Police did to striking miners what they did at Hillsborough: they lied
THE self-serving police elite can try to use the idiotic Andrew Mitchell to look pure, righteous and trustworthy but after the lies of Hillsborough were exposed, we get news that South Yorkshire police may have lied during the miners’ strike in 1984.
Were young officers keen to get on and not sully their careers coerced into fabricating reports that led to the arrests of 95 miners in what became known as the Battle of Orgreave? All the miners were acquitted. But in nicking them, the police made it harder for the accused to protest. Hit them hard and tomorrow they won’t turn up to protest.
BBC’s Inside Out hears from Vera Baird, the former Solicitor General. She says coppers were ordered to describe “scenes they’d simply never seen”.
Timing is all. After the horrors of Hillsborough were added to by a conniving police force, it’s all too easy to believe the same force lied before. Last month, the independent Hillsborough panel proved that 164 South Yorkshire Police statements had been altered after the tragedy. They were altered – all of them – to make the police look good.
Mark George QC, a Sheffield barrister, says he has been throughs cores of police reports and spotted “several dozen” examples of officers using exactly the same wording.
Norman Taylor, was detective with the Northumbria police force on duty at Orgreave. A man in plain cloths told him:
“He was reading from some paper, a paragraph or so, and he asked people to use that as their starting paragraph.”
Andrew Mitchell resigned for swearing at the police. He upset them by, as the police claim, calling them “plebs”. Yet, no police officer has lost his job or his pension over Hillsborough. No police officer lost his job or his pension over the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes. The death of Ian Tomlinson showed us that police employ a certain sort of copper to do heavy lifting. And in South Wales… Well, you can’t see the story for the stench.
PS – for lies to hold and spread, you need the media to turn them into written fact. The Sun spread the police gospel on Hillsborough. And it did this to the miners…
For more on the miners strike – and that lead photo (see above) – please go here.
Posted: 22nd, October 2012 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
