ABERFAN DISASTER: power and corruption in the Valley of Death

On Friday 21st October 1966, 240 children aged 7-10 arrived at Pantglas Junior School, in Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales. 
Picture the musical lilt of their excited chatter as they talked about the start of their half-term week's holiday a few hours later.
Imagine for yourself the innocent joy of them singing the hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful at the school assembly at 9 o'clock, after which they traipsed into their classrooms. 

Then at 9.15am, Hell was unleashed. The mountainous mining tip that overshadowed the village disintegrated, slid down the mountainside and swept at incredible speed across farms, the canal, railway embankment and into the heart of the village, including the Junior school. The 1.4 million cubic feet of murderous muck gave no time for warnings or escape that morning. It buried the school building until only the roof was visible; poured into the classrooms and killed 109 of the children, and 5 teachers, through crushed skulls, multiple crush injuries, and, in particular, asphyxiation. In a matter of seconds a generation died. 

A GENERATION WIPED OUT

A total of 144 people from the village of Aberfan died these terrible deaths, 116 of them children. They were buried as completely as the victims in Pompeii, in 79 AD. But there was one huge difference: the Aberfan Disaster could and should have been prevented, but multiple warnings were ignored by those in power at various levels - a fact the same powers subsequently tried to hide from millions of people shocked and grief-stricken at what was the UK's first televised disaster. 

Aberfan wasn't the product of the Earth's natural geology erupting in the form of the Mount Vesuvius volcano; it was an entirely man-made disaster, on a devastating scale.
At the subsequent public inquest, the father of one of the dead children angrily demanded that the death certificates should record "Buried alive by the National Coal Board. That is what I want to see on record. That is the feeling of those present. Those are the words we want to go on the certificate."

'BURIED ALIVE BY THE NATIONAL COAL BOARD'

On that fateful morning, mothers chatting along the road - after dropping their kids at school minutes before - dashed back to literally claw with their bare hands at the slimy, thick debris that engulfed the school, in a desperate bid to rescue their sons and daughters. Hundreds of miners from the Merthyr Vale pit were among the first on the scene, several of them openly weeping as they dug desperately in search of their own children. Miners from the neighbouring Taff Bargoed Valley were joined by about 2,000 emergency service workers and volunteers in a frantic rescue mission. But mostly in vain. Some children were rescued, but none after 11am. The efforts of volunteers and emergency service workers morphed into a search for the dead. It took a week to recover the bodies. Over 3,000 attended the mass funeral.

Mining communities like Aberfan lived with death, but this time Death came to claim their children. Virtually every single street in Aberfan village lost some or several that day, as did nearby farmhouses. 

No wonder a study by the University of Wales a full 33 years later found that 29% of the Aberfan survivors were still suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and 46% of them had suffered PTSD at some time over the intervening decades. Survivors tell of children being guilt-ridden at surviving; adults afraid to sleep, refusing to take their prescribed sedatives if it was raining; children bed-wetting and terrified of their bedroom doors being shut; alcoholism, family breakdowns and mental breakdowns being common in the aftermath, for several subsequent years.

FROM GRIEF TO ANGER 

Shortly after 21 October 1966, the collective and personal, individual sorrow turned to anger, as the causes of this terrible tragedy were discussed, and the response of the authorities emerged. And the people in power to which we refer were in particular the National Coal Board, chaired by Lord (Alfred) Robens, and the Labour government led by Prime Minister Harold Wilson. 

The geological cause of the disaster was brutally plain and simple. For the 50 years prior to 1966, the waste from coal mines was piled up in tips - slag heaps - on the slopes of the Welsh valleys, layer upon layer. Seven such tips loomed over Aberfan. The murderous Tip 7 was an accumulation of loose rock, shale and mining muck piled up on porous sandstone, with underground springs beneath that. Heavy rain for several days triggered the slide, as the debris was saturated, and it slid down the slope into the village at massive speed, ten metres deep, demolishing farm cottages and houses as well as the school. 

MULTIPLE WARNINGS IGNORED - FOR YEARS BEFORE 

Tip slides were fairly common in the Welsh mining valleys for years before 1966. But still the mining waste was piled up, by the National Coal Board, using tipping gangs. 

In Aberfan, there'd been tip slides as far back as 1943, and again in 1963. But still the NCB piled the debris high up above the village.

And warnings of the potential danger to life and limb had been made, several times, in the years before October 1966 - in particular by villagers themselves. As mentioned already, a tip slide had occurred as recently as 1963 - though the NCB bosses were to subsequently deny this stark fact, visible to the naked eye, at the government's Inquiry in the wake of the 1966 Disaster! 

Even before that physical warning, villagers had raised concerns about the safety of the tip with the NCB in September 1960. The NCB replied that it posed no dangers.

In fact, after the disaster, researchers discovered letters from villagers warning explicitly of a disaster, not just in the immediate years before it happened, but back in the 1950s!

In 1964 the local councillor warned that the tip atop the mountain ridge above the village could threaten, specifically, the school. The NCB ignored the warnings. 

A PREVENTABLE DISASTER ALLOWED TO HAPPEN 

In 1965, a petition against the tip was raised by mothers in the village, and presented to Merthyr County Borough Council by the school head-teacher, Ann Jennings. A year later she and half the school's children perished beneath the mayhem unleashed from the mountainside. 

Working class people warned of the potential dangers, but the authorities ignored them, with the local Council's concerns never getting to anybody above the level of local NCB engineers. No action was taken. No inspections were even conducted. A preventable disaster was allowed to happen, wiping out a generation in this Valley of Death.

But what was the response of those in power after the event, after their failure to act had allowed 144 villagers to die?

LORD ROBENS LORDED IT OVER THE NCB 

Lord Robens ruled the National Coal Board like a personal fiefdom. He'd been a full time official for the shopworkers' trade union, Usdaw, in 1935, before graduating to being a Labour MP and then Minister of Power in Clement Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government.

In 1960, Robens was approached by Tory Prime Minister Harold MacMillan to take the reigns as chairman of the nationalized NCB. Robens expressed fear that he might never be able to balance the books - though we have no evidence he bothered to point out the nationalized coal industry was crippled by gargantuan compensation handed out to the rapacious private mine-owners, who had left the mines in a state of ruination prior to state ownership in 1947. In reply, Macmillan told Robens "Don't worry, dear boy [the boy was 50!]. Blur the edges, blur the edges."

That gives us a glimpse of the culture prevailing in nationalized industries: saddled by debt caused by obscene over-compensation to previous capitalist owners; run by remote, bureaucratic, totally unaccountable dictators like Robens; and used as cheap suppliers to the still-dominant private sector of capitalist Britain - "blurring the edges" where necessary, including on health and safety.

Robens accepted MacMillan's offer and ruled the NCB for ten years from 1960. 

THE STENCH OF A COVER-UP 

On Friday 21st October 1966, Robens heard of the Aberfan Disaster but went nowhere near the village until late on Saturday. He chose instead to attend the ceremony and party in Guildford marking his investiture as Chancellor of the University of Surrey. NCB officials initially lied to the Secretary of State for Wales - the government - claiming Robens was at the scene of the carnage, on the Friday, personally directing the rescue operations.

When Robens did deign to arrive, he told TV reporters nothing could have been done to prevent the tip slide, and claimed "It was impossible to know there was a spring at the heart of the tip." 

Immediately, the villagers smelt the stench of a cover-up, a whitewash. Everyone knew about the springs; many villagers had played at them as children before the springs were buried beneath the NCB's waste mountains, including Tip 7. And they were clearly marked on Ordnance Survey maps of the district.

Of course Robens' calculation was that if the NCB could convincingly claim they knew nothing of the waterlogged base to the tip, and the dangers it posed, they couldn't be blamed for 144 deaths. Cold, cruel, calculated lies by those in power. 

THE DAVIES INQUIRY 

Conscious of the need to respond to the public shock at the scale of death, and probably personally shaken by the scenes of devastation on his visit to Aberfan on the day, Harold Wilson and his Labour government ordered an immediate Tribunal of Inquiry, appointing Welsh barrister and Privy Councillor, Lord Justice Edmund Davies, as its chair. 

The Davies Inquiry lasted 76 days, interviewing 136 people, and reported in mid-1967.

NCB officials tried to block their path to the truth throughout. They even spent several days denying the tip slide in 1963 had ever happened! And Robens himself only bothered to turn up on day 70, tried to be obstructive and deny any NCB responsibility - to such a degree that the villagers' QC, Desmond Ackner, accused him of acting as if the NCB "bore no more blameworthy connection than, say, the Gas Board."

Under relentless, skilful cross-examination by Ackner, the lying Robens eventually admitted NCB responsibility. 

But for Robens' and other NCB bosses' attempts to lie and obstruct, most of the 76 days taken up by the Inquiry - and the immeasurable suffering it added to the bereaved - could have been avoided completely.

NCB'S 'BUNGLING INEPTITUDE'

The Davies Inquiry rejected the charge of "callous indifference" levelled at the NCB bosses, but did lacerate Robens and the NCB for "a terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude", with "a total lack of direction from above". 

Highlighting that NCB mining engineers only had concern for safety down the mines themselves, and not for the waste tips the mines produced, the Inquiry Report departed from the dry-as-dust language of most government Inquires. It was poetic in its description of the safety role of NCB engineers towards the tips as being "like moles being asked about the habits of birds".  

NO TIPPING PLAN

The Inquiry Report blasted the NCB for creating the geological conditions that led to the disaster - by repeatedly ignoring previous warnings; by their "disregard and failure to act" on previous smaller tip slides, with not even any surveys being conducted; but chaotic and unplanned additional waste being added to the slag heaps. In one phrase that summarized things, they condemned the NCB for "having no tipping plan".

But in other regards the Davies Inquiry was mild and limited. It held nine NCB senior officials partly responsible, but did not recommend any demotions or sackings, let alone prosecutions. And not a single one of them, not even Robens, suffered any sanctions for their gross negligence, leading to the slaughter of innocents in Aberfan. Indeed, as we'll see shortly, Robens enjoyed promotion to even higher places later.

SICKENING DANCE OF DECEIT 

Government documents subsequently released under the 30 year rule exposed a sickening cynicism in the actions of NCB chief Robens and Wilson's Labour government - through the auspices of Labour Minister of Power, Richard Marsh - in the wake of the damning Davies Inquiry. They danced a carefully choreographed deceit of the public, and in particular the grieving Aberfan villagers. 

Wielding his power as a Privy Councillor (by the way, a position he shared with Lord Justice Davies, chair of the Inquiry!), Lord Robens demanded to see a pre-publication copy of the Davies Report. This gave Robens ten days to prepare his strategy, to avoid any consequences to his power and privileges, despite the Report being what Harold Wilson called "devastating" in its condemnation of the NCB Board and of Robens for his misleading statements.

Robens used the time to enlist support for his NCB role within the NUM, the miners' union, speaking round pits by arrangement between the NCB and NUM, making very popular denunciations of nuclear power - which, naturally, garnered him support amongst coal miners whose jobs were threatened by the growing nuclear energy option. 

ROBENS' BOGUS RESIGNATION 

A month later, in discussions with government Minister Richard Marsh, Robens helped draft the wording of a letter of reply... from Marsh to Robens! 

This was a letter noting, but declining, an offer of resignation by Robens as NCB chairman. Robens even insisted on removal of a sentence in Marsh's first draft, which blamed the entire NCB Board. Robens demanded this so that he could deflect all blame from himself and the top dogs surrounding him, instead putting the entire blame for the Aberfan slaughter on the chargehand of the local tipping gang! 

It was only after government Minister Richard Marsh meekly accepted Robens' dictated version of the wording of what was allegedly Marsh's letter - declining Robens' offer to resign as NCB chair - that Robens then submitted his letter of resignation! 

They danced this cynical duet of deceit in order to keep Robens in his mighty position as Coal Board boss, despite the growing loss of trust in both the NCB and government among the people of Aberfan and their allies. Why? 

COLLABORATION IN PIT CLOSURES 

Robens was an archetypal Old Labour power broker and operator. He was firmly on the right-wing of the Labour Party, siding with Hugh Gaitskell against left-winger Nye Bevan, for example. But he maintained points of contact on the left and in the unions in order to wield all the more power, especially as NCB chief. This was particularly so in his collaboration with the national leader of the NUM, Welshman Will Paynter, Communist Party member and veteran of the Spanish Civil War!

Paynter helped Robens wind down the coal industry without mass strikes in opposition. So much so that during Robens' 10-year tenure at the head of the NCB, the coal industry collapsed from 698 pits employing 583,000 miners to 292 pits with only 283,000 miners. 

Government documents since released under the 30 year rule confirm Wilson's Labour government kept Robens as head of the NCB, even despite Aberfan, because they believed he was the only man who could manage the decline of the coal industry without provoking mass industrial action. They started the process of dismantling one of the UK's main industries; a decimation of communities completed in the 1980s by Thatcher's Tories, after they'd wielded every arm of the state to defeat the miners' heroic opposition. 

CORPORATE MANSLAUGHTER 

The collaboration and cover-up between the NCB boss and Wilson's Labour government was made possible by two key factors: the failure by a gullible and obedient press to expose their dirty work, and the complete absence of Corporate Manslaughter legislation. 

This was the UK's first televised disaster, yet where were the exposés and investigations? The mainstream media - including the newfangled BBC TV - mostly just swallowed the spin of the authorities and did a terrible disservice to the victims and their families.

The absence of a law that holds company chief executives personally responsible for deaths due to the negligence they've presided over is a huge gap in health and safety law - which continues to let culpable bosses off the hook, even now, 50 years on from Aberfan. No such law and sanction exists against negligent capitalist bosses, despite the issue being first raised in 1965 - because corporate lobbying of governments has blocked it being introduced. This encourages a culture of neglect, of 'blurring the edges' on workplace safety, in pursuit of profit. 

ABERFAN: A WARNING ON SAFETY TODAY 

Next time you hear some Tory or other apologist of capitalist employment methods whine about the 'red tape' or 'bureaucracy' of workplace health and safety laws - something we're likely to hear a lot more about during and after Brexit negotiations - remember Aberfan. 

Remember that back then there was literally no law governing the safety of mining tips, for instance; no HSE inspectors; "no legislation dealing with the safety of tips in force in this or any country, except part of West Germany and South Africa", to quote the Davies Report on Aberfan. 

It was only 3 years after Aberfan that the government introduced the Mines and Quarries (Tips) Act 1969. 

Later still - to reverse the situation where safety legislation was largely reactive, rather than imposing any general legal duty for safety on employers - the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 was enacted. In what must be one of the sickest jokes around, this 1974 Act was the child of recommendations by a parliamentary committee set up in 1967 by Labour Minister Barbara Castle, who appointed as chairman of the committee... no, you couldn't have guessed it... Lord Alfred Robens!! 

REMOVE THE TIPS!

The cruel injustices meted out to the devastated working class people of Aberfan didn't end with Robens being kept on as the top NCB boss, despite "the terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude" the Tribunal of Inquiry branded him and his Board with. 

Alongside their demands for honest explanations of the cause of the wipe-out of a generation, of their own children, the villagers demanded outright removal of the other six tips dominating the skyline. In some part for safety reasons, but overwhelmingly to remove the constant, haunting reminder of the disaster they'd suffered; demolition of those monstrous monuments to the deaths of their children and neighbours. 

The government - under the advice of the NCB and indeed the Davies Tribunal Report - declared that the remaining six slag heaps were not unsafe, didn't need to be removed, but generously conceded an offer to landscape them! What they carefully avoided saying was that this was a vastly cheaper option than the estimated £3million cost of removal, with behind-the-scenes warnings that such a cost would lead to the closure of the Merthyr Vale pit and its jobs (although subsequent research suggests they were lying about the costs of the demolition option). 

PEOPLE POWER GETS ORGANISED 

Landscaping might have been relatively inexpensive, but it was utterly, cruelly insensitive to a whole community suffering mass bereavement and trauma. 

In an inspiring echo of all that is most courageous about working class people who organise and fight for justice - whether trade unionists fighting their employers through collective union action, or the likes of the Hillsborough families' prolonged struggle for Justice for the 96 - the Aberfan people didn't lie down and accept this treatment from the powers-that-be. They set up a Tip Removal Committee, and fought long and hard. 

The ruling powers were unaccustomed to 'ordinary' working class people displaying such extraordinary determination, or challenging them - especially in the midst of such emotional suffering. They stonewalled the demands to dismantle the tips. 

But the ruling elites also sought to block the campaigners by dirty, secret state methods - behind their public claims to be pouring out sympathy to the bereaved village. Participants described how their phones were tapped, with cars following Tip Removal Committee members everywhere they went. 

DIRT IN THE WALES OFFICE!

Eventually, after being frustrated and ignored by the government for ages, a more militant wing of the committee, led by local miner Enos Sims, decided on some direct action at the Wales Office in Cardiff. They took care not to discuss their plans on the phone. 

After being told 'No' by the government for the umpteenth time, they arranged to 'bring the mountain to the government', so to speak! They dumped bagfuls of slurry from the tips inside the Wales Office. It had an instant impact, with the Secretary of State for Wales suddenly urging the Wilson government to remove the six offending slag heaps, which the government announced mere days later. A victory for determined action by working class people who got themselves organised. 

GOVERNMENT PLUNDERS DISASTER APPEAL FUND 

Here's the vicious sting in the Labour government's tail, though. 

Wilson's government conceded to the Aberfan people's relentless demand to demolish the tips; traumatic eyesores that were a daily reminder to them of loss and human disaster - caused by ruthless negligence by those in power. They paid out a £200,000 government grant towards the removal costs. 

The other source of funding for the tip clearance is a permanent condemnation of the government, the NCB bosses, and indeed such seemingly benign forces as the heads of the Charity Commission. Let's sketch the back story.

£500 FOR A CHILD'S LIFE 

After the Davies Report had savaged the NCB for its "terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude" as the root cause of the 144 deaths, the NCB offered compensation to bereaved families. At first they offered an insulting £50 per fatality! 

Under the outcry this triggered, they then paid out £500 per fatality - still little more than they paid in compensation for each dead animal! What price the life of a child?

In this context, the Aberfan Disaster Fund was established, relying on the solidarity and generosity of ordinary people - children included - from far and wide. A total of 90,000 people donated, with an astonishing £1.75million collected; about £30million in 2016 money. 

WHERE DOES CHARITY BEGIN? 

Several times, the ladies and gentlemen of the Charity Commission intervened to dictate how these funds were used - despite clearly being donated to help the devastated families and community in the small Aberfan village. 

They blocked payments - which had been agreed by the Disaster Fund trustees - to parents unless their children were physically injured that terrible day; no thought for the life-long psychological damage. 

They stepped in another time to demand that no payments could be issued to bereaved parents until each case was investigated to see whether the parents were close to their children, and thus likely to be suffering mentally! 

You couldn't invent such cold cruelty - by those in charge of 'charity'.

LABOUR GOVERNMENT ROBBED FUNDS FOR THE DEAD

Another decisive intervention they made was when the government hounded the Disaster Fund trustees into paying nearly 10% of the total Fund - £150,000 - towards the  cost of removing the other six tips. Tips which had been put there and left there by the NCB, supported by successive governments, despite repeated residents' warnings of the safety risks, spanning several years.
The Charity Commission declared this larceny of funds, donated in good faith, to be entirely lawful under charity laws (it wasn't) and helped the Wilson government plunder the Disaster Fund. 

As a footnote, the Labour government of 1997 - 30 years later - returned the £150,000 to the Aberfan Disaster Fund, now mostly used to sustain the cemetery and memorials to the dead.
Outwardly generous and just, this act by Tony Blair's New Labour was another cruel deceit. It gained kudos for seemingly righting a wrong by Labour 30 years before. But taking inflation and loss of interest over the previous three decades into account, instead of returning £150,000 they should have been coughing up £1.5million to the people of Aberfan in 1997.

A TRAGEDY RICH IN WARNINGS AND LESSONS FOR TODAY 

This unimaginable tragedy is full of stark warnings and rich lessons, even 50 years after Aberfan's man-made disaster occurred. Much has changed since 1966, but far too much has remained the same. 

Most coal mines have been shut down - as have the livelihoods of whole communities. The destruction of the coal industry, accelerated by Thatcher in the 1980s, has left industrial deserts with multiple social ills in its wake. The mining tips have therefore disappeared with the mines. They no longer hang like the shadow of death over the Welsh valleys.

But a whole succession of man-made disasters have devastated lives and families since Aberfan: the Herald of Free Enterprise ferry disaster at Zeebrugge; rail disasters at Clapham and Paddington; the Hillsborough 96... to name but a few. 

CUTS COST LIVES

Cost-cutting and profiteering, with negligence on safety standards by those in power, have been common causes of all these and other human tragedies. 

They've been entirely avoidable - and in most cases the employers, government or police chiefs had been warned of potential disasters long before they happened. Those in power put profit before people, cost-cutting before crowd safety, ignored the warnings - and then lied through their teeth after the death tolls, to hide their culpability. 

CAMPAIGNS FOR TRUTH, JUSTICE & SAFETY

In this shameful exercise they've been overwhelmingly aided and abetted by the mainstream media - or at least big sections of it. Usually it's taken sustained, courageous campaigns by devastated families, communities and workers' unions to expose the truth and win justice for the victims. 

In an age where the Tories and profit-addicted employers are desperate to unwind the limited advances on workplace health and safety, we should use Aberfan as a warning of what could happen if they're not resisted and defeated. 

Corporate manslaughter legislation should be extended to make company chief executives open to prosecution, as a deterrent to them cutting corners on safety for the sake of profit or public sector cuts. 

DEMOCRACY AND WORKING CLASS CONTROL 

And rather than leave safety measures to unelected, aloof bosses who've been proven to risk life and limb for the company profit-and-loss accounts, we should pursue the demand for workplace safety to be under the control of committees of elected trade union health and safety reps.

The appalling role of Lord Robens and the NCB bosses at Aberfan is a powerful lesson in what public ownership should - and should not - consist of. 

A socialist government should never repeat the costly outrage of obscene overcompensation of private owners. They've had more than enough loot already, so why reward them at the expense of saddling nationalized industries or services with a mountain of debt, as happened with the coal industry in 1947? 

ELECTED BOARDS, NOT FUTURE LORD ROBENS 

Furthermore, never again should any industry or service that's taken into public ownership be run by unelected, unaccountable, disgustingly overpaid bureaucratic boards of management. Anyone who imagines that such a set-up amounts to socialism should remember two words: Aberfan, and Robens. 

The terrible tale of arrogant neglect, indifference to warnings from working class communities, and subsequent lies and corruption to hide the truth, are more than a compelling case for democratic accountability at every level in any public service or industry. 

Elected boards of management; day-to-day workers' control; elected community representatives alongside workers' elected representatives; boards of management on nothing above skilled workers' wages and subject to immediate recall and replacement - those are some of the core features required for democratic public ownership; to ensure the interests and safety of workers and communities are protected. 

COMMIT TO A SAFE AND SECURE FUTURE 

It took the tragedy of Aberfan - and more to the point, the indescribable resilience and spirit of the villagers in their battle for truth and justice - to force governments into improvements on health and safety laws in subsequent years. 

Unfortunately, for as long as our economy is owned by a faceless few whose entire motivation is profit maximization, so too we will have to emulate the spirit of the working class people of Aberfan in defence of the safety, livelihoods and lives of workers and their communities. 

A commitment to winning such a safe and secure future - run by and for people, not profit - is the best monument we can all build to the innocents slaughtered in Aberfan 50 years ago. 

THE STATE IS ROTTEN: Hillsborough, Orgreave, Shrewsbury, blacklisting...

There is something rotten at the heart of capitalism.

Not just a few bad apples, but a whole stinking barrel of cover-ups, collusion in lies, corruption and cruel, class injustice that goes to the very top of society.

But the priceless courage and tenacity of a group of mostly working class people has exposed the corrupt state, and put the Establishment perpetrators on the run.

The jury's verdicts on the Hillsborough Disaster provide devastating confirmation of the cruel deceits, shameless lies and corruption at the tops of the police, the media and successive governments. 

The revelations of details and footage of 96 fans being crushed to death - at the inquests and subsequent TV documentaries - are heartbreaking. Try to imagine what it was like for friends and relatives of the 96, as they sat in the hearings for two long years, listening to police chiefs still trying to blame the fans for this slaughter of the innocents, 27 years on, right up until the jury's verdicts, as they dragged out proceedings in a callous attempt to cover up their own culpability.

Weep in Anger and Admiration

I am far from being alone in weeping every time the issue is mentioned on TV, for the unimaginable suffering of the 96 innocent victims and their families, and survivors (some of whom I knew) whose lives were irreparably damaged after being on the brink of death. Tragedies caused by negligence by police chiefs, owners of the clapped out Sheffield Wednesday stadium, the FA, and a Tory government that vilified working class football fans as sub-human hooligans, herding them into pens like cattle, surrounded by high fences that turned these prisons into a death trap at Hillsborough. 

But grief merges with anger at the systematic campaign to smear and frame the dead, and all Liverpool fans. At the collusion in the Establishment's cover-up between South Yorkshire Police chiefs and the heartless, vindictive Maggie Thatcher and her Tory government. At the disgusting, unforvigeable lies of Rupert Murdoch's gutter press. 

And tears flood too in admiration for the superhuman tenacity of the Hillsborough families and their allies, as they refused to be defeated over 27 years' pursuit of Justice for the 96, their persistence vindicated by the jury's 14 decisions - including that the fans bore no responsibility for the worst sporting disaster in UK history, and that the 96 were "unlawfully killed". 

The detailed sequence of events - the real truth, known to most of us since that fateful day in April 1989, but now officially confirmed by the longest legal hearings in UK history - have been spelt out elsewhere (including in my 2012 blog article). 

From Orgreave to Hillsborough 

To fully grasp the explanation for police attitudes and actions at Hillsborough, and the enormity of the subsequent collusion between police chiefs, government figures, members of the judiciary and a major part of the capitalist media, we have to look back at 1984, and especially to the Battle of Orgreave on 18 June 1984. 

Secret Cabinet papers, released in January 2014 under the 30-year rule, confirmed what trade unionists and socialists knew and argued 30 years earlier. They exposed how the Tories consciously planned to shut 75 pits, wipe out over 75,000 miners jobs, smash the NUM union, and impose destitution on entire communities. They targeted Yorkshire for their opening salvo in a class-based civil war without bullets. And they prepared well, beefing up police pay, police powers and national coordination of police actions - stripping away elements of local control, effectively turning the police into a paramilitary wing of the government and Coal Board bosses. And nowhere more so than in South Yorkshire.

Police trap laid

Three months into the 1984-5 miners' strike to defend jobs, communities and the future, the NUM got word of the British Steel coking plant at Orgreave, near Rotherham (8 miles from Hillsborough) being on the brink of running out of supplies. Temporary closure would have been a mighty boost to the strike, so they called a mass picket to stop lorries carrying coke supplies. 

Up to 10,000 pickets came from far and wide, in magnificent solidarity. To their amazement, buses and cars full of pickets didn't face the usual police roadblocks that had turned Britain's coalfields into a diluted version of apartheid South Africa's pass laws. Instead, police politely invited and ushered them onto the piece of land near the coking plant. Too late, the pickets found themselves surrounded on three sides by massed ranks of about 5,000 police, drafted in from all over the country. 

Police carnage 

As pickets in tee-shirts and trainers - some of them stripped to the waist in the glorious sunshine - peacefully milled around on the hill, unable to get near the lorries, the police unleashed an unprovoked assault. 

Riot police, with helmets, shields and batons, smashed into the front lines of pickets. With military precision, they periodically opened up to let through heavily-clad cavalrymen, mounted police, who charged with long truncheons flying, their horses trampling people underfoot, whacking fleeing pickets' heads as they tried to escape. 

The cavalry charged through the village. An eyewitness recalled seeing a Derbyshire lad sitting on a bridge eating an ice cream, only to have a police truncheon smash through the cone and into his face. Others saw two coppers pin down a Nottinghamshire picket while a third battered him senseless, until an inspector said 'That's enough, you're going to kill him', whereupon they dragged him off and wiped away the blood before photographing the half-dead picket. 

This was unprovoked carnage, a pre-planned display of naked state violence by overpaid thugs in uniform, hired by a frightened ruling class who were out to teach the miners and wider working class a lesson in who rules whom. 

Decades of lies

The physical violence was rapidly followed by shameless violence against the truth. The BBC was as brazen in pumping out lies as the Sun and most of the press. Footage of the police carnage against defenceless pickets was literally reversed, to make millions watching TV bulletins think South Yorkshire Police were acting in self defence from picket violence. Many of the victims of police attacks were arrested and 95 charged with riotous assembly, which at the time potentially carried a sentence of life imprisonment. 

Here's the link with the police action at Hillsborough, five years later: the charges were dropped when documents showed police statements were fabricated, often identical, dictated to junior officers by detectives who weren't even at Orgreave. 

Quietly, in 1991, when pickets sued them for assault, unlawful arrest and false imprisonment, South Yorkshire Police settled out of court, awarding 39 pickets £500,000, which also gagged the miners from exposing the truth. 

Fabrication by police chiefs 

Documents from the Hillsborough case have now exposed not only that the same fabrication of police evidence occurred at Orgreave as at Hillsborough, but that several of the same senior police officers and the same SYP solicitor (identified as 'Mr H') were involved at both! Junior police officers testified that at Orgreave they were told not to write up their reports in their notebooks [which are like sacred documents and are used as gospel by the Courts] - just as happened at Hillsborough. Their statements were often written up months afterwards. 

The Snowman was here!

One of the police top brass active at both events was John Nesbitt, former Chief Superintendent of SYP. He was the stuff of legend during the miners' strike, having ordered coppers in a Range Rover to ram a snowman built by pickets as a petty show of power, only to discover the miners had built the snowman round a concrete bollard, which wrecked the police vehicle, and earned Nesbitt the nickname 'Snowman'! 

He was the one who arrested miners' leader Arthur Scargill at Orgreave, and then tried to claim his head injuries were the result of Arthur falling over before the events that day! But in January this year, at the Hillsborough inquest, a policemen (David Frost) who was there when the 96 died, testified how Snowman Nesbitt - a Chief Superintendent of SYP by then - had met a group of junior officers and told them to alter their initial statements, stating: 

"We have all got to get our stories straight or a lot of senior officers' heads will roll."

Acting with Impunity

The top brass in SYP orchestrated the state thuggery on behalf of Thatcher's thuggish Tory government at Orgreave, to cow miners - dubbed 'the enemy within' by Thatcher - and the wider working class. They unleashed state terrorism that day, and were then encouraged and aided by the Thatcher regime in covering up the truth, slandering and trying to jail their victims. No police officer was ever charged or even reprimanded for assault, let alone perjury and perversion of the course of justice.

Orgreave taught them to think they could act with impunity, an outlook that seeped down the police ranks. And that outlook towards working class people, and arrogant assurance they could get away with lies and fabrications, was sustained by the very same SYP and some of the very same top brass and solicitor five years later. If the state - up to and including Thatcher's Cabinet - hadn't got away with these monstrously corrupt practices at Orgreave, some or all of the 96 might never have died at Hillsborough. 

Orgreave Inquiry 

Top civil servants briefed Tory Home Office Ministers admitting 'mistakes or worse' in the Orgreave policing, but arguing against a public Inquiry for political reasons, and Tory Home Secretary Kenneth Baker publicly declared he was "glad to express my sincere admiration for the work of the police". 

Successive governments - Tory AND Labour! - denied demands for an inquiry into the role of the police and government at Orgreave, to cover up who gave the orders for this display of unbridled state terrorism against its own working class. 

It was only after a BBC documentary in October 2012 that South Yorkshire Police referred themselves to the (ludicrously misnamed) Independent Police Complaints Commission. At one stage, in 2014, the IPCC had to threaten legal action to force SYP to hand over five boxes of documents, which SYP had refused to relinquish for five months, subsequently claiming they were in the hands of their insurers!

The IPCC proceeded to delay and prevaricate over whether a scoping exercise on the evidence merited a public investigation - only to declare 2.5 years later, in June 2015, that "due to the length of time that has elapsed" an Inquiry into Orgreave wasn't appropriate! You couldn't make it up - but they did.

It was also the cataclysmic revelations of the Hillsborough Independent Panel in 2012 that encouraged the birth of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, which was further boosted in its demands for a full-blown public inquiry by the recent victory of the Hillsborough Justice campaigners. 

Breaking down the barriers 

Now the barriers erected for over 40 years by a venal ruling class - their police chiefs, judiciary, press and governments included - have begun to crumble and collapse in the face of relentless campaigns by ordinary working class people with extraordinary dedication, based on burning anger at injustice. A public Inquiry into Orgreave is about to be granted. 

The new Chief Constable of SYP, Dave Jones, last week tried to distance himself from the stinking corruption of his predecessors by declaring his support for an Orgreave Inquiry. 

In a very telling declaration from an incredible source - former Manchester Police chief Sir Peter Fahey - the wider guilt of the entire system was hinted at. Describing Orgreave accurately as "a police army of occupation", Fahey went on to call for an Inquiry...

"...into policing of the miners' strike, not just Orgreave, and the role of the police, but also the role of politicians. We need to look at the wider context of the way the police were used and the agenda set for them by government. Clearly it was about national control of the police in pursuit of a political agenda."

Prosecute ALL the Perpetrators!

The truth confirmed about Hillsborough should now lead to prosecution of those who caused the cruel carnage at a football match, at a day's entertainment, but also those up to their necks in decades of systematic lies and fabrications designed to shift the blame from the perpetrators to the victims, in an exercise dripping with class hatred. 

And not just David Duckenfield, but other SYP bosses; the West Midlands Police chiefs who staged a bogus inquiry in full knowledge of the cover-up; the football bosses who ignored safety for short-term profit; the media who smeared and demonized the dead and the city of Liverpool; and indeed the government figures who colluded in the decades of corrupt cover-ups. 

Labour's shame 

And whilst Labour's Andy Burnham is currently basking in the praise heaped on him for ordering, in 2009, the Hillsborough Independent Panel, whose revelations in 2012 blew this tower of lies asunder, there are some stubborn facts we shouldn't forget. In common with the rest of his Labour Cabinet of the time, he'd done nothing to challenge the lie machine until he met a torrent of angry chants from the terraces of "Justice for the 96", when he spoke at Anfield at the 20th anniversary event in April 2009. Worse still, his predecessor Jack Straw cynically deceived the Hillsborough families when Labour won office in 1997, promising them a full-blown Inquiry, then setting up a one-man legal 'investigation' that was stage-managed to conclude there was no justification in holding any Public Inquiry [see my 2012 blog for detailed documentary evidence of this episode].

Systemic corruption 

The Orgreave and Hillsborough scandals are interwoven by a thousand threads, but they are also part of a bigger fabric of state corruption and class injustice. Back in 1972 the Shrewsbury pickets were framed for daring to strike in defence of pay and jobs, with six of them jailed under obscure laws like the 1875 Conspiracy Act, and then drugged and tortured in jail. 

Nor did these practices stop at Orgreave or Hillsborough. Decades of blacklisting in the construction and other industries has ruined thousands of families' livelihoods and lives. Undercover secret service infiltration of protest groups - stooping to sexual relationships and having children with protestors as a cover for spying - are not just the stuff of the excellent recent TV drama, Undercover, but frightenly common in real-life Britain. Recent Tory legislation makes such methods, and state snooping on people's communications, all the easier - and legal!  

System change 

Capitalism is a system of rule and exploitation of the 99% by the 1%. It wouldn't succeed in holding onto power for the ultra-privileged few without a complex web of propaganda, deceit, lies, anti-working class laws, an upper-class judiciary steeped in the same class ideology and interests as the owners of economic wealth - and ultimately the naked brute force of state forces like the police, deployed in times of conflict between working people and those exploiting them.

So we need to press on with demands for full exposure of the methods of all these forces - including their hired politicians - demanding justice for Hillsborough, Orgreave, the miners as a whole, the Shrewsbury pickets, blacklisted workers... 

But to prevent constant repetition of these crimes against the majority working class population by those with power, we need to strive for a socialist democracy, a society where the wealth producers own and control the wealth, and where forces like the police are democratically controlled citizens' forces, not weapons in the hands of a tiny minority class of exploiters and their corrupt politicians. 

AT LAST! JUSTICE FOR THE HILLSBOROUGH 96!

“At last!”
That was a common response in Liverpool today to the monumental decision by the jury – in the inquests into the Hillsborough disaster on 15 April 1989 – that the 96 Liverpool FC fans who died were “unlawfully killed” and that the match police chief, Detective Superintendent David Duckenfield, is “responsible for manslaughter through gross negligence.”

Families of the 96 took the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the Kop to the court room in Warrington where the outcome of the two-year-long inquests was announced. One of them shouted “God bless the jury” as they announced they’d voted 7:2 that fans who left home to enjoy the FA Cup semi-final on a sunny Saturday were “unlawfully killed”.

FANS BLAMELESS
On top of that decision, the jury were unanimous in other conclusions: that the fans were entirely blameless for the tragedy; the Sheffield Wednesday ground did not have a legitimate Health & Safety Certificate; the police had triggered the crush that killed the 96 by opening the Leppings Lane gate (instead of delaying the kick-off) and then directing thousands down the tunnel into the overcrowded middle terraces whilst the side terraces were half empty; police and ambulance chiefs caused people to die by failing to promptly declare a major incident; they then systematically doctored statements of rank and file police and ambulance crews criticising the operations, as part of a disgraceful burial of the facts – a smear campaign against the dead victims, their families and Liverpool fans.

“WE NEVER, EVER GAVE UP DESPITE ALL THE KNOCKBACKS"
Those women and men who’ve fought for Justice for the 96 for an incredible 27 years wept, sang, hugged and spoke with a devastating mixture of sadness, relief, sense of vindication and anger at the inquests’ revelations and outcome.
On top of the devastation of losing family members – 71 of whom were aged 27 or under (the length of time it’s taken to publicly prove the truth) – many lost their livelihoods, others were taken into care as children through loss of their mother, and all suffered the stigma of the smears issued by the authorities against the fans for all those years.

These indescribably brave campaigners have been forced to fight for justice for the loved ones they’d lost after the 1991 Coroner’s Report concluded “accidental death”. For 25 years the smear that it was drunken, ticketless, riotous fans that had caused the disaster hung over the memory of the 96 and the entire city, their families especially. Their efforts were rewarded when the verdict of accidental deaths was quashed in 2012 by the Independent Inquiry Panel, which insisted on the recent inquests.
What incredible courage it took to fight on! As one of them said today, “We never, ever gave up despite all the knockbacks.”

ESTABLISHMENT LIES TO THE BITTER END
Families had lost sons, daughters, husbands, wives, siblings. One daughter today wept at how her father had been thrown in a gym covered by a black bin bag.
Relatives had to relive the grief over two years of inquests, because right to the bitter end, police authorities persistently lied and blamed the fans, dragging out the inquests by an extra year or more. Just last year, Duckenfield eventually admitted his blunders and apologized. Bereaved women did a TV video declaring they would never accept his apology, “after he made us live a lie for 26 years, which is beyond cruel.”

At last, the truth is confirmed. Amidst many other crimes against working class people, evidence proved how the police chief called for police dogs before requesting ambulances, treating fans like thugs when in fact they were desperately trying to escape the crush or rescue others. Whilst some police officers tried to help, the majority were lined up across the pitch as if to stop a riot, when the fans were literally fighting for their lives. The ambulance service was lied to about the situation being a crowd riot – only three ambulances ever entered the ground – one of them an hour after the fatal mayhem started – whilst others were parked outside.


Having herded fans into the overcrowded middle terraces of a venue that was unfit in the first place, police chiefs added to the death toll by massive delays in acting to save lives. And then they lied, accusing the fans of having broken down the gate into the Leppings Lane end that the same police chief had ordered open. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun then vilified the dead, other football fans, and the entire city of Liverpool, and Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher colluded in this monstrous frame-up of the dead.

JUDICIAL LIES
The judiciary played their part in trying to hide the truth. The 1991 inquiry that decided ‘accidental deaths’ refused to take or consider any evidence after 3.15pm, making the false claim that all the victims had died by then. In fact, the current inquests proved some didn’t die until as a late as 5pm, underlining the cruel fact that prompt actions by the police and ambulance chiefs could have saved a majority of the 96!

NOT YET JUSTICE
At last, the names of the 96 have been cleared. At last, some degree of closure for relatives. But not yet justice. As most of the Justice for the 96 campaigners today said, criminal prosecution needs to follow on from the jury’s verdict. The current South Yorkshire Police chief admitted his predecessor “got it catastrophically wrong.” Families of the 96 have called for criminal prosecutions.
But it shouldn’t just be Duckenfield who is charged. What about the owners of Sheffield Wednesday who refused to repair a clapped out stadium despite warnings that fans reported crushing at Liverpool v Nottingham Forest the previous year? That doctors at the match confirmed there wasn’t a single defibrillator in the stadium?

“Liverpool’s failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon.” – Boris Johnson

What about the Sun – a dirty rag – and Kelvin Mackenzie, its editor who ran monstrous headlines about LFC fans robbing and defiling corpses?
Or the West Midlands Police who held a fake inquiry into their South Yorkshire force?
Or Thatcher, who of course is no longer available to answer for her role in collusion at a callous, calculated cover-up, when she met with the police chiefs the next day?
Or the cynical manoeuvres by subsequent Labour Home Secretary, Jack Straw, to stitch up a bogus Inquiry, whilst promising justice to the families?

At last, the truth is out, the fans and the family campaigns totally vindicated – but justice must be done. And nobody – including people too young to fully grasp what all this signifies, because they weren’t around or conscious of the heartbreaking disaster of 1989 – nobody should fail to register how monumental the jury’s decision is. As one woman who lost her son at Hillsborough said today, with angry tears:

“This is a defining moment in the history of social justice, when the Establishment was taken on by ordinary people and the Establishment lost!”