[Kizzy]

'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