Only A Clean Sweep

Kevin Horne writes:

Mining communities were always close-knit.

If you forgot your house key, you could go next door and borrow theirs. The keys were identical.

It was the same if you got into trouble – a neighbour gave you a clip round the ear and told your dad down the pit. Our estates policed themselves.

You never saw the force, but we always respected them.

When the strike began in 1984, I was 35 and had worked at Barnburgh colliery for seven years. 

With every year that passes, fewer and fewer miners will live to see the day we get to the truth about events on 18 June that year. 

It was a red-hot day.

We were walking down the old tip when we saw thousands of police marching in formation.

One mate, who had served in the military, believed they were soldiers.

We helped a policeman remove some stone that had fallen on to the road.

He said that it was to allow vehicles carrying injured pickets to pass. 

But instead of ambulances, more police came galloping through on horseback.

We were in T-shirts and they were fully armed. 

We ran into a playing field, where hundreds of pickets had been penned in.

The wagons came for the coal and, as I reached the front, I was arrested for obstruction. 

Later, at Rotherham police station, they held the pickets in a quadrangle – men bleeding from broken limbs, with cracked skulls, bandaging their own wounds with T-shirts – and I was charged with unlawful assembly. 

My wife and I attended the trial for the first 15 miners and, when it collapsed, went on holiday.

I was in a bar in north Wales when the news showed the lads I should have been on trial with leaving court. 

The charges had been dropped but the damage endures.

My family became infected with what I have called a disease – a distrust of the police that spans generations. 

But this week, the government has the opportunity to turn the page on these years.

Last month, the home secretary, Amber Rudd, asked me what an inquiry would mean after all these years. 

I’m now a grandfather and I want my grandchildren to be able to trust the police, as I was brought up to do, I said. 

She nodded. 

But if the government fails to get to the full truth about Hillsborough, Orgreave and the South Yorkshire police, then my community may never trust the police again.

It does not need to be expensive but Amber Rudd cannot shy away from a full inquiry. 

Former miners and our families fear that an inquiry sitting behind closed doors, led by a single establishment figure, will not get to the truth.

If she chooses a scaled-down approach, the home secretary will make the same mistake that left the Hillsborough families fighting for an extra decade.

Only a clean sweep can take away the distrust.

My wife and sons will never forget, but I hope the next generation will be given a chance to move on if we can finally establish the truth.