Evaluating Tactics for Public Order Policing in the United Kingdom: Examining the Police Deployment at Orgreave During the Miners’ Strike of 1984

Orgreave is the most contentious industrial confrontation of the latter 20th century. The events on 18th June 1984, in South Yorkshire, exposed a policing style that had been rejected by Lord Scarman yet agreed by the Home Secretary. Shrouded in secrecy, political memoirs have emerged that can be seen to directly influence equally secretive police public order tactics. Orgreave exposes how public order policing can in reality mean political order policing, thereby revealing the nakedly politicised role of the police as a coercive arm of the State: an Orwellian State that is prepared to do whatever it takes to preserve its power.