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. ‘The air that day was black with missiles,’ he continued. A shocked indraw of breath from Barbara Jackson, an administrator for the National Coal Board who was on strike for as long as the miners and who helped to organise the Sheffield women’s campaign against the pit closures. Those are ‘emotive words’, she declared, still intensely loyal to the miners. ‘It wasn’t the miners who charged the police,’ she reminded us, vehemently. ‘The police opened ranks and then the horses [of the mounted police] came out.’ The footage shown on the BBC News that night, Jackson told us, was reversed, distorting what actually happened and leaving the impression that it was the miners who had charged first. The BBC, MacGregor hastened to intervene, later said the reversal was ‘an accident’.