Justice for Orgreave?

Forty years ago, during the UK miner's strike, Margaret Thatcher sent 8000 police to attack striking miners during the so-called Battle of Orgreave. 95 miners were subsequently charged with riot and violent disorder - only for the charges to be thrown out when the police were found to have systematically lied. The police paid nearly half a million pounds (in 1980's money) to settle the resulting lawsuits, but no officer was ever disciplined, and no-one was held accountable for the abuse of power. But now, the UK government is finally launching a formal inquiry into the police's actions:

More than four decades after the violent policing at Orgreave during the miners’ strike and a failed prosecution criticised as a police “frame up”, the government has established a statutory inquiry into the scandal.

The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced the inquiry having informed campaigners last Thursday at the site in South Yorkshire where the Orgreave coking plant was located.

The inquiry into the policing on 18 June 1984 and the collapsed prosecutions marks the culmination of remarkable persistence by campaigners, who argue that the miners’ strike remains an enduring source of injustice.

If run fairly and allowed to inquire fully (and if the files haven't all been conveniently “lost” or destroyed), the inquiry might actually get to the bottom of the systematic police misconduct during this part of the miner's strike, name names, and allow those responsible to be held to account - just like the similar inquiry into the Hillsborough disaster. OTOH, after 40 years, it is likely that many of those ultimately responsible - including Thatcher - are dead and buried, and the Establishment (which has refused justice and dragged its feet and whitewashed for the last forty years) will no doubt now argue that too much time has passed and nothing can be done - just as it has done over all its other crimes. Which just reinforces the need for that rotten institution to be ejected from power - permanently. The UK deserves democratic, accountable government, not a rotten system of lies and cover-ups which seems to exist primarily to protect itself from accountability.