THE Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign is a crusade that threatens to reveal what really happened on one significant day during the miners’ strike.

On June 18th 1984, the BBC Evening News showed scenes from that day’s Battle of Orgreave. The TV clips were clear enough: striking coal miners appeared to have rioted in fields near the Orgreave Coking Plant in Rotherham.

As an active trade unionist with a father and other relatives on strike, I was a staunch supporter of the miners’ cause, but struggled to make sense of these events. Why would pickets wearing only t-shirts, shorts and plimsolls, attack the mighty police battalions with their dogs, horses, shields and truncheons? It didn’t make any sense.

That Monday turned out to be a seminal moment in the year-long industrial dispute. 47 pickets were charged with rioting and if found guilty, faced a life sentence.

I spoke to trusted friends whose eye-witnesses accounts totally contradicted the official state version. I heard tales of unprovoked police assaults; of mounted officers deliberately galloping into crowds of unarmed miners; of officers taking part in an ‘orgy of violence’; of innocent bystanders being clubbed to the ground.

It was the police who turned to rioting that day, they said. We turned up solely to picket to save our jobs.

Like millions I became confused. Who were the real liars? The police, Prime Minister Thatcher and the BBC were saying one thing, and the pickets another. I’d much rather believe my friends but the TV evidence seemed overwhelming.

12 months later, shocking news emerged from the Crown Court in Sheffield. All 47 accused of rioting were found not guilty after it was revealed that the film footage that day was deliberately altered by the BBC to falsely paint the miners as instigators of the riot. Furthermore, all significant police evidence was found to be nothing but orchestrated lies.

As Michael Mansfield QC said after the trial, this is ‘the worst example of a mass frame-up... this century’.

But Mrs Thatcher was probably fully aware that the police had broken the law that day (perhaps at her behest?) and couldn’t care less. Victory was hers and the strongest trade union in the country was smashed.

Moreover, emasculating the trade union movement meant she could now cut wages and public services to the bone, so that profits for her wealthy friends would spiral upwards. Transferring money from the poor to the rich in this way would now be as easy as taking sweets from a baby.

It’s now 2024 and to many, the enormous significance of Orgreave is clear.

For 40 years the British working class has suffered, so that today many rely on food banks; there’s massive levels of child and pensioner poverty; lack of affordable homes; homelessness; an NHS that’s failing; water companies that make billions whilst poisoning our waterways; huge student debt; private transport companies that abandon unlucrative routes; raising of the pension age whilst life expectancy plummets for many; etc.

Meanwhile, the number of British millionaires and billionaires has rocketed.

And so the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign was set up to discover what really happened on that hot summer’s day in 1984, so that if the state did deliberately cause a riot, it’s never allowed to do it again. Ever!

The Independent Police Complaints Commission has already issued a public statement about Orgreave, admitting: ‘there was evidence of excessive police violence, a false narrative from police exaggerating violence from miners, perjury by officers giving evidence against miners, and an apparent cover-up of that perjury by senior officers.’

But not one guilty police officer has had to face the music, and the central role of Mrs Thatcher’s government has never been investigated by anyone.

This week, the current Labour government has the opportunity to examine this historic injustice by setting up a full independent enquiry into the Battle of Orgreave (as promised) with the power to see all classified documents and subpoena any witness still alive.

And those who try to pervert the course of justice should face prison for life – as did the 47 innocent miners.