How ‘safe’ Queen’s Speech ducked a Bill of Rights battle

DAVID Cameron last night came under fire for a ‘dull’ Queen’s Speech which dodged the issue of restoring British sovereignty over Brussels.

The Prime Minister failed to spell out how he will scrap Labour’s Human Rights Act and replace it with a British Bill of Rights.

Yesterday former cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith accused Mr Cameron of avoiding any subjects which could derail Number 10’s efforts to keep Britain inside the EU.

And Leave campaigners said both the Sovereignty Bill and the Bill of Rights would have highlighted how Britain’s hands will remain tied while it remains part of the Brussels club.

Number 10 insisted the package of 21 bills – which took the Queen less than nine minutes to deliver – was ‘bold and radical’ and should not be dismissed as a ‘damp squib’.

Mr Cameron highlighted plans to reform the care system, extend academy schools, allow the establishment of new universities and overhaul prisons – giving some freedom to set their own regimes. He said it was a programme of reform by the Government which would ‘extend life chances for all’. Other proposals included:

Giving every household the right to demand fast broadband and compensation when services fail;

A controversial overhaul of planning laws to make it easier to build new homes;

Making it far easier for children to be adopted;

An age-verification system to stop children accessing internet porn;

A new sugar tax aimed at fizzy drinks manufacturers;

Another crackdown on health tourism – this time targeting EU citizens.

But in a withering attack yesterday, Mr Duncan Smith dismissed the year’s legislative programme as ‘dull’.

He added: ‘ Many Conservatives are increasingly concerned that in the Government’s helter-skelter pursuit of the referendum, they have been jettisoning or watering down key elements of their legislative programme. Whether it is the Trade Charternothing Union must proposals,standBill or in it the the seemsBBC way of winning the referendum. ‘It appears the much-vaunted Sovereignty Bill, key to the argument that the PM secured a reform of the EU, has been tossed aside as well. The fear in Government must be that as no one in Britain buys the idea that the EU has been reformed, the Sovereignty Bill would draw the public’s attention back to that failure.’

In a bid to dampen down the row, Downing Street insisted the PM wants to ‘move forward as quickly as we can’ on a British Bill of Rights to replace the Human Rights Act. But the speech offered only ‘proposals’ on the issue – despite the Tories promising to take action a decade ago.

And plans to force all schools to become academies were dumped after a Tory MP revolt. Some MPs also suggested proposals to counter extremism – opposed by free speech groups – had been watered down.

Last night Number 10 insisted ministers were still ‘working towards’ a Sovereignty Bill. However Ukip deputy leader Paul Nuttall pointed out that Tory MPs who had been ‘ convinced to support Cameron’s decision to support Remain by promises of a Sovereignty Bill’ would feel ‘utterly betrayed’.

THE battle was the climactic moment of the miners’ strike, the most violent day of the year-long dispute, as vast numbers of police confronted thousands of pickets outside the Orgreave coke works near Rotherham.

The explosive flashpoint developed into running battles as each side advanced and retreated, and the brutality of the clashes on that baking June day in 1984 mesmerised and appalled the nation.

It was the confrontation that turned the dispute in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s favour, for it proved the police had the numbers, the methodology and the will to prevail.

Which is why it is so extraordinary that a Conservative Home Secretary, Theresa May, is now considering holding a public inquiry into the so-called Battle of Orgreave.

Brutality

There have long been demands from the Left for such an investigation, of course — demands driven by claims of police brutality. Cavalry charges, baton attacks and indiscriminate arrests were all tactics of a police force that, so its critics have claimed, resorted to unjustified and excessive force.

What made this ugly episode all the worse, they add, is that the scale of the police savagery was concealed from the public through organised deception.

And it is clear that Home Office thinking is taking the same line. Only this week, Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s former chief of staff, made an emotive appeal for an inquiry.

‘If the police pre-planned a mass, unlawful assault on the miners and then sought to cover up what they did and arrest people on trumped up charges, we need to know,’ he said, brimming with righteous zeal.

Yet if Theresa May sanctioned such an inquiry, it would be a deeply regrettable decision.

It would not only represent a triumph of Left-wing propaganda over historical reality, but would also be a repugnant betrayal of the courageous stand made 32 years ago by the police and Mrs Thatcher’s government in defence of democracy against anarchic destruction.

Supporters of an inquiry, including Nick Timothy, like to draw a parallel between Orgreave in 1984 and Hillsborough in 1989. In each case, South Yorkshire Police were involved and, in each case, we are told they showed criminal indifference towards humanity and the truth.

Indeed, the push for an Orgreave inquiry has been given impetus by the recent Hillsborough inquest, which found that the 96 Liverpool fans on that tragic day in Sheffield were unlawfully killed.

Campaigners eagerly point out that many of the officers at Hillsborough also took part in Orgreave five years earlier. But this amounts to a nasty form of guilt by association. The two cases are completely different.

At Hillsborough, the Liverpool fans were entirely innocent, seeking to do nothing more than watch a football match.

But at Orgreave, the pickets deliberately stoked a vicious confrontation with the police.

Their violence was no aberration. Along with bullying and intimidation, it was a central part of an insurrectionist strategy by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) to heighten the conflict and bring down the elected government.

Moreover, the Hillsborough inquest and previous inquiries into the tragedy were all central to a genuine search for the truth, in order to bring justice to the relatives of the victims.

Outrage

But an Orgreave inquiry would be a highly politicised arena for peddling ancient grievances and whipping up synthetic outrage against the Tories and, in particular, the Left’s favourite bogeyman, Margaret Thatcher.

The process would be dominated by a sentimental, grossly distorted narrative, with the pickets portrayed as the poor, innocent victims of an authoritarian state machine filled with class hatred.

Such an approach would be an absurd re-writing of history.

The man truly responsible for the savagery of the miners’ strike was their leader, Arthur Scargill, an anti- capitalist demagogue who saw his union as the vanguard of a Hard- Left revolution. He had been itching for an all- out war against his arch-enemy Mrs Thatcher ever since he became NUM president in 1982.

The trouble was that the majority of the miners had shown a deep reluctance to engage in this tinpot dictator’s dream of revolutionary struggle.

Three times in the early Eighties, the NUM voted against all- out industrial action in nationwide ballots.

So when Scargill embarked on his dispute over the Coal Board’s pit closure programme in February 1984, he decided to circumvent the problem by not holding a national ballot at all.

It was a disastrous move that shifted the union from democratic legitimacy to the path of violence. Without a proper vote, Scargill had no mandate for his strike. The only way to enforce it was to send massed units of pickets to coalfields to intimidate workers into downing tools.

Savage clashes were inevitable from the start. And none was worse than those at Orgreave, where Scargill, having failed to intimidate the Nottinghamshire fields into shutting down, was determined to prevent coke supplies leaving the plant.

There had been skirmishes and simmering hostilities for weeks, but the fighting really escalated on June 18, as 5,000 officers took on 10,000 strikers.

The idea that the police were responsible for the violence is comprehensively demolished by the contemporary coverage of what the Left-wing Guardian newspaper described as ‘sickening scenes’.

In his report from Orgreave, the Guardian’s reporter spoke of ‘police being attacked with bricks, slivers of glass and containers of fuel’. Cars were ‘rolled downhill towards policemen and ignited to make a flaming barricade’, while ‘wooden stakes had been placed in lines to prevent any horse charges’.

According to this account, it was the police on the defensive.

‘The barrage of rocks, bricks and glass was kept up for hours. For most of this, policemen stood with riot shields to fend off missiles,’ reported the Guardian.

The police’s bravery worked. The coke supplies continued from Orgreave . . . but so did the NUM violence.

In August, in the north-eastern town of Easington, there was a full-scale riot by strikers when a miner, protected by the police, succeeded in returning to work at the local colliery.

Far worse followed in November 1984. Ferrying a miner to work at Merthyr Tydfil, taxi driver David Wilkie was killed when two strikers dropped a concrete block from a bridge on to his car.

The two killers were jailed for murder, their sentences later reduced to manslaughter. One of the men’s solicitors commented of the NUM leadership: ‘In that war there were generals and they stood outside the law.’

Strife

Predictably, Scargill never showed any regrets over the appalling culture of violence he engendered. In his inflammatory rhetoric, he was clear that strife was exactly what he wanted.

A Scottish miners’ leader Bob Young recalled: ‘If Arthur Scargill had said there were guns at the door and we were going out to fight, then the guns would have been picked up and we would have been out there fighting.’

It can’t be denied that in court cases arising from the dispute — including the trial of men arrested at Orgreave — police evidence was shown to be unreliable. Claims that some officers fabricated evidence have never gone away.

But the fact is it is Scargill and the NUM who should really be in the spotlight, not the police. As the Guardian itself commented on that dark day at Orgreave: ‘There was no doubt that the police units faced enormous pressures and physical danger.’

If Theresa May wants a subject for an inquiry from the strike, she would do better to consider the organisation of the pickets or the funding of the union, much of which was reported to come from the Soviet Union and Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya.

The police — backed up to the hilt by the Government — did a heroic job in holding the line against revolutionary chaos. Altogether, 1,392 officers were injured during the strike.

As Mrs Thatcher put it during that turbulent year: ‘What we have got is an attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law and it must not succeed.’

If only Mrs May and this Government would display that same resolution and steadfast approach today.