18 June 1984 is now regarded by many historians as a defining moment in recent British social history: the turning point in a long battle between the Conservative government and National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). It resulted in the eventual collapse of the Miners’ Strike, and with it, not only the coal industry, but the strength of the trade union movement in Britain.
Miners: from victory to vulnerability
Only a decade earlier the NUM gained a massive victory over the Heath government with a strike which, in 1972, led to the three-day week, loss of confidence in the government and the election of a Labour government in 1974.
Coal was still the primary source of energy in the UK, providing light, heat, and power for homes and industry. Even in 1980, coal mining concentrated in the great coalfields of South Wales, Scotland, Nottinghamshire, Durham, and South Yorkshire employed over 180,000 men. These were the industrial elite whose high wages powered their local economies.
But by 1984, oil and gas, including the vast riches of the North Sea oilfields, were overtaking coal as the nation’s prime energy source. Empowered by her patriotic victory in the Falklands War, a much more ruthless Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher saw the right moment to avenge the historic defeat of previous Conservative governments by combating militant NUM leader Arthur Scargill with ruthless efficiency.
The importance of the Orgreave coking plant
Deliberately waiting until a moment when coal stocks were at an all-time high, then publishing provocative plans for wholesale closure of many uneconomic coal mines, she forced Scargill into a trap of his own making. By not having a national ballot, which was to weaken his moral and legal case, the NUM leader totally underestimated the ruthlessness of Thatcher in taking on what she was later to describe as “the enemy within”.
It must have been glaringly clear to Scargill by early summer of 1984 the NUM would have a long and gruelling battle, with government and right-wing media working ruthlessly to pressurise miners, with mortgages and hire purchase agreements to pay, back to work.
That’s why the Orgreave coking plant was so significant. The high-quality coke produced there provided coke for one major customer: Scunthorpe Steelworks. As very recent events have shown with brutal clarity, if high-quality coke didn’t get to the blast furnaces in sufficient quantity, the furnaces would have to be closed, causing catastrophic damage, which would in turn have a major impact on steel and wider industrial manufacturing capacity.
Scargill’s plan
Scargill’s strategy was simple but bold. By secondary picketing of lorries at the plant gates, the NUM would stop coke reaching the Scunthorpe Steelworks, and the government would be forced to capitulate.
So, the stakes were high.
What happened was an alarming and even terrifying episode of British history. Police forces from all over the UK were militarised to a degree that had never happened before, at least in peacetime. Equipped with heavy-duty helmets, shields, batons, police on foot and mounted on horseback were brought to Orgreave in significant numbers.
The Battle of Orgreave
Firsthand accounts of what actually happened are documented in a recent book, An Uncivil War by Michael Donald and Daniel Gorden (also made into a documentary), published to mark the 40th anniversary of what is now known as the Battle of Orgreave. Using firsthand accounts from eyewitnesses, including not just miners but police officers, politicians, and impartial observers, what emerges is truly disturbing.
Pickets, most of them dressed in T-shirts and jeans on a sunny morning and carrying flimsy placards, were directed by seeming friendly police officers to what they imagined would be relatively orderly picket lines. But they found themselves corralled into a corner as police with shields and batons, and on horseback, charged into them with clear orders to crush and smash the miners.
Inevitably, there was violence from both sides. Striking miners, fighting for their jobs, livelihoods, and families are no angels. But as so many independent accounts concur, it was totally one-sided, the state crushing the opposition in as ruthless and violent a way as possible. Mercifully, at Orgreave at least there were no fatalities, but many serious injuries, again overwhelmingly among the miners. The protesters had to literally flee for their lives, over nearby railway embankments or into gardens.
Most news media played down wrongful arrests and police violence but exaggerated that of miners. As always, history is written by the victors.
Predictably, in the months that followed, the strike collapsed in division, bitterness and hunger, after a few blacklegs defied picket lines, miners, broken, returned to work in floods, the Nottinghamshire miners returning first. By March 1985, a year after the strike began, a humiliated NUM sanctioned a return to work. Within months, mine closures began, cheaper imported coal now replacing that from British mines.
The legacy of deindustrialisation
The significance of Orgreave is that it was a turning point not only for coal but also the start of a deliberate policy of deindustrialisation of much of Britain. North Sea oil wealth was used not for new technology to replace doomed smoke-stack industries, mainly in the North and Midlands, but for unemployment pay and to invest in the growth of booming financial and legal service sectors and new IT-led developments, primarily in the South.
The North-South divide was allowed to become a chasm, the once-proud mining, textile and steel towns of the North now hollowed out, suffering the blight, sadness and ignorance of poverty, which the efforts of the Blair/Brown governments did something to alleviate but which the Cameron/Osborne austerity did much to deepen, and the Starmer/Reeves agenda seems to be making worse.
Memories and justice in Yorkshire
Yet it is not without irony that Scunthorpe Steel works, which was Scargill’s bargaining tool at Orgreave, has just been rescued by the government, recognising the catastrophic vulnerability of our nation, both economically and for defence, if one of our last prime steelmaking facilities were to close.
Orgreave is now a pleasanter place since the huge and ugly coking plant was demolished, the land cleansed for middle-class housing. A new advanced manufacturing park occupies part of the site. Maybe some children and grandchildren of former pitmen have jobs there. The nearby Orgreave mine is now a nature reserve, its former slag heaps host butterflies and trees, and old pit flashes are lakes for anglers.
But memories linger. Many people believe what happened on 18 June 1984 at Orgreave was both shameful and illegal. People are still suffering the consequences of what happened. The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC), formed by ex-miners, trades unionists and others, is determined to get justice for striking miners who believe that police violence, lies and cover-ups have been deliberately ignored, drawing parallels with the Hillsborough tragedy.
There is a beautiful Etruscan word ‘Saeculum’, which means the living memories of the oldest people now still alive. OTJC must capture such testimonies to secure real change. There should be a permanent, living memorial for an event which, for good and for ill, was a turning point in our national history.
What happened after the Battle of Orgreave had devastating economic and physical impacts, not just on the communities of South Yorkshire, but the whole of the North. In its way, it can be compared to a latter-day, infamous Harrying of the North, by Margaret the vengeful Conqueror.
