Inquiry into police clash with miners

THE Government is about to announce an inquiry into police conduct at the so-called Battle of Orgreave in 1984, it has been reported.

The witnesses at Orgreave  have always insisted that the South Yorkshire Police orchestrated a pitched battle between striking miners and officers at the town’s coking plant.  At the time in 1984, the media tended to portray the miners as aggressors rather than the police.

But since the more recent findings over the Hillsborough disaster, which took place five years later in the same police force area, there have been allegations suggesting the evidence against the miners was 'falsified'. 

Now the Home Secretary is said to be considering what precise format the inquiry will take.

Reports suggest mounted police charged the crowd in response to some missiles being thrown. Labour MP Tristram Hunt, a historian, has previously described the episode as 'legalised state violence'.   Altogether 95 miners were charged with offences following the clashes, but their trial collapsed.

Kelvin MacKenzie & 'The Truth'

A SHAMEFACED Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of The Sun, was ambushed by the media last week following the finding of an inquest jury that the 96 fans who died at Hillsborough were unlawfully killed and went on to pinpoint police failures before and after the 1989 FA Cup semi-final. 
Mr. MacKenzie, when The Sun editor in 1989, had printed a front page which wrongly accused the Liverpool fans’ hooliganism and as a contributing factor to the death of 96 people.
Now, it seems, Kelvin MacKenzie regards himself as 'a victim' of Hillsborough in so far as he claims that he was duped into believing the police accounts at the time. 
Last Friday, on the News Quiz on Radio Four Jeremy Hardy said MacKenzie was taken-in because at the time 'he had wanted to believe' the false police accounts that some Liverpool fans had urinated on police and had picked the pockets of the dead.
According to the Huffington Post the former Sun editor, MacKenzie told an ITV reporter who cornered him at Weybridge station in Surrey:

'It’s been an absolute disgrace what the police have done in South Yorkshire these last 27 years.

'I feel desperate for the families and I also feel that in some strange way that I got caught up in it. I feel terrible for them.'


This is a rather poor response from one of the gentlemen of the press, who should have known better.

Meanwhile, last week, the Daily Mirror, a rival to The Sun, was gloating:

'Former newspaper editor Kelvin MacKenzie claimed he “got caught up” in the Hillsborough cover-up.  Mr MacKenzie signed off on the The Sun’s shameful ‘The Truth’ front page in the wake of the 1989 disaster. '