Govt launches an inquiry into the 1984 violent Orgreave clash after decades of justice campaign pressure

Four decades after one of the most controversial and violent chapters in British industrial history, the UK government has announced a full statutory inquiry into the infamous 1984 Orgreave clashes.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper made the announcement at the site of the former coking plant in South Yorkshire, surrounded by campaigners, union leaders, and survivors of the brutality that unfolded during the miners’ strike.

For the families, communities, and picketing miners caught in the chaos that day, this inquiry is not just overdue—it’s monumental.

On 18 June 1984, over 8,000 miners, responding to a mass picket call from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), were met by 6,000 police officers from across the country. The result: a full-blown violent confrontation, now burned into the collective memory of coalfield Britain. Mounted officers charged at protesters. Truncheons were used with devastating force. Dozens were injured—some seriously.

The next day, 95 miners were charged with riot and unlawful assembly. But in July 1985, the entire prosecution case collapsed amid damning claims of fabricated police statements and courtroom lies. One prominent barrister at the time, Michael Mansfield KC, called it “the biggest frame-up ever.”

Now, 40 years later, the state is finally listening.

“People have waited for answers for over 40 years,” Cooper told the Guardian. “The scale of the clashes, the injuries, the prosecutions, the discredited evidence—there’s still so many unanswered questions.”

Cooper—herself an MP representing a former mining area—said the inquiry will explore both the police response and the prosecution failures.

The investigation will be chaired by the Bishop of Sheffield, Pete Wilcox, who has previously worked closely with the Hillsborough Independent Panel—another case involving South Yorkshire Police, and another dark scar on the force’s reputation. Crucially, this new inquiry will be statutory, meaning it has the power to compel witnesses and force the release of documents.

The announcement follows relentless pressure from campaigners, including the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC), formed in 2012. Campaigner Joe Rollin called the announcement “cautiously elating.”

“We’ve fought for this for years,” he said. “We’ve still got a long road ahead, but we’ll never give up until we get the justice we deserve.”

Arthur Critchlow, one of the 95 miners arrested in 1984, suffered a fractured skull at the hands of a police truncheon. “It’s a massive injustice,” he said. “I just hope the miners will be vindicated… that the country will realise we weren’t lying. The media and the police were.”

NUM President Chris Kitchen welcomed the move but made clear the deeper political stakes. “We’ve always believed what happened at Orgreave wasn’t just industrial—it was political. The police were weaponised by the state to crush working-class resistance.”

The Thatcher government, particularly the former Prime Minister herself, labelled the striking miners “the enemy within.” That sentiment, critics argue, gave police license to act as political enforcers—not neutral public servants.

While some miners did throw stones during the chaos, the sheer scale and aggression of the police response has long fuelled suspicions that violence was premeditated.

A spokesperson for South Yorkshire Police has said the force will “fully cooperate” with the inquiry.

But for those still carrying the physical and emotional wounds of that day, this is about more than cooperation. It’s about finally exposing what they believe was a state-sanctioned assault on working-class Britain.

After 40 years, the reckoning has begun.