Orgreave... no inquiry
 

'Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, just doesn’t get why an official inquiry into the violent confrontation between police and miners’ pickets in 1984 at a coking plant in Orgreave is still necessary, albeit some 32 years after the event. In her statement yesterday, she stated: “There would... be very few lessons for the policing system today to be learned from any review of the events and practices of three decades ago. This is a very important consideration when looking at the necessity for an inquiry or independent review and the public interest to be derived from holding one.”

Thus Rudd thinks in terms of lessons to be learned for policing, whereas many of us want to understand whether – as Alan Billings, the South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner, recently commented – the police had been “dangerously close to being used as an instrument of state.” Dangerously close or the real thing? This is a question not about policing itself but about the conduct of the government of the day when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister.'

Did the government of the day contrive to use the police as if they were a standing army to parry what was perceived as a threat to the state? That is the question to which we need to know the answer: yes or no?


http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/...-a7390621.html

This decision is scandalous.

The police WERE used by the Government as a Private Para-Military Army.

The police - especially The Metropolitan Police - DID initiate much of the violence.

Many - not all - of the police acted as yobbos in uniform with almost Tribal displays of confrontational aggression and threatening behaviour.

These included violently bashing their riot sticks against their perspex riot shields in UNISON so that the SIGHT of long lines of police standing with shield and riot stick, AND the sound - like 'a train thundering nearer on the rail tracks' - STRONGLY RESEMBLED, and was INTENDED to resemble, the scene from the Michael Caine/Stanley Baker classic film 'Zulu', where thousands of Zulu warriors intimidated Bromhead and Chard's tiny besieged force of British soldiers at Rorke's Drift.

To deny the VALIDITY of a LONG OVERDUE inquiry based upon the grounds given, is pure unacceptable whitewashing of a dark incident in their history which the Government and Police Authorities want to obliterate.

Nothing to add other than I agree this is a disgrace not to have an enquiry into this.
I fully agree with both Kizzy and Kirk in both their observations.