The Spectator’s Notes | 3 November 2016

It is a great relief that there will be no inquiry into the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ in 1984. The weirdness is that Mrs May’s people ever entertained the thought in the first place. The push for an inquiry is a classic example of the attempt by the aggrieved, usually on the left, to turn history into a trial. If we were to inquire into the miners’ strike, more than 30 years on, it would be far more pertinent — though still a very bad, divisive idea — to establish the full facts about how Arthur Scargill got money from Gaddafi’s Libya and was promised it by the Soviet Union. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse is current proof of how retributive urges make a just process impossible. If Orgreave, which was actually a victory for the rule of law and the right to work, had been put in the dock we really would have entered the world according to Ken Loach.