The Miners’ Strike and Me, written and directed by Stuart Ramsay, STV 11.05 pm

It’s  a year of anniversaries. One hundred years since the First World War and thirty years since the miners’ strike. Great Britain, an island nation, built on coal. Remember them, coal miners? Quaint little people that used to black up and work in coal mines. Seems hard to believe they existed. 84 000 of them and they had wives and families. Seventy pits. Arthur Scargill the NUM leader said the government had a hit list. The media proclaimed it a fantasy. Minutes of cabinet meetings from that era suggest not only did the Thatcher government have a hit list they had a Schlieffen plan that did not involve invading Belgium, but did involved stockpiling coal at power stations and getting the police onside for a tactical assault on coal miners, those bolshy representatives of the working class. Orgreave was the government's forces Waterloo. Grass field lay either side of the 10 000 picketing miners. The police could use horses and baton-wielding police officers. They could deploy tactical ‘snatch squads’ of police in riot gear with shields. This was not the usual push and shove remembered fondly by pickett Tim Lloyd. On camera a police office is shown smashing him on the head with his baton. He hit him so hard and so often he recalled the baton broke. Ninety-five were arrested, including Lloyd. Being arrested meant that defendant was sent a letter from the Coal Board telling him he was sacked. Michael (Tarzan) Heseltine puts Thatcher’s claims quite simply: ‘it was the rule of the mob, or the rule of law’. £400 000 was paid in damages to those arrested at Orgreave, but calls for a public enquiry were ignored. This programme was not, however, about bitterness, of righting historical wrongs. There was laughter as the striking miners, with no wages, no strike pay and trying to make-do with soup kitchens and food parcels, recalled police officers bussed in from the Met waving ten pound notes in their faces and calling them Scargill notes because of the overtime they were getting. Harry Enfield’s ‘loads of money’ caricature was born in the Yorkshire coalfields. There were tears from the wives of the miners, like Carol Greathed, who became politicised, as women (once more) came to the forefront of protests against Thatcher. And there was, thirty years later, still anger about ‘scabs’. But more than that, there was tears for a world that has passed, when men could dig out a living, when industry mattered, when the working class had leverage and banks didn’t dictate the social policy of exclusion and scapegoating the have-nots.

http://player.stv.tv/programmes/miners-strike/2014-03-12-2305/