ORGREAVE INQUIRY ANNOUNCED

ORGREAVE TRUTH AND JUSTICE CAMPAIGN 

PRESS CONFERENCE STATEMENT 21st JULY 2025

We have waited a long time for this day and the announcement of an Orgreave inquiry is really positive news. This is an historic and momentous announcement, and the OTJC looks forward to the next stages and the inquiry commencing as soon as possible.

This 41st anniversary year of the miners’ strike reminds us that we must never forget the importance of that great strike to defend an industry, jobs, trade unions and communities and the fight for all our futures. We are indebted to the striking miners for their dedication to that year-long struggle that changed our lives forever.

Thank you to everyone who has campaigned with us over the last 13 years for an Orgreave Inquiry. It has been a long, hard and sometimes lonely journey, but we are determined, persistent people and we have been unrelenting  and consistent in our campaigning. However, without the support and solidarity of the Labour and Trade Union movement we would never have been able to come this far. 

Our Campaign started 13 years ago  into events related to Orgreave on 18th June 1984 during the 84/5 miners’ strike. What happened at Orgreave is key to understanding what happened throughout that strike.  Events relating to this day can provide answers to how and why paramilitary violent policing across mining villages and communities all over Britain was taking place throughout the strike. The injustice faced by the miners and communities has never been acknowledged by the State and instead they have lied and covered it up.

We know that the Tory Government of the 1980s were directly involved in the strike while professing ‘non-involvement’. The Tory Ridley plan of the 1970s had planned for it and the 1980s Tory Government put public resources into the implementation of this plan.  This was State sponsored organisation against the miners and their livelihoods. The Tory’s own archives confirm Parliament and the public were knowingly lied to but their involvement in the strike and the policing of it has never been publicly acknowledged. Their involvement needs an inquiry.

The mass media colluded with the Tories by lying in their reports about what was really happening or not reporting at all. Their involvement in these lies and coverups continues to this day.  The raw footage that the media companies have of police attacking miners at Orgreave and other footage of police violence and harassment must be handed over to an inquiry.

The 1980s Tory government planned to  destroy the British coal industry and organised labour, the NUM and its leaders Arthur Scargill, Peter Heathfield and Mick McGahey and the British labour and Trade Union movement.

Orgreave marked a turning point in the policing of public protest. The Right to Protest should be a fundamental human right.

With no accountability of policing at Orgreave a message was sent to the police that they could employ violence with impunity. This set a culture that enabled the police cover up in 1989 at Hillsborough and the Hillsborough campaigners are still fighting for justice to this day.

We want answers to questions about the systemic violent and lying behaviour of the police. We need to know how police officers on the ground were briefed and how that briefing came about. We need government and police papers releasing that have been embargoed until 2066 and 2071. This is of great public interest and concern and is about a government who actively worked against its own population and handed the police paramilitary powers and destroyed an industry in the process. 

What is important is that due to the age and health of many miners we quickly secure a public acknowledgement of why and what the State did to the miners and our communities. We have to have hope that an Inquiry of full disclosure should influence the future behaviour of the State and public officials. 

PRESS CONFERENCE YOUTUBE 

Donkey Dave