally batter them and hopefully they'll
:11:43. > :11:45.retreat, which they did. Up the field, down a railway embankment,
:11:45. > :11:48.huge injuries. Stef Wysocki was a striking miner
:11:48. > :11:52.from the Derbyshire coalfield. He went to Orgreave that day to picket.
:11:52. > :11:55.It were a nice hot summer's day. We were all there in T-shirts. They
:11:55. > :11:59.were in full riot gear. They knew what were going off. We didn't. I
:11:59. > :12:02.just stood there with my hands in my pockets. I hadn't done anything
:12:02. > :12:06.wrong. I was just watching what was going off. It was all new to me.
:12:06. > :12:09.I'd never seen anything like this before. I just stood there and next
:12:09. > :12:12.minute I seen all these policemen running up field and I looked round
:12:12. > :12:17.to see who they were running for. And there were only me there left,
:12:18. > :12:21.so obviously they were after me. REPORTER: So when they got to you,
:12:21. > :12:26.did you put any resistance up? whatsoever. None whatsoever.
:12:26. > :12:30.REPORTER: So when they arrested you, what did you expect to happen?
:12:30. > :12:33.I hadn't done anything. So I didn't think I would get charged.
:12:33. > :12:36.Obviously there were a lot of cameras there. And when it got to
:12:36. > :12:40.court there, they got all the photos of me being arrested at the
:12:40. > :12:44.top of the hill with no injuries. And when we got to the bottom of
:12:44. > :12:51.the hill, I'd got injuries and I were in their custody.
:12:51. > :12:55.REPORTER: What sort of injuries? Bruises, facial cuts. Bleeding.
:12:55. > :13:01.REPORTER: So you got a bit of a kicking then?
:13:01. > :13:03.Oh I got a very big kicking. One of things we done was we protected the
:13:03. > :13:06.arrested person as we went through police lines.
:13:06. > :13:08.Because I have to say some of my colleagues, or not colleagues,
:13:08. > :13:11.individuals from other forces weren't above trying to land a
:13:11. > :13:16.smack on the head of an individual coming through. I wasn't happy
:13:16. > :13:20.about that. My prisoner, he gets to the holding centre in the state in
:13:20. > :13:24.which he was arrested. I didn't want someone who was injured who
:13:24. > :13:27.would then make allegations against me. I said, "what are you arresting
:13:27. > :13:30.me for"? He said, "throwing stones at a policeman". I said, "look at
:13:30. > :13:35.my hands. I haven't thrown anything". He said, "they all say
:13:35. > :13:41.that". So then I was marched down the field, both arms up my back.
:13:41. > :13:46.Got to the police line. I was banged onto police shields. They
:13:46. > :13:55.bounced me off. The shields opened and I was punched, kicked, prodded,
:13:55. > :13:58.you name it. I walked in, and I was nearly carried out. Stage two, we
:13:58. > :14:04.have to have a recording process, that's the statement process done
:14:04. > :14:07.by another unit. And unfortunately they were caught out once again
:14:07. > :14:09.because some of the officers who claimed to have arrested certain
:14:09. > :14:13.individuals plainly didn't, because they're not in the photographs
:14:13. > :14:16.accompanying the miners. So basically the second stage process,
:14:16. > :14:26.the investigation and recording of what happened on the field at
:14:26. > :14:27.
:14:27. > :14:32.Orgreave was a contrivance. Another barrister who defended the miners
:14:32. > :14:34.in the Orgreave Trial was Vera Baird.
:14:34. > :14:39.Officers signed statements saying they'd seen A, they'd seen B,
:14:39. > :14:42.they'd seen D. Important symptoms of disorder. But actually we got
:14:42. > :14:45.the log books of the vehicles and many of them hadn't even left home
:14:45. > :14:49.by the time those things had happened and been taken away. So,
:14:49. > :14:58.it was a clear plan to make this escalation of the gravity of the
:14:58. > :15:03.charges really work. I think the allegation was that we
:15:03. > :15:07.had statements dictated to us or something similar. I was not
:15:07. > :15:09.dictated to with regards to the statement. But some of the
:15:10. > :15:13.statements in public order situations can seem formulaic. So
:15:13. > :15:17.where officers, or in my statement it talks about "I was frightened, I
:15:17. > :15:20.was apprehensive". Those were forms of words you used because in terms
:15:20. > :15:24.of the public order act, or it was actually common law then, those
:15:25. > :15:27.were the things you expressed. Hillsborough Independent Panel
:15:27. > :15:37.report accused South Yorkshire Police in 1989 of making a
:15:37. > :15:40.
:15:40. > :15:46.concerted effort to remove damaging references from officers. The panel
:15:47. > :15:49.found 116 statement had been altered. The police narrative was
:15:49. > :15:52.that Liverpool fans were drunk and ticketless. Some officers even
:15:52. > :15:55.falsely claimed to the press that supporters had stolen from the dead
:15:55. > :15:57.and urinated on people while police officers attempted to save lives.
:15:58. > :16:00.In the case of Orgreave five years earlier, the manipulation of
:16:00. > :16:03.statements appears to be even more organised than at Hillsborough. In
:16:04. > :16:08.1985, the first 15 miners charged with riot were tried here at the
:16:08. > :16:18.old Sheffield Crown Court. But the trial collapsed in spectacular
:16:18. > :16:22.
:16:22. > :16:24.style when it became clear the police evidence wasn't reliable.
:16:24. > :16:27.One officer, PC Stephen Hill, admitted under cross examination
:16:27. > :16:30.that much of his statement had been narrated to him. PC Hill's version
:16:30. > :16:34.of events tallies with Inspector Norman Taylor's recollection of
:16:34. > :16:39.what happened when he was asked to write up his statement. It was like
:16:39. > :16:42.a big room. And people were in different parts of the room. I
:16:42. > :16:46.recall this policeman in plain clothes mentioning that he'd had a
:16:46. > :16:52.good idea of what had happened. And we were from different police
:16:52. > :16:56.forces. And that there was a preamble to set the scene. And he
:16:56. > :16:59.was reading from some paper, a paragraph or so. And he asked the
:16:59. > :17:03.people who were there to use that as their starting paragraph. So you
:17:03. > :17:06.copied down what they told you to write? So that paragraph, I think
:17:06. > :17:10.it was basically the time and date, the name of the place. There were
:17:10. > :17:13.guys from the Met who hadn't a clue where South Yorkshire was. In fact,
:17:13. > :17:15.it was more than just one paragraph. The arresting officers may have
:17:15. > :17:18.thought that they were simply describing the scene at Orgreave.
:17:18. > :17:22.But why did senior South Yorkshire detectives have to dictate a form
:17:22. > :17:24.of wording for the officers to use? It seems clear the fact that the
:17:24. > :17:28.exact same phrases appeared in dozens of police witness statements
:17:28. > :17:38.was no coincidence. To take just one example, 31 officers from four
:17:38. > :17:46.
:17:46. > :17:50.We've obtained copies of around 100 police witness statements after
:17:50. > :17:52.Orgreave. And what you see in those statements is fascinating.
:17:52. > :17:58.Statement after statement from officer after officer, the same
:17:58. > :18:04.phrases appear over and over again. So was it the intention from the
:18:04. > :18:08.start to build an exaggerated case of riot against the pickets. And
:18:08. > :18:11.that charge of riot matters. The common law offence of Riot dates
:18:11. > :18:14.back to the medieval period. Prior to its use in the Orgreave trials,
:18:14. > :18:18.nobody in England and Wales had been accused of riot for more than
:18:18. > :18:21.60 years. But why did South Yorkshire police choose to it?
:18:21. > :18:24.Whereas a picket convicted of a public order offence such as
:18:24. > :18:32.throwing a stone might get a fine, pickets convicted of riot were
:18:32. > :18:36.faced potentially life in prison. Ian Hernon was a political reporter
:18:36. > :18:42.in the 1980s and went on the write about the history of the Riot Act.
:18:42. > :18:45.It was a very blunt instrument to suppress civil discontent. It
:18:45. > :18:48.wasn't used very often. Most famously it was used in the
:18:48. > :18:56.Peterloo massacre in Manchester as a way of allowing the militia and
:18:56. > :19:00.the cavalry to kill civilians. It wasn't used very much after that.
:19:00. > :19:09.In fact the last time that we know for sure that it was used was
:19:09. > :19:12.during the 1919 police strike in Birkenhead.
:19:12. > :19:15.But the real key to it was the process that was used after they
:19:15. > :19:19.were arrested. Two police would arrest one miner. They would take
:19:19. > :19:21.them back through the police lines to an office and lock him up,
:19:21. > :19:25.having presented him to a custody sergeant and write their statement
:19:25. > :19:27.immediately. And in that office, as they told us, were some detectives
:19:28. > :19:31.who were dictating the paragraphs alleging the scene of disorder
:19:31. > :19:41.necessary to make a little offence like throwing a pork pie, into a
:19:41. > :19:41.
:19:41. > :19:43.riot. The main reason I think why the
:19:44. > :19:47.Orgreave trial collapsed was because the police being totally
:19:47. > :19:49.out of control, cavalier in the whole affair, were in such a rush
:19:50. > :19:57.to arrest people, injure people, that who arrested who was lost
:19:57. > :20:02.track of. So they didn't keep a note of which person had been
:20:02. > :20:07.arrested by which cop. So they had a whole big bunch of people and
:20:07. > :20:12.whole big bunch of cops and they just made up who they arrested. And
:20:12. > :20:16.then they made up the stories associated with who'd done what.
:20:16. > :20:19.You can see in a way that they were merely trying to set the scenario,
:20:19. > :20:22.but actually what they were doing was teeing up, perverting the
:20:22. > :20:25.course of justice. Because these men could not say that those things
:20:25. > :20:28.had happened yet they were signing a statement saying they knew they'd
:20:28. > :20:30.be prosecuted if they got it wrong, and come into court and giving
:20:30. > :20:37.evidence in accordance to their statement of scenes they'd simply
:20:37. > :20:46.never seen. The people who were arrested that day, were
:20:46. > :20:49.subsequently charge with riot? Were you surprised? Actually it did.
:20:49. > :20:53.Because normally the public order offence, Section 5 Public Order
:20:53. > :20:56.would be the one they used. So even when you get groups of people on a
:20:56. > :21:00.Friday night or so, that would be it. We took the Orgreave statements
:21:00. > :21:03.to a leading Sheffield barrister to ask for an independent opinion.
:21:03. > :21:09.It's very obvious in the Orgreave case that there was widespread
:21:09. > :21:11.collusion. You can't get statements written in the way they have been
:21:11. > :21:14.done here, by police officers from different forces involved in
:21:14. > :21:23.different arrests and find such a degree of similarity between those
:21:23. > :21:29.statements without there being some degree of collusion. I've just
:21:29. > :21:32.taken one of a number of examples. This is a West Yorkshire police
:21:32. > :21:35.officer who is involved in a separate arrest, nothing to do with
:21:35. > :21:38.this South Yorkshire officer. But when you put their statements
:21:38. > :21:48.literally side by side, you can see that their statements begin in an
:21:48. > :21:58.
:21:58. > :22:07.You've got the setting of the scene here as to the date. This passage
:22:07. > :22:09.here. Exactly the same in the two statements. That's word for word.
:22:09. > :22:12.Absolutely, and then here's an interesting phrase. "Periodically
:22:12. > :22:15.there was missile throwing from the back of the ranks, but apart from
:22:15. > :22:18.this there was no trouble". Now some other statements have the
:22:18. > :22:21.first part of that but leave out that second bit. But there are
:22:21. > :22:27.literally several dozen examples of police officers who've used exactly
:22:27. > :22:30.the same phrase there. I was frankly shocked by Orgreave.
:22:30. > :22:33.By the deliberate nature of putting together this case against men who
:22:33. > :22:36.were after all, some of them may have been occasionally violent,
:22:36. > :22:40.many of them absolutely were not, but after all they were simply
:22:40. > :22:43.trying to fight for their jobs and that's what they were doing, so I
:22:43. > :22:50.was shocked by the extent of the politicisation of police, and to
:22:50. > :22:53.some extent the criminal justice system generally. And how strong do
:22:53. > :23:00.you think the evidence is that cover that was enacted after
:23:00. > :23:06.Hillsborough was in their culture already at the time of Orgreave?
:23:06. > :23:09.I think the evidence is strong. What happened at Orgreave seems to
:23:09. > :23:14.be on the basis that the police just assumed that if they gave a
:23:14. > :23:21.particular account of the day's events. Nobody would challenge, or
:23:21. > :23:24.at least nobody who they thought mattered would challenge them. And
:23:24. > :23:27.so when you have groups of miners and the miners' communities saying,
:23:27. > :23:30."that's not how it happened at Orgreave, we know, that's not how
:23:30. > :23:33.it happened". Of course there's a parallel there with Liverpool and
:23:33. > :23:39.Hillsborough. The Hillsborough families have known all along the
:23:39. > :23:42.truth. But it was an attempt by the police to set the agenda according
:23:43. > :23:45.the fact that I think at the time they did feel that they could say
:23:45. > :23:49.these things and that nobody who mattered was going to challenge
:23:49. > :23:56.them. As indeed is the case, because outside of the trial,
:23:56. > :23:59.nobody did challenge them and bring them to book.
:24:00. > :24:02.In those days, every day at about 11 o'clock, we'd all troop over to
:24:02. > :24:09.Downing Street and the press secretary of that time would brief
:24:09. > :24:13.us on Margaret Thatcher's attitude. Now even though it's a long time
:24:13. > :24:16.ago, almost daily we heard the miners described as a bunch of yobs
:24:16. > :24:24.or yobbos - that was one of the favourite phrases - and how dare
:24:24. > :24:27.they hold the country to ransom. When we queried police tactics, we
:24:27. > :24:35.were simply told that anyone who challenges the government or bad
:24:35. > :24:39.mouths the police is the enemy within.
:24:39. > :24:42.No doubt at all that it was political. I mean before Orgreave
:24:42. > :24:45.I'd done other cases and although by the establishment there's been a
:24:45. > :24:48.continual denial that we have political trials in the United
:24:48. > :24:51.Kingdom, in fact they're a little more subtle, they don't call them
:24:51. > :24:55.political trials and it's not a political offence. But essentially
:24:55. > :25:05.the momentum is undoubtedly political. And as far as 1984
:25:05. > :25:10.
:25:10. > :25:12.miners' strike and strikes before. This was clearly a political battle
:25:12. > :25:15.and a political imperative. Thatcher saw the NUM as being
:25:15. > :25:20.subversive. And that's how they became "the enemy within" so what
:25:20. > :25:23.could be more political than that? The notable thing about it is that
:25:23. > :25:26.because it didn't succeed, it was a mass acquittal, very little has
:25:26. > :25:29.been made of it. If they had been convicted and then acquitted again
:25:29. > :25:35.years later, that somehow hits the spot in a way that an acquittal
:25:35. > :25:38.didn't. So there is no doubt among some cases, for instance, Stefan
:25:38. > :25:42.Kiszko, that was pure dealing with forensic stuff, this is much worse
:25:42. > :25:52.than some of those cases. Though it's not dissimilar to the kind of
:25:52. > :25:56.
:25:56. > :25:59.Birmingham Six situation. It is a miscarriage of justice, but not in
:25:59. > :26:03.a normal sense of the word. Obviously if they'd been found
:26:03. > :26:05.guilty and had to go to appeal and then got let off, those are the
:26:05. > :26:10.famous miscarriage of justices. But there's a much bigger miscarriage
:26:10. > :26:14.of justice here at Orgreave. And it's not isolated because we see
:26:14. > :26:21.the same thing at Hillsborough. Not a single police officer was
:26:21. > :26:24.prosecuted. Even ones that were caught on camera beating a
:26:24. > :26:31.defensive miner, holding one to the ground and beating him in one
:26:31. > :26:39.particular case, not a single officer prosecuted. Not a single
:26:39. > :26:43.one was even disciplined. It's obviously difficult because of
:26:43. > :26:46.the lapse of time. It's now getting on for 30 years since Orgreave. But
:26:46. > :26:48.the fact remains that if there is evidence that senior police
:26:48. > :26:51.officers in South Yorkshire Police did apparently conspire together
:26:51. > :26:54.and this couldn't have happened just on one officers' say so, if
:26:54. > :26:57.there's evidence of a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, then
:26:57. > :27:07.in principle, why should they be allowed to live out their
:27:07. > :27:10.
:27:10. > :27:15.retirements on their pensions with We asked South Yorkshire Police to
:27:15. > :27:20.participate in this film but they declined. Instead they gave us this
:27:20. > :27:24.statement. "South Yorkshire Police notes the issues raised in the
:27:24. > :27:27.programme and will consider whether any review is necessary. The force
:27:27. > :27:37.is not aware of any adverse comment about the statements from the trial
:27:37. > :27:40.
:27:40. > :27:45.judge in the case. The police and reputation in mining areas went
:27:45. > :27:52.crashing to the ground. I was still practising during the miners'
:27:52. > :27:57.strike. If there was any evidence against a police officer, there
:27:57. > :28:07.would never be a conviction. There is still strong feelings against
:28:07. > :28:10.
:28:10. > :28:13.The Battle of Orgreave happened 28 years ago. Ancient history some
:28:13. > :28:16.might say. But as we've seen tonight and as we've learned
:28:16. > :28:18.recently with Hillsborough, what lies in the past isn't necessarily
:28:18. > :28:21.a closed chapter. The South Yorkshire Police of today is
:28:21. > :28:24.different to its 1980s counterpart, but fate has dictated that the
:28:24. > :28:33.actions of the force in the 1980s, at Hillsborough and at Orgreave,
:28:33. > :28:37.will now face closer scrutiny than they ever did at the time. That's
:28:37. > :28:46.all for tonight. But you can find us on Facebook and follow us on