22/10/2012 Inside Out Yorkshire and Lincolnshire

Welcome to Inside Out. I am Toby Foster. I am at Orgreave, the scene

of the bitter minor battle in 1984. There are two accounts of what

happened that day, one from the miners and one from the police. We

have got evidence that suggested the police doctor statements which

could have led to the culture which five years later on would see the

In September the Hillsborough Independent Panel released its

report into the stadium disaster of April 1989. It revealed a catalogue

of accusations against South Yorkshire Police, the Ambulance

Service, Sheffield Wednesday and many others. But of all its

shocking findings, what stands out is the evidence that 116 police

statements were changed in an attempt to put the blame for the

disaster onto Liverpool supporters. The new evidence with which we are

presented today makes it clear, in my view, that these families have

suffered a double injustice. The injustice of the appalling events,

the failure of the state to protect their loved ones and the

indefensible wait to get to the truth, and then the injustice of

the denigration of the deceased, that they were somehow at fault for

their own deaths. On the face of it there seems little connection

between the miners' strike in the 1980s and what happened on the

Leppings Lane that terrace but tonight we will reveal that

Hillsborough, far from being an isolated event, was, in fact, part

of a pattern of senior South Yorkshire officers manipulating the

statements made by junior officers and while Hillsborough resonated

around the world, what happened at Orgreave in June 1984 has been left

as a footnote in history. In the aftermath of Hillsborough

South Yorkshire police systematically altered the witness

statements of its own officers. Tonight we'll reveal how five years

earlier the same force deliberately moulded statements so it could

prosecute miners at Orgreave for riot, an offence that potentially

carried a life sentence. They wanted to teach the miners a

lesson, a big lesson, so that the miners wouldn't come out in force

again. I was punched, kicked, prodded, you

name it. I walked in, and I was nearly carried out.

You can see in a way that they were trying merely to set the scenario,

but actually what they were doing was teeing up, perverting the

course of justice. I was a bit surprised when I came

in and someone said we need to have this as a starting paragraph.

However I'd never been involved in a situation where so many people

were arrested. The violence and intimidation that

we have seen should never have happened. It is the work of

extremists. It is the enemy within. Oh, what a lovely summer.

Oh, what a long, long strike. But if we have to go through it all

again, We would still stand up and fight.

Convoys of coal going from Orgreave. Men standing side by side.

Women serving the soup for them, Watching lories of coal go by.

Rows and rows of men in blue. Horses, dogs and truncheons too.

Hitting miners, they didn't care who.

It's not so long ago that Yorkshire was synonymous with mining. Before

the 1984 strike, this region was dotted with 60 collieries. Each of

them supporting a community and giving thousands of miners jobs.

Coal kept the lights on and powered industry. But now only three

underground pits remain in Yorkshire, like this one at

Hatfield near Doncaster. The strike was the turning point

for the industry. The miners, led by Arthur Scargill, believed that

the government planned to shut down hundreds of pits. Faced with the

loss of their jobs, most Yorkshire miners came out on strike. They

hoped to choke the country's supply of energy and force Mrs Thatcher to

back down. No way. Move! crucially most Nottinghamshire

miners kept working, believing their pits would be safe. The year-

long dispute pitched miner against miner, and against the government.

But they'd planned ahead. Power stations had stockpiled coal and

tough union laws had made it harder for other workers to support the

miners. Throughout the dispute, pickets and police clashed

regularly. The most notorious flashpoint was at the Orgreave

Coking Plant on the outskirts of Sheffield. The coke produced at

Orgreave fuelled the British Steel mill in Scunthorpe. During the 1972

miners' strike, the National Union of Mineworkers had famously shut

the Saltley Coking plant in Birmingham by sending in flying

pickets. Arthur thought what we should

really do is to have one big pitched battle. Like the one he had

at Saltley Gate. At Saltley Gate, we won.

Saltley acted as the template for the picketing at Orgreave 12 years

later. Only this time, the miners faced a police force and a

government determined not to be beaten.

Almost from the start of the strike in March 1984, there had been

pickets at Orgreave. We shall be coming here until we

stop them wagons. We want that plant shutting down. We want them

stopping them wagons going in. Over the weeks tensions grew and

things finally came to a head on June the 18th. That day up to

10,000 pickets turned up. There to try and stop the miners shutting

the plant were at least 5,000 policemen from many different

forces across the country. The man in overall command that day, was

the South Yorkshire Police Assistant Chief Constable Anthony

Clement. The miners' strike is 100 days old tomorrow and today brought

the worst scenes of violence of the dispute.

The violence lasted most of the day. By the end 93 miners had been

arrested. The official police report said 51 pickets were injured

along with 72 police officers. But, as with Hillsborough, two very

different accounts of what happened emerged.

We were like a phalanx of Roman legionnaires, lined across the

field. Obviously the coke lorries were coming through, infuriating

the pickets and so the level of missiles appeared to increase.

Police horses were deployed. And then on the date in question, the

decision was taken, we were taken from long shields and told we were

to deploy as short shield snatch squads.

It was like a military plan. And when miners arrived in June

sunshine, bare chested. They'd been picketing there for weeks and weeks.

They expected it to be kind of the same ritual. You arrive and the

police are there in a great long line and we push against it and

then it's sort of over with really. And lorries go into the coking

works. There was an understanding and

acceptance that protest was their lawful and legal right but these

idiots who wanted to use the police as Aunt Sallys, the anonymity that

their numbers gave them caused the problem.

It started with the usual pushing and shoving and it was fairly much

OK, but it started to escalate where one or two bricks and bottles

came across. They had dogs on one side. They had

police on horse-back in the field. It was like a medieval battlefield.

The rows upon rows of great long shields. And up on the bridge and

into the village, there were horses and cops across the road. So they

were surrounded. And there were 10,000 miners. And there were a lot

of police. And it was like, click. The decision came from Clements and

off they went. Horses charged straight into the miners. They

could have been trampled to death. The short shield units went in

afterwards. They grabbed people, So that charge by the horses,

Norman, do you think that was justified by the level of violence

that you were encountering? I was a bit surprised to see the horses.

But quite pleased. Cos they'd stopped the bricks being thrown.

You know if the horses are coming charging towards me, swinging them

big night-sticks. You know, I might be built like Gandhi, but I'm not

going to sit down in the road singing, we shall overcome, baby.

I'll you that. So of course we launched bloody bricks at them to

try to stop the charge. These days Michael Mansfield is one

Britain's most famous defence barristers, specialising in

miscarriages of justice. But in 1984 he was only starting to make a

name for himself when he represented several miners in the

first trial which took place in Sheffield in 1985.

The video footage the police themselves took showed a completely

different story. Not the one the BBC put out, but the police footage

was quite different. There were a lot of independent monitors, some

with notebooks, some with cameras and one with a movie camera stuck

up in a tree. The police had no idea to which the extent of what

they were doing, their unlawful activities were being filmed. So if

you put the combination of that package together, you had a record,

a really almost unchallengeable record of a completely different

version of events. The police account reported at the

time was that miners had massed together and launched a violent

assault on the Police. South Yorkshire police claimed there'd

been no choice but to send in mounted policemen and snatch squads

with short shields in order to regain control.

A lot of miners think that there was a concerted attempt at Orgreave

to send them a message that they weren't going to win. Did you see

evidence of that? Yeah, I would say so. The comment, we weren't going

to lose, was upper most in a lot of our minds. Coming from Birmingham,

the previous miners' strike in Birmingham, Saltley Gate,

effectively the pickets had won by pushing through the police lines.

And I wasn't there, I don't think many of the officers I knew were

there because it happened in a previous decade, but it was

something for us professionally, we weren't going to lose.

The miners' maintained that they'd been peacefully picketing and it

was the police who'd attacked them. The video evidence produced in

court contradicted the police So it had two stages. Get em all in

a field and charge and generally batter them and hopefully they'll

retreat, which they did. Up the field, down a railway embankment,

huge injuries. Stef Wysocki was a striking miner

from the Derbyshire coalfield. He went to Orgreave that day to picket.

It were a nice hot summer's day. We were all there in T-shirts. They

were in full riot gear. They knew what were going off. We didn't. I

just stood there with my hands in my pockets. I hadn't done anything

wrong. I was just watching what was going off. It was all new to me.

I'd never seen anything like this before. I just stood there and next

minute I seen all these policemen running up field and I looked round

to see who they were running for. And there were only me there left,

so obviously they were after me. REPORTER: So when they got to you,

did you put any resistance up? whatsoever. None whatsoever.

REPORTER: So when they arrested you, what did you expect to happen?

I hadn't done anything. So I didn't think I would get charged.

Obviously there were a lot of cameras there. And when it got to

court there, they got all the photos of me being arrested at the

top of the hill with no injuries. And when we got to the bottom of

the hill, I'd got injuries and I were in their custody.

REPORTER: What sort of injuries? Bruises, facial cuts. Bleeding.

REPORTER: So you got a bit of a kicking then?

Oh I got a very big kicking. One of things we done was we protected the

arrested person as we went through police lines.

Because I have to say some of my colleagues, or not colleagues,

individuals from other forces weren't above trying to land a

smack on the head of an individual coming through. I wasn't happy

about that. My prisoner, he gets to the holding centre in the state in

which he was arrested. I didn't want someone who was injured who

would then make allegations against me. I said, "what are you arresting

me for"? He said, "throwing stones at a policeman". I said, "look at

my hands. I haven't thrown anything". He said, "they all say

that". So then I was marched down the field, both arms up my back.

Got to the police line. I was banged onto police shields. They

bounced me off. The shields opened and I was punched, kicked, prodded,

you name it. I walked in, and I was nearly carried out. Stage two, we

have to have a recording process, that's the statement process done

by another unit. And unfortunately they were caught out once again

because some of the officers who claimed to have arrested certain

individuals plainly didn't, because they're not in the photographs

accompanying the miners. So basically the second stage process,

the investigation and recording of what happened on the field at

Orgreave was a contrivance. Another barrister who defended the miners

in the Orgreave Trial was Vera Baird.

Officers signed statements saying they'd seen A, they'd seen B,

they'd seen D. Important symptoms of disorder. But actually we got

the log books of the vehicles and many of them hadn't even left home

by the time those things had happened and been taken away. So,

it was a clear plan to make this escalation of the gravity of the

charges really work. I think the allegation was that we

had statements dictated to us or something similar. I was not

dictated to with regards to the statement. But some of the

statements in public order situations can seem formulaic. So

where officers, or in my statement it talks about "I was frightened, I

was apprehensive". Those were forms of words you used because in terms

of the public order act, or it was actually common law then, those

were the things you expressed. Hillsborough Independent Panel

report accused South Yorkshire Police in 1989 of making a

concerted effort to remove damaging references from officers. The panel

found 116 statement had been altered. The police narrative was

that Liverpool fans were drunk and ticketless. Some officers even

falsely claimed to the press that supporters had stolen from the dead

and urinated on people while police officers attempted to save lives.

In the case of Orgreave five years earlier, the manipulation of

statements appears to be even more organised than at Hillsborough. In

1985, the first 15 miners charged with riot were tried here at the

old Sheffield Crown Court. But the trial collapsed in spectacular

style when it became clear the police evidence wasn't reliable.

One officer, PC Stephen Hill, admitted under cross examination

that much of his statement had been narrated to him. PC Hill's version

of events tallies with Inspector Norman Taylor's recollection of

what happened when he was asked to write up his statement. It was like

a big room. And people were in different parts of the room. I

recall this policeman in plain clothes mentioning that he'd had a

good idea of what had happened. And we were from different police

forces. And that there was a preamble to set the scene. And he

was reading from some paper, a paragraph or so. And he asked the

people who were there to use that as their starting paragraph. So you

copied down what they told you to write? So that paragraph, I think

it was basically the time and date, the name of the place. There were

guys from the Met who hadn't a clue where South Yorkshire was. In fact,

it was more than just one paragraph. The arresting officers may have

thought that they were simply describing the scene at Orgreave.

But why did senior South Yorkshire detectives have to dictate a form

of wording for the officers to use? It seems clear the fact that the

exact same phrases appeared in dozens of police witness statements

was no coincidence. To take just one example, 31 officers from four

We've obtained copies of around 100 police witness statements after

Orgreave. And what you see in those statements is fascinating.

Statement after statement from officer after officer, the same

phrases appear over and over again. So was it the intention from the

start to build an exaggerated case of riot against the pickets. And

that charge of riot matters. The common law offence of Riot dates

back to the medieval period. Prior to its use in the Orgreave trials,

nobody in England and Wales had been accused of riot for more than

60 years. But why did South Yorkshire police choose to it?

Whereas a picket convicted of a public order offence such as

throwing a stone might get a fine, pickets convicted of riot were

faced potentially life in prison. Ian Hernon was a political reporter

in the 1980s and went on the write about the history of the Riot Act.

It was a very blunt instrument to suppress civil discontent. It

wasn't used very often. Most famously it was used in the

Peterloo massacre in Manchester as a way of allowing the militia and

the cavalry to kill civilians. It wasn't used very much after that.

In fact the last time that we know for sure that it was used was

during the 1919 police strike in Birkenhead.

But the real key to it was the process that was used after they

were arrested. Two police would arrest one miner. They would take

them back through the police lines to an office and lock him up,

having presented him to a custody sergeant and write their statement

immediately. And in that office, as they told us, were some detectives

who were dictating the paragraphs alleging the scene of disorder

necessary to make a little offence like throwing a pork pie, into a

riot. The main reason I think why the

Orgreave trial collapsed was because the police being totally

out of control, cavalier in the whole affair, were in such a rush

to arrest people, injure people, that who arrested who was lost

track of. So they didn't keep a note of which person had been

arrested by which cop. So they had a whole big bunch of people and

whole big bunch of cops and they just made up who they arrested. And

then they made up the stories associated with who'd done what.

You can see in a way that they were merely trying to set the scenario,

but actually what they were doing was teeing up, perverting the

course of justice. Because these men could not say that those things

had happened yet they were signing a statement saying they knew they'd

be prosecuted if they got it wrong, and come into court and giving

evidence in accordance to their statement of scenes they'd simply

never seen. The people who were arrested that day, were

subsequently charge with riot? Were you surprised? Actually it did.

Because normally the public order offence, Section 5 Public Order

would be the one they used. So even when you get groups of people on a

Friday night or so, that would be it. We took the Orgreave statements

to a leading Sheffield barrister to ask for an independent opinion.

It's very obvious in the Orgreave case that there was widespread

collusion. You can't get statements written in the way they have been

done here, by police officers from different forces involved in

different arrests and find such a degree of similarity between those

statements without there being some degree of collusion. I've just

taken one of a number of examples. This is a West Yorkshire police

officer who is involved in a separate arrest, nothing to do with

this South Yorkshire officer. But when you put their statements

literally side by side, you can see that their statements begin in an

You've got the setting of the scene here as to the date. This passage

here. Exactly the same in the two statements. That's word for word.

Absolutely, and then here's an interesting phrase. "Periodically

there was missile throwing from the back of the ranks, but apart from

this there was no trouble". Now some other statements have the

first part of that but leave out that second bit. But there are

literally several dozen examples of police officers who've used exactly

the same phrase there. I was frankly shocked by Orgreave.

By the deliberate nature of putting together this case against men who

were after all, some of them may have been occasionally violent,

many of them absolutely were not, but after all they were simply

trying to fight for their jobs and that's what they were doing, so I

was shocked by the extent of the politicisation of police, and to

some extent the criminal justice system generally. And how strong do

you think the evidence is that cover that was enacted after

Hillsborough was in their culture already at the time of Orgreave?

I think the evidence is strong. What happened at Orgreave seems to

be on the basis that the police just assumed that if they gave a

particular account of the day's events. Nobody would challenge, or

at least nobody who they thought mattered would challenge them. And

so when you have groups of miners and the miners' communities saying,

"that's not how it happened at Orgreave, we know, that's not how

it happened". Of course there's a parallel there with Liverpool and

Hillsborough. The Hillsborough families have known all along the

truth. But it was an attempt by the police to set the agenda according

the fact that I think at the time they did feel that they could say

these things and that nobody who mattered was going to challenge

them. As indeed is the case, because outside of the trial,

nobody did challenge them and bring them to book.

In those days, every day at about 11 o'clock, we'd all troop over to

Downing Street and the press secretary of that time would brief

us on Margaret Thatcher's attitude. Now even though it's a long time

ago, almost daily we heard the miners described as a bunch of yobs

or yobbos - that was one of the favourite phrases - and how dare

they hold the country to ransom. When we queried police tactics, we

were simply told that anyone who challenges the government or bad

mouths the police is the enemy within.

No doubt at all that it was political. I mean before Orgreave

I'd done other cases and although by the establishment there's been a

continual denial that we have political trials in the United

Kingdom, in fact they're a little more subtle, they don't call them

political trials and it's not a political offence. But essentially

the momentum is undoubtedly political. And as far as 1984

miners' strike and strikes before. This was clearly a political battle

and a political imperative. Thatcher saw the NUM as being

subversive. And that's how they became "the enemy within" so what

could be more political than that? The notable thing about it is that

because it didn't succeed, it was a mass acquittal, very little has

been made of it. If they had been convicted and then acquitted again

years later, that somehow hits the spot in a way that an acquittal

didn't. So there is no doubt among some cases, for instance, Stefan

Kiszko, that was pure dealing with forensic stuff, this is much worse

than some of those cases. Though it's not dissimilar to the kind of

Birmingham Six situation. It is a miscarriage of justice, but not in

a normal sense of the word. Obviously if they'd been found

guilty and had to go to appeal and then got let off, those are the

famous miscarriage of justices. But there's a much bigger miscarriage

of justice here at Orgreave. And it's not isolated because we see

the same thing at Hillsborough. Not a single police officer was

prosecuted. Even ones that were caught on camera beating a

defensive miner, holding one to the ground and beating him in one

particular case, not a single officer prosecuted. Not a single

one was even disciplined. It's obviously difficult because of

the lapse of time. It's now getting on for 30 years since Orgreave. But

the fact remains that if there is evidence that senior police

officers in South Yorkshire Police did apparently conspire together

and this couldn't have happened just on one officers' say so, if

there's evidence of a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, then

in principle, why should they be allowed to live out their

retirements on their pensions with We asked South Yorkshire Police to

participate in this film but they declined. Instead they gave us this

statement. "South Yorkshire Police notes the issues raised in the

programme and will consider whether any review is necessary. The force

is not aware of any adverse comment about the statements from the trial

judge in the case. The police and reputation in mining areas went

crashing to the ground. I was still practising during the miners'

strike. If there was any evidence against a police officer, there

would never be a conviction. There is still strong feelings against

The Battle of Orgreave happened 28 years ago. Ancient history some

might say. But as we've seen tonight and as we've learned

recently with Hillsborough, what lies in the past isn't necessarily

a closed chapter. The South Yorkshire Police of today is

different to its 1980s counterpart, but fate has dictated that the

actions of the force in the 1980s, at Hillsborough and at Orgreave,

will now face closer scrutiny than they ever did at the time. That's

all for tonight. But you can find us on Facebook and follow us on