Police and miners clash again over Orgreave on Radio 4’s The Reunion

Four could have been dubbed the Frank Radio network this week as the sharp skills of Sue MacGregor, Alan Dein and Fi Glover teased out some stark opinions and revelations. MacGregor was back on Sunday morning with a new series of The Reunion, daring to bring together round the same table in an enclosed studio five people who were closely involved in the miners’ strike of 1984–5. And not just any five people, but five people who at the time were on fiercely opposing sides of the crisis: a Tory cabinet minister, a policeman, a union official who later became a Labour minister, and a white-collar member of the NUM. Thirty years later the gulf between the politicians and the workers, with the police playing piggy in the middle, was as deep and tetchy and irreconcilable as ever. It made for an uncomfortable listen.

Bill King, the policeman, talked about the ‘howling mob’ at the Orgreave steel works where, on 18 June 1984, 5,000 flying pickets faced off 5,000 flying policemen, many of them on horseback.