Demand for inquiry over claims of ‘unsafe’ convictions during miners’ strike in Scotland

Labour MSP Neil Findlay will lodge a motion at Holyrood tomorrow stating that new evidence "suggests that policing of the strike in Scotland was highly politicised, resulting in many miners being the victims, arrested for crimes they did not commit and have since lived their lives victims of miscarriages of justice".

Findlay will say that new revelations make calls for an inquiry into the convictions of the Scottish miners irresistible.

Last night, in an emotional appeal to Sturgeon, Findlay said: “Many miners have gone to their grave as innocent men who were victims of a miscarriage of justice – for them, their families and their communities we must get to the truth.”

His motion calls on the Scottish Government to "initiate a full public inquiry into the policing of the strike in Scotland giving victims from across the Scottish coalfields the opportunity to access the truth and justice".

Findlay said an inquiry in England, reportedly agreed after Orgreave Truth and Justice campaigners met Home Secretary Rudd last Tuesday, and the revelations in documents revealed under the 'Thirty-Year Rule' show that senior members of the then Tory Government of Margaret Thatcher, including Home Secretary Leon Brittan, Attorney General Sir Michael Havers and the Prime Minister herself, drew up plans to intervene in police operational matters and fast-track prosecutions of strikers.

This, said Findlay, means that it would be unjust to deny Scottish mining communities an investigation along the lines of the one held into the Hillsborough disaster.

He continued: “The Hillsborough inquiry and the evidence that has come from it are a game changer in relation to Orgreave. This has real implications for Scotland.

“We know that the Scottish coalfield made up 10 per cent of the UK mining workforce yet also accounted for 30% of the overall arrests – this suggests to me that policing tactics here were much more aggressive and determined to make arrests than anywhere else in the UK.”

Rudd is reportedly preparing to appoint a lawyer next month to carry out a review of material relating to the so-called Battle of Orgreave. Clashes at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire in 1984, one of the key flashpoints of the industrial dispute, set the tone for policing of picket lines in the rest of the country.

Documents now made public include the minutes of a meeting held in 1984 at Downing Street attended by Thatcher, Brittan and Havers, appear to show that the minsters improperly intervened in police operational matters and fast-track prosecutions, despite concerns at the time over the weakness of evidence.

A month after Orgreave, the document marked secret and personal, records Brittan telling Thatcher that “arrangements had been set in place to collect regular and comprehensive information on the incidence of intimidation in the dispute” and that he “envisaged that publicity should be given to this information on appropriate occasions”.

The minutes add that “the group …invited the Home Secretary, consulting the Lord Chancellor and Attorney General, to pursue vigorously all possible means of accelerating the prosecution of alleged offences arising from the dispute, and to report further to the group.”

A fortnight later a second document shows that Brittan promised “he would seek to persuade them [the police] to increase the rate of prosecutions”, a proposal that was given Thatcher’s support.

Findlay is urging Sturgeon to use the Scottish Government’s powers to launch its own inquiry into the policing of the strike in Scotland during the year-long strike.

Alex Salmond's SNP government in 2013 refused initial calls to hold an inquiry, even although the dispute took place well over a decade before the start of devolution and was under the watch of Thatcher’s Tory party.

The then Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill said it was for individual miners to lodge their own appeals with the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, as the calls from campaigners and former miners were rejected in the Scottish Parliament.

However, Findlay will call on Sturgeon and the new Justice Secretary Michael Matheson to back a fresh approach, saying that the proof that Tory ministers pressured police and prosecutors to pursue miners made the case for an inquiry in Scotland unanswerable.

Findlay added: “When I last made the call for a Scottish inquiry into the Policing of the Miners’ strike, the then First Minister Alex Salmond and Justice Secretary Kenny McAskill refused to act.

“Now given the increasing likelihood of an inquiry into Orgreave and the new revelations from the Cabinet papers of 30 years ago highlighting the politically-driven nature of the policing of the strike across the UK, I am calling on Nicola Sturgeon and Michael Matheson to hold a full inquiry.

“The alternative is that we end up with a Tory Government in England instructing an inquiry and a Scottish Government siding with the Establishment to prevent one!”

IT’S now 32 years since John Shallow was arrested for the only time in his life, when in his 20s as a striking miner at the Polkemmet pit in the West Lothian coalfield he was on the picket line in the early stages of the year-long dispute.

Shallow would go on to be convicted at Kilmarnock sheriff court and fined £250 and at the end of the strike was forced out his job, when the coal board unceremoniously made him redundant.

“It still irks me awful that I’ve got a conviction for police assault”, says the 58 year-old when he hears about the plea to Nicola Sturgeon to use her powers to look into the policing of the strike.

Now employed as a dairy worker, he has a vivid recollection of his arrest and encounter with the police on the picket line back in 1984.

The account from Shallow about being arrested after a shove from the back on the picket line led to him falling over, sounds like the kind of text book case Lothian MSP Findlay is seeking to raise – of people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"I was stood on a bank at the side and a shove came from the back of the crowd", says Shallow, who now lives in Shotts, Lanarkshire.

“I slid down the hill and then when I got back up a cop pulled the hood over my parka coat.

“I said what’s that for and he just came back at me and said ‘you’re done pal’."

From then on Shallow, who had never been in trouble with the police before or since, was dispensed with swiftly by the officers in the frontline.

He says: “They put me in the back of a police van and there were a lot of other lads in the van already.

We then got taken to Kilmarnock police station, where we were kept for 12 hours.

“I was told that I was charged with a police assault, but I hadn’t touched him.

“He’d claimed I’d kicked and hit him, but how could I have done that if I was just getting up off the floor. There was no contact at all from me.

“We were released very late at night after about 13 or 14 of us had been held all that time in eight-by-six cells.

“It was horrendous and we were treated like animals”, Shallow says of his treatment.

But what of his treatment at the end of the strike and how did his experiences affect him in the aftermath?

“I ended up being fined £250 and although the coal board didn’t sack me, when Polkemmet closed after the strike I was made redundant and wasn’t offered a job at Bilston colliery like some miners.

“So I was effectively forced out of my job.”

Like the other Scottish miners convicted in Scotland during the strike, Shallow adds: “It still irks me awful that I’ve got a conviction for police assault.

“It’s like being put in jail for a robbery you didn’t do.”