Joe Rollin was seven years old when modern Britain was founded in 1984: “I didn’t realise it at the time, but just look at the repercussions.” We spoke soon after the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC) had forced the government into establishing a statutory inquiry into one of 1984’s most notorious incidents, the Battle of Orgreave. Now 48, Rollin, an organiser for Unite and a founding member of the OTJC, understood perfectly well what happened during that haunting and seminal year.
Margaret Thatcher was re-elected by a landslide in 1983. The Conservatives wanted to free the market from regulation and the individual from collectivism. Britain’s political economy would become, as Rollin put it, “neoliberal”. To do this, Thatcher and her team would have to liquidate the power of organised labour and its most powerful union: the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). “They had to break them by whatever means necessary,” Rollin told me. The year of the miners’ strike was the moment the break occurred.
The strike began on 6 March 1984 at Cortonwood pit in South Yorkshire, and soon spread to coalfields around Britain, lasting for another 11 months, three weeks and four days. Its sheer duration, scale and violence led Seumas Milne, the journalist and former Jeremy Corbyn adviser, to describe the strike as having “no real parallel anywhere in the world”.
It provided the backdrop to Rollin’s childhood. He was born in Barnsley in 1977. Both of his grandfathers were south Yorkshire miners. “Everybody in Barnsley had connections to mining in one way or another,” said Rollin. “Everybody.” His parents were in the Trotskyist group Militant; his mother was a teacher, his father a social worker who studied at a “left-wing hotbed” trade union college. (Family photos show a tiny Rollin wearing a “coal not dole” badge.) They took Rollin and his brother to CND demos and NUM rallies. Rollin has carried on the family’s traditions in syndicalist union organising. Asked for a political hero, he doesn’t hesitate in saying Arthur Scargill. “I’ve been involved in social justice forever.”
Rollin’s school made students keep a scrapbook of what they did on the weekends. “Mine would always involve a demonstration. My older brother was the same.” One cutting their mum kept read: “On the weekend we went to London and shouted: ‘Maggot, maggot, maggot. Out, out, out.’” His brother meant “Maggie”, of course, but “Mum’s still proud of it,” Rollin laughed.
The Battle of Orgreave has a misleading name. It looked like a trap, set for the NUM and its overconfident leader, Scargill, by the National Coal Board, the South Yorkshire Police and, perhaps, by the Conservative government. Spend time looking at the photos of the 8,000 miners in their T-shirts and jeans who joined the picket on 18 July 1984 and one expression appears and reappears over and over again, as the riot police and mounted officers charge towards them: fearful surprise.
The mass picket of the Orgreave coking works, a hulking plant set in fields near Rotherham, was expected to be a straightforward replay of the Saltley Gate picket of February 1972. There, 12 years previously, a younger Scargill and 15,000 miners had forced the coal board and the Conservatives into a humiliating climbdown over pay, a victory that eventually brought down Edward Heath’s government.
Scargill and the miners were not forgotten or forgiven by the Conservatives. After she won the election in 1979, Thatcher engaged her transport minister, Nicholas Ridley, to begin work on a plan to deal with the nationalised industries, such as coal mining. (Like anybody familiar with the 1984-85 strike, it does not take Rollin long to bring up the “Ridley Plan” during our conversation.) Ridley’s 26-page report recommended privatising coal, steel, railways, ports and other industries that had become publicly owned after the war, and to “break up the power of [monopolistic] public sector unions”.
When the strike began in March 1984 the government was ready for it. Thatcher’s chancellor, Nigel Lawson, later compared the government’s preparations to Britain’s programme of rearmament to face Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.
“We need the support of everyone in this battle which goes to the very heart of our society,” Thatcher told an audience at Banbury cattle market a few weeks before Orgreave. “The rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob.” Those contemporaneous journalists who observed the strike were struck by the mass organisation of the “battle” between the miners and the government. More than 11,300 miners and their supporters were arrested during the dispute. The political commentator Brian Walden called it a “civil war without guns”. When Mike McKay, a BBC journalist, looked back on its 40th anniversary last year he remembered “driving up the A1, and on the other side of the road was this endless convoy of police riot vans. It just went on and on… It was like you were watching an occupying army travelling to the front.”
In Barnsley, Rollin was on the front line, and in 1984 Yorkshire became Ulster: “The state occupied our towns and villages, akin to Northern Ireland – I mean they literally occupied them. Miners were prevented from travelling lawfully.”
Orgreave processed coal into coke for the furnaces of British Steel’s factories 40 miles away in Scunthorpe. If the NUM could break the flow of coke from Orgreave to Scunthorpe, steel production would halt – a major strategic victory. Rail unions, supporting the miners, refused to move coal, leaving the government reliant on private haulage companies from Poland and South Africa to bring coal to Orgreave in convoys of 30 lorries, three times a day. The NUM’s picket needed to stop the deliveries.
“The mass picket played into the hands of the police,” writes Robert Gildea in Backbone of the Nation, his 2023 history of the strike, “who dictated the terms of the engagement.”
Reading miners’ accounts of the day, it becomes obvious something was off from the start. The miners – “the lads” as they are called in so many recollections, like the boys who went over the top at the Somme – dressed for a day out at the football. They bared their chests. The police, clothed in clerical black, were armoured and armed. They were drawn from forces around the country: crackling with walkie-talkie static, measuring their truncheons, preparing their dogs and horses. One miner interviewed by Gildea recalled that the police were so prepared for the bright June day that they had an ice cream van behind their lines: “They were so well organised, man, it was a trap. And we fell for it, went straight in.”
“The day started peacefully,” said Rollin. He then described the police charges, the dogs and the horses, the batons and the broken bones, the missiles and the miraculous fact that no one died. Around 100 miners were arrested, charged with unlawful assembly and riot, then refused medical treatment at Rotherham police station. In May 1985 the trial of the Ogreave picketers collapsed, amid accusations that the police had lied in court. All were acquitted after Michael Mansfield QC tore the police’s evidence to shreds.
Their acquittal did not alter what happened at Orgreave. The miners, the NUM and Scargill lost. The police, the coal board and Thatcher won. As Gildea writes “18th July 1984 was the 169th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo… this time the miners were the French and Scargill a beaten Napoleon.” Miners who were there had a difficult story to tell themselves, their families and the future. Some still talk about police provocateurs infiltrating their lines, tapped phone lines giving away their plans to the state, soldiers who were among the police and used as drivers in the convoy. The miners had been broken, and so had their trust in the British state. “Their masculinity was left in tatters in the field,” Rollin said. The suspicion that would lead to the OTJC’s founding was born.
To travel around South Yorkshire today can be an eerie experience. Former pit villages such as Goldthorpe, once host to one of the NUM’s most radical branches, look shattered, as if they really have lost a war. Other villages have partially recovered, with former mining land flooded and reshaped to create lakes and nature reserves. Cortonwood, where the strike began, is now a shopping complex, as is Meadowhall near Sheffield, once a steelworks. Shopping replaced working. What used to be Manvers Main Colliery, a short drive from Orgreave (also a shopping centre), is now home to a housing estate, a golf club and a Holiday Inn Express.
On 4 August last year, the hotel, which then hosted asylum seekers, was attacked by a crowd in some of the worst violence of the summer’s riots. Footage showed some of the rioters calling police protecting the hotel “scabs”. It was a strange echo of the confrontational spirit of the strike. Many of those arrested that day were the sons and grandsons of men who had been on the pickets in 1984-85. Others had been on the picket lines themselves. “Some miners I knew were involved and arrested that day,” said Rollin. Here was another grotesque legacy of the strike’s failure. Rollin, who has lived in Barnsley for most of his life, aside from a 12-year stint as a printworker in London, attributed the rise of the far right across South Yorkshire to the “political void” left by the collapse of organised labour across the region. “Any organised political education was gone,” he said. The NUM colleges closed down. Any sense of community was ripped away. “These places were ravaged with drugs [after the strike]. Investment never really came under New Labour. Them communities became riddled with zero-hour jobs.”
In 1984 a young miner could afford a house, a car and holidays for his family. By 2024 such prospects were limited. South Yorkshire became one of the most paranoid places in Britain. Given what happened over 40 years, it’s not hard to understand why.
I spoke to Rollin at a much more hopeful, “mad busy” time. During our phone call he was in the car driving towards Birmingham, where Unite remained confident of beating the council in the months-long refuse workers’ strike. He said 85 per cent of the city’s residents supported the strike, blamed the council for trying to “take a quarter of the pay from” Unite’s members and predicted victory over the “Tory commissioners” running the city.
And the prospect of justice for the victims of Orgreave is getting closer. Rollin founded the OTJC in 2012 with ex-miners and others. (Scargill supported them from afar.) There was never an investigation into the police violence on 18 June 1984, nor an investigation into why the police evidence in 1985 collapsed. Not one officer faced disciplinary or criminal proceedings.
In 2012 the Guardian’s David Conn published an article linking the violence at Orgreave in 1984 and the collapsed trial against the picketers in 1985 to the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, in which 97 people were unlawfully killed. In 1989 South Yorkshire police were led by Peter Wright, the same chief constable who led the force during Orgreave. He was later found to have orchestrated a false narrative to blame the victims at Hillsborough.
“The most important thing for me is that we get the truth,” said Rollin. “[It wasn’t] that long ago that people said Hillsborough were terrible, and the state’s version of events [was] the narrative in people’s minds.” Coroner’s inquests held between 2014 and 2016 eventually found that supporters at Hillsborough were unlawfully killed owing to grossly negligent failures by police and ambulance services to fulfil their duty of care. “The truth will come out [about Orgreave],” Rollin said. “The miners were not violent thugs that day.”
The OTJC expects the inquiry into Orgreave to finally and fully access all relevant documents relating to the event, including some that have remained classified on the grounds of national security. The overall police operational plan has never been seen by the public. Minutes of a cabinet meeting in 1985 show that Leon Brittan, then home secretary, wanted to avoid “any form of enquiry” into policing of the picket lines. Rollin alleges that senior Tories from that era quashed any hopes of an inquiry while the Conservatives were in power between 2010-24.
The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, informed Rollin and other campaigners that the inquiry would begin on 13 July at the site where Orgreave Colliery once stood. Cooper had been calling for the inquiry since 2015, and it has featured in every Labour manifesto since. Rollin, who has only been a member of the Labour Party during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership between 2015 and 2020, sounded surprised, even grateful, that an inquiry was happening. Cooper has made it clear to campaigners that the inquiry will address the policing that day, as well as the trial in 1985. While it is unlikely that anybody will be prosecuted as a result, Cooper has explicitly refused to rule it out.
Modern Britain has a strange relationship with the year it began. While South Yorkshire rotted for 40 years and became an incubator for extreme politics, audiences in London wept and cheered at the Billy Elliot musical. Many hearts bled for the miners – once they were safely buried as a force in the land. The country, however, is becoming less certain of itself and what was achieved by breaking organised labour in 1984. The Thatcher settlement, maintained by Blair and his successors, is beginning to fall apart. “The inquiry will break open a wholedebate,” said Rollin hopefully. “All these things that broke collectivism… the suffering, the damage.” He paused, then predicted a rebirth of the trade union movement. The alternative, seen last summer, might be much worse.
[See also: GMB chief Gary Smith: “Oil and gas is not the enemy”]
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This article appears in the 30 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer of Discontent
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