Demand for inquiry over claims of ‘unsafe’ convictions during miners’ strike in Scotland
NICOLA Sturgeon will this week come under pressure to order a Hillsborough-style inquiry into the policing of the 1984-85 miners’ strike in Scotland. The First Minister will be urged to act over the convictions of almost 500 Scottish miners which campaigners say are unsafe and politically motivated.
Labour MSP Neil Findlay will lodge a motion at Holyrood tomorrow stating that new evidence “suggests that policing of the strike in Scotland was highly politicised, resulting in many miners being the victims, arrested for crimes they did not commit and have since lived their lives victims of miscarriages of justice”.
Findlay claims that new revelations make calls for an inquiry into the convictions of the Scottish miners irresistible.
In an emotional appeal to Sturgeon, he said: “Many miners have gone to their grave as innocent men who were victims of a miscarriage of justice – for them, their families and their communities we must get to the truth.”
His motion calls on the Scottish Government to “initiate a full public inquiry into the policing of the strike in Scotland giving victims from across the Scottish coalfields the opportunity to access the truth and justice”.
Findlay said an inquiry in England, reportedly agreed after Orgreave Truth and Justice campaigners met Home Secretary Amber Rudd last Tuesday, and the revelations in documents revealed under the “Thirty-Year Rule” show that senior members of the then Tory Government of Margaret Thatcher, including Home Secretary Leon Brittan, Attorney General Sir Michael Havers and the Prime Minister herself, drew up plans to intervene in police operational matters and fast-track prosecutions of strikers.
This, said Findlay, means that it would be unjust to deny Scottish mining communities an investigation along the lines of the one held into the Hillsborough disaster.
He continued: “The Hillsborough inquiry and the evidence that has come from it are a game-changer in relation to Orgreave. This has real implications for Scotland.
“We know that the Scottish coalfield made up 10 per cent of the UK mining workforce yet also accounted for 30 per cent of the overall arrests – this suggests to me that policing tactics here were much more aggressive and determined to make arrests than anywhere else in the UK.”
Rudd is reportedly preparing to appoint a lawyer next month to carry out a review of material relating to the so-called Battle of Orgreave. Clashes at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire in 1984, one of the key flashpoints of the industrial dispute, set the tone for policing.
Documents now made public include the minutes of a meeting held in 1984 at Downing Street attended by Thatcher, Brittan and Havers, appear to show that the minsters improperly intervened in police operational matters and fast-tracked prosecutions, despite concerns over weakness of evidence. A month after Orgreave, the document marked secret and personal records Brittan telling Thatcher that “arrangements had been set in place to collect regular and comprehensive information on the incidence of intimidation in the dispute” and that he “envisaged that publicity should be given to this information on appropriate occasions”.
The minutes add that “the group … invited the Home Secretary, consulting the Lord Chancellor and Attorney General, to pursue vigorously all possible means of accelerating the prosecution of alleged offences arising from the dispute, and to report further to the group”,
A fortnight later a second document shows that Brittan promised “he would seek to persuade them [the police] to increase the rate of prosecutions”, a proposal that was given Thatcher’s support.
Findlay is urging Sturgeon to use the Scottish Government’s powers to launch its own inquiry into the policing of the year-long strike in Scotland.
Former first minister Alex Salmond’s SNP Government in 2013 refused initial calls to hold an inquiry, even though the dispute took place well over a decade before the start of devolution and was under the watch of Thatcher’s Tory party.
The then justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, said it was for individual miners to lodge their own appeals with the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), as the calls from campaigners and former miners were rejected in the Scottish Parliament.
However, Findlay will call on Sturgeon and the new Justice Secretary Michael Matheson to back a fresh approach, saying that the proof that Tory ministers pressured police and prosecutors to pursue miners made the case for an inquiry in Scotland unanswerable.
Findlay added: “Now given the increasing likelihood of an inquiry into Orgreave and the new revelations from the Cabinet papers of 30 years ago, I am calling on Nicola Sturgeon and Michael Matheson to hold a full inquiry. The alternative is that we end up with a Tory Government in England instructing an inquiry and a Scottish Government siding with the Establishment to prevent one.”
Last night, a Scottish Government spokesperson reaffirmed that it had no plans to hold a separate inquiry into the policing of the strike in Scotland.