Orgreave inquiry unveiled after four decades

More than four decades after the violent policing at Orgreave during the miners' strike and a failed prosecution of miners criticised as a police "frame up", the government has established a statutory inquiry into the scandal.

- David Conn

Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, announced the inquiry having informed campaigners on Thursday at the site in South Yorkshire where the Orgreave coking plant was located.

The inquiry into the policing on 18 June 1984 and the collapsed prosecutions is the culmination of remarkable persistence by campaigners, who argue that the strike remains an enduring source of injustice.

The present-day focus on Orgreave developed after 2012, when the Guardian highlighted the violence and alleged manipulation of evidence afterwards by South Yorkshire police, and the fact that five years later the same force was responsible for the Hillsborough disaster, in which 97 people were unlawfully killed.

Speaking to the Guardian at the Orgreave site, now an advanced manufacturing complex, retail estate, new homes and parkland, Cooper said: "I think the miners' strike still has deep scars across coalfield communities, and the decisions made at that time - the broadest decisions that were taken by the Thatcher government in the 1980s - the scars can still be felt across the coalfields." The Home Office said the criminal charges brought by South Yorkshire police against 95 miners were dropped "after evidence was discredited". The legacy of Orgreave had been to undermine "the wider mining community's confidence in policing for decades", it said.