London: The official investigation into police misconduct over the Battle of Orgreave — the violent clash in 1984 between striking miners and police — is too slow, seemingly incompetent, and rapidly losing the public’s confidence, according to a police commissioner and campaigners.
Speaking ahead of the 30th anniversary of the notorious clashes, on June 18, a former solicitor general, Vera Baird QC, said the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) appeared to have failed to have taken the issue seriously and should be removed from looking further into the events.
More than 18 months since the IPCC began a “scoping” exercise into whether it should fully investigate claims that officers fabricated statements, key witnesses to possible corruption have still not been interviewed by investigators.
On Wednesday, it will be three decades since the bitter skirmishes between around 10,000 striking miners and some 5,000 police officers in fields near the coking plant at Rotherham, South Yorkshire. The prosecution of 95 miners charged over the incident collapsed the following year after concerns had emerged about police statements. The IPCC is currently examining allegations that officers colluded in preparing court testimony.
Baird, Northumbria’s police and crime commissioner, said the IPCC’s performance over Orgreave appeared so lamentable that she would rate its scoping assessment at “two-and-a-quarter” out of 10. She added: “The IPCC is running out of time for trust to be sustained. One wants to have faith in the publicly established statutory organisation that investigates complaints against the police, but it’s impossible not to ask yourself: ‘What’s keeping them?’
“If the IPCC cannot do this work, then it’s time that somebody independent was appointed to take it on. The foot-dragging will generate an impression to the public that they [the IPCC] are not interested, or they are waiting for relevant people to die, or they are just a bunch of people who cannot sort themselves out and have no intelligent priority mechanism, or if they have, they have prioritised this extremely low.”
Another aspect that is frustrating campaigners is that demands for a full public inquiry into police corruption surrounding Orgreave have been shelved while the IPCC looks into the issue.
Baird, who represented miners throughout the strike, said witnesses during the trial of the acquitted miners, including solicitors, have not yet been approached by the IPCC or asked for their court notes. Police officers at Orgreave, she said, were asked by South Yorkshire police detectives to describe in their statements “scenes they’d simply never seen”, with some Liverpool officers claiming they had witnessed a riot at Orgreave but had never left Merseyside.
Baird added: “The evidence is clear: it was admitted in court. There is a group of lawyers and defendants who will be able to testify to this effect. Indeed, there were 12 jurors as well. The IPCC just looks weaker and weaker. We were there, we heard it, the cops admitted it. What are they waiting for?”
Despite such apparent evidence, the fact that lawsuits were brought against the police for assault, unlawful arrest and malicious prosecution, and that South Yorkshire police — the force at the centre of the Hillsborough disaster cover-up — later agreed to pay nearly £500,000 (Dh3.1 million) in compensation to 39 miners, campaigners are concerned over the lack of progress.
Barbara Jackson of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign alleged that when they met IPCC investigators a year into its scoping assessment, they had failed to obtain a transcript of the trial, a public document. She also said the IPCC had not contacted the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) or her campaign group, and it had been left to them to find and interview former miners, explaining that they had forwarded testimony of 15 miners plus a number of the 95 acquitted pickets to investigators.
Jackson also said officials spent just three hours at the NUM archives in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, and that there was a growing suspicion that the IPCC was content to allow its scoping to rumble along while the Hillsborough inquests continue. “They just don’t want to go there and have another Hillsborough,” she said.
Meanwhile, academics from Sheffield University will this week launch a study claiming that Orgreave exerts an enduring impact on industrial relations in Britain. Michael Jefferson, a senior lecturer at the School of Law at the University of Sheffield, said the incident had had a profound influence in changing how disorder was policed.
Jefferson said that the violence, which would have prompted police prosecutions today, had led to a fundamental re-examination of police behaviour during disputes. He argues that at Orgreave, where strikers were escorted to a field flanked by police on all sides except where a railway line ran, was arguably the first instance of “kettling”, the controversial tactic for controlling crowds during demonstrations.
The IPCC commissioner, Cindy Butts, said the scoping work was ongoing, but very complex: “We do appreciate the frustration and concerns about the time this is taking. We are nearing a conclusion of our scoping work, but we want to ensure we have had the opportunity to analyse as much of the relevant documentation as possible before we make a decision.
“We have been assessing documentation from a range of different sources, including South Yorkshire police and the national archive, and continue to liaise with the National Union of Mineworkers and the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign to gain access to any documentation they may have. We remain committed to reaching a decision as soon as we can.”
