6

1984

Miners and Milestones

1984 was a momentous year: politically, professionally and personally. The miners embarked on their longest and most acrimonious strike, which changed the course of history, and I made decisions that changed the course of my history.

On 1 May – a propitious date – I established a new set of chambers at Tooks Court, part of the rationale behind which was to provide a collective base for young entrants to the Bar who wished to pursue cases of a political/civil-rights nature, rather than merely take anything that was around. Originally the idea was for Stephen Sedley (now Lord Justice Sedley) and I to head this project jointly – he would lead on the civil side and I would do the crime – but the potential birth was so painful for the set that we were both in at the time (Cloisters under John Platts Mills) that our project, as originally planned, was stillborn. In order to smooth ruffled feathers, Stephen stayed and I left.

At this period I was involved in a complex ‘spy’ trial, representing Michael Bettany, an MI5 officer convicted of passing sensitive information to the Soviet Embassy in London. This was a stressful case for a number of reasons: much of it was held in camera; most of the paperwork was secret and had to be held in safes; and I was so concerned that our every word was being bugged that I ended up having conferences in lifts. It was a doubly stressful time, not only because of the gravity of the case but also because my family life was imploding. Melian and I both accept equal responsibility for the breakdown of our marriage, but there’s no doubt that the innocent victims were our five lovely, long-suffering children.

Stephen Sedley’s place at Tooks Court was taken by Paddy O’Connor, a passionate, intellectual high-flyer. We began with a small, diverse band of young and enthusiastic colleagues, 40 per cent black and 50 per cent women, and wanted to be outside the confines of the Inns of Court, without the usual hierarchy of clerks and the internal arrangement of most chambers: in other words, we were a form of collective. We employed clerks on PAYE (resisting the percentage fee structure commonly used); we sought the ultimate democracy with weekly meetings to discuss policy and politics; and our fees were to be pooled so that all tenants received equal remuneration, a utopia which we never actually achieved.

Not long after our inception, the senior clerk, overwhelmed by the amount of work and the arrogance and demands of the barristers, as he saw it, literally jumped on his bike and left us for France. In his absence three young barristers – Sandra Graham, Christiana Hyde and Janet Plange – stepped into the breach and sorted the administration until I persuaded him to return to a suitably admonished band of brothers- and sisters-in-law. Looking back, I can’t really blame him. Barristers can be a difficult lot: something to do with their self-employed status and with the uncertainty of where the next case (and therefore the next fee) is coming from; but there’s no excuse for tantrums, and I’ve seen my fair share of those. Yet we are still going strong.

It was not only the establishing of Tooks Court which made 1984 a momentous year for me, for it was then that I met Yvette, an independent television producer and director. She was (and remains) dynamic, political, intelligent and sexy – a combination I just couldn’t resist. Yvette was researching and producing, for the BBC’s Community Programme Unit, a film about the miners’ strike called Taking Liberties, and came to interview me with the director Steve Connelly, as I had been recommended as a useful lawyer who might explain the laws on picketing and so on. She was not au fait with the law, but she was very bright and asked all the right questions – and we hit it off immediately. It was, quite simply, love at first sight.

In my recorded interview with Yvette I was able to point out the freedoms that, from the earliest days of the strike, were being threatened – freedom of association, movement and speech – and she expressed herself delighted that I had given her ‘the structure of the film’. Less of a boost to my ego was the fact that I was so verbose that I was left on the cutting-room floor (though Yvette never thought that my ego needed much boosting!).

While making the film, Yvette and her crew spent time in Yorkshire and stayed in mining communities, exposing the scale of the police intervention and the violence inflicted on so many families in these small pit villages. The footage was a revelation.

She met Terry (‘My friends call me Tex’) Dunn, who opened doors to a community that was sceptical or even hostile towards the media, and with good reason. Tex became not just a source of great inside information, but also a close personal friend.

At one point the film crew decided to challenge the freedom-of­movement restrictions imposed by the police by taking Tex and another miner in a van to Nottinghamshire. Inevitably they were stopped at a roadblock, and the sequence in the film would be almost comical, were it not so chilling, as the police were both abusive and dismissive at the same time. The crew kept filming, but were told to turn round and go back to Yorkshire or they would be arrested. I had half-hoped they would keep going so that we could challenge the policy in court, but Yvette had to think of the miners, whose future livelihoods and freedoms were at stake, so back they went, with Tex commenting, ‘Is this Poland, or what?’

The background to the 1984–5 miners’ strike is long and complicated, but at its centre was the hatchet man Ian MacGregor, who a few years earlier had been brought in to decimate the steel industry and in 1983 was appointed Chair of the National Coal Board, with the full approval of ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher, to do the same to the coal industry. The rousing miners’ leader Arthur Scargill (whom I came to represent on more than one occasion), President of the National Union of Mineworkers, was determined to protect the conditions – and ultimately the jobs – of hundreds of thousands of miners who worked in the industry at that time, while Women Against Pit Closures was an amazingly resilient and successful movement led by a committee of ferocious campaigners, including Arthur’s wife, the irrepressible Anne Scargill, who shares my birthday and is exactly the same age. She and I are like twins, and remain great friends. Stir into the mix the police, media and judiciary – whose role it became to label and condemn miners as criminals – and it made for one of the most bitter industrial disputes of modern times.

Following a vote for an overtime ban against pit closures and a paltry pay rise of 5.2 per cent at a time of double-figure inflation, many miners were laid off, and several local disputes erupted. Face-workers’ basic wage for a shift was £29 – with added bonuses from productive pits (mostly in Nottinghamshire) – and many surface workers relied on income supplement and housing benefit. The work was hard, dirty and dangerous, but miners needed their jobs, and they knew that if they lost this strike, the NCB would close seventy pits. (And it did.) After the closure of Cortonwood pit in Yorkshire was announced on 1 March 1984, with nine years of coal remaining, 55,000 Yorkshire miners came out on strike, and the national strike (including coalfields in Yorkshire, Scotland, South Wales and Kent) was solid within a fortnight. Nottingham proved to be less staunch, although the local leadership did call their men out following the death of twenty-four-year-old David Jones, who collapsed while picketing at Ollerton colliery.

There then commenced one of the biggest and most brutal police operations against citizens that Britain has ever seen. Tens of thousands of police from at least sixteen different forces including the Met were deployed, at an estimated cost of £2 million a week.¹ Roadblocks sealed off the county of Nottinghamshire from any outside picketing; lorries carrying coal to steelworks and driven by non-unionised men willing to cross picket lines were heavily protected; miners were beaten and arrested and their leaders attacked.

But this didn’t stop the miners. They found paths through woods and across farmers’ fields. Clapped-out cars fuelled by supporters’ donations transported miners disguised as market traders down country roads to appeal to their dithering Nottinghamshire colleagues to show unity. But by then the propaganda war was on to convince the Notts miners to scab – that is, to betray their comrades by crossing the picket line – and, spurred on by their right-wing leaders, scab most of them did, with a few notable exceptions, such as Ernie Barber and the gentle giant Stefan Wysocki (from Derbyshire, where the strike was also less solid), two miners whom I came to know and respect thoroughly for sticking to their principles. By mid-March most Nottinghamshire miners were working again, which cut a deep rift in the solidarity of the strike.

Mining was an industry labelled ‘uneconomic’, despite the fact that many pits had years of coal remaining, but it wasn’t the money that made the miners fight: it was the fact that there was no alternative. Between 1972 (the year of the previous strike) and 1984 more than 100,000 miners’ jobs had been lost and 115 pits shut down – and when the mines closed, with them went their communities. So in 1984 the miners knew that the stakes were high.

The state intervened to try and immobilise the strike. Despite sustained support from UK and European dockers, huge consignments of coal were secretly transported from Poland and South Africa via non-union ports on the east coast. NUM funds were sequestrated; deductions were made to already meagre state benefits given to striking miners’ families; and pressure was applied to get miners to return to work. Miners and their families suffered tremendous hardship and were isolated by the betrayal of the TUC leadership under Len Murray and Norman Willis, whose major role was to negotiate a ‘surrender deal’ with the government and the NCB. Politicians of all hues had been baying for the miners’ blood and the Labour Party leadership under Neil Kinnock did little to counteract the tumult.

But what can never be underestimated, and should not be forgotten, was the huge support and solidarity shown by other trade unionists, both in the UK and internationally, and the generous support of the public, both in their fundraising and in their physical participation in the strike. My own in-laws, Paul and Sally Vanson, both staunch Labour supporters, were among those who collected money and clothing, and together Yvette and I drove with them to Yorkshire to distribute the goods. The miners and their families were courageous in their commitment to saving their pits and their livelihoods during the longest industrial dispute ever in the UK, and earned huge respect for doing so.

But they suffered. A total of 766 miners were sacked by the NCB and never returned to work in the depleted coalfields, while almost 10,000 were arrested and, according to Home Office figures, 7,874 were charged with everything from breach of the peace through unlawful assembly to riot. Our great friend Tex was thrown through a plate-glass window at his pit by police and then charged with ‘criminal damage’. He was also sacked for that alleged offence, and this loyal, committed miner was hounded out of his industry and his community. He went on to gain a degree at the LSE and to help many other trade unionists fight for their jobs and rights via a charity in London, but the loss of his pit and his family left Tex an ill man. He has rebuilt his life with a new wife and son, but I suspect he will never really get over the strike and its aftermath.

Despite the hardships, there were funny moments. One of the apocryphal stories involves a much-hated, haughty Chief Superintendent. Arriving on a picket line one cold winter’s morning, he was confronted by a huge replica of himself made out of snow, complete with pips, buttons, cap and smirking mouth. Less than amused by the snowman blocking his way, he ordered the miners to demolish it, and of course they refused. Furious, he jumped into his Range Rover and drove it at speed at the offending snowman. What he didn’t know, until a mighty crunch ensued, was that the grinning snowman had been built around a large concrete bollard – and so ended the life of the Chief Superintendent’s rather fine police vehicle.

Fortunately, many of the hundreds of actions taken against individual miners arrested on public-order charges, both minor and serious, in the magistrates’ and Crown courts proved unsuccessful, thanks to a great team of defence lawyers who took on the system and won: the Tooks contingent virtually removed themselves to Yorkshire to defend them. Having put ourselves on the line in this way, we were reliant on an equally small band of committed solicitors to brief us.

One of the most important trials of my life involved defending Bernard Jackson, President of the Wath Main branch of the NUM in South Yorkshire, along with another local lad, David Moore, and Craig Waddington from Scotland, three of the fifteen defendants in the crucial Orgreave trial of 1985.

Orgreave was owned by British Steel, supplying coke to its steelworks in Scunthorpe, and miners began picketing the plant from early in the strike, asking for and receiving support from the steel workers, who refused to cross their lines. By late May 1984 there had been mass pickets as pressure was put on the steel workers to resume work, and scab lorry drivers were brought in to transport the coke, with 200 lorries a day roaring past the pickets because the coke was so vital to continuing steel production. Arthur Scargill had already been arrested once, along with many others.

Bernard was a white-haired, pipe-smoking miner with a solid commitment to his industry, who was hugely politicised by the strike. David was a quiet, mild-mannered, religious man, genuinely astonished by the state savagery he experienced. And Craig was a young, feisty lad who would take no nonsense from anybody, and who maintained this spirit despite many attempts to curb it.

For what was called ‘the most important trial of public order this century’, we faced the daunting task of ensuring these innocent men were found not guilty, though by the time of the trial they had been pilloried and maligned in the national press as rioters and men of violence. Eighty-odd others were charged with similar offences, and the outcome of our trial would almost certainly determine their futures as well.

Yvette and I rented a ‘granny flat’ attached to a farm overlooking Orgreave itself, a large industrial site, a huge black, smoking, fiery blot on the surrounding countryside – much of which was given over to rapeseed production, so beautiful in the spring with its bright-yellow hue and such a contrast to the coking plant.

On 18 June 1984, a beautiful early summer’s day, the largest picket of Orgreave assembled. Thousands of miners from all over the country were escorted onto a field next to the plant and then surrounded by police – the miners in T-shirts or bare-chested, the police in full riot gear with batons, shields, helmets and dogs, and mounted contingents waiting in the wings. (This tactic of corralling or ‘kettling’ of protesters has been used regularly ever since – right up to the G20 demonstrations in April 2009.)

What followed – at least, what the prosecution said had followed – was described at length in the opening speech of Brian Walsh, QC, in the imposing Victorian courtroom in the centre of Sheffield, not two miles from Orgreave itself. Standing by an axe, ball bearings, a mallet and a metal bar, which he termed ‘but a tiny sample of an arsenal of weaponry with which these men . . . equipped themselves’, Walsh described how ‘the pickets put their plan into action. They charged forward against the police lines, hurling missiles in a quite terrifying display of violence which lasted several hours . . . They were sick minds who organised this.’

Later, in 1986, Bernard Jackson, who had kept his own record of the trial, wrote a book with Tony Wardle to support the powerful film which Yvette produced and directed for Channel 4, The Battle for Orgreave. In it Bernard describes in detail, and very movingly, the whole build-up to the strike; his own experiences of being smashed in the face with a shield and held in a painful and dangerous armlock, ‘damn near strangling me’; his time in prison on remand; the trial; and his feelings about the struggle to keep their jobs and communities intact:

The anger I felt was the anger of injustice. I felt anger towards the media who had consistently chosen selectivity, right from the start of the strike, in what they pictured and what they reported. How many pictures had been shown of a poor bleeding policeman when for every policeman there were a hundred injured pickets – fractured arms and legs, split skulls and livid truncheon weals? I felt anger at the state which had not only allowed this to happen but was obviously pulling the strings, planning it and providing the resources to make it possible. I felt anger at the men who should have been supporting us, the Kinnocks and Willises, when openly and arrogantly the state was intent on smashing working-class organisations. How dare they pretend to represent, to speak for the working class? History will judge them and it will not forgive easily.²

For me the summer of 1985 was a stimulating and tense time. It was a year since the events at Orgreave, the strike was over and many pits had closed, but until I moved up to Yorkshire and visited the homes of miners and working men’s clubs I had no real idea of the extent of the sacrifices and daily struggles faced by mining families: burning their own furniture to keep warm; surviving on food parcels and soup kitchens; and running the gauntlet of cocky Metropolitan police officers from down south, flaunting their pay packets stuffed with overtime.

My clients had been anticipating the trial with trepidation and the stakes were high, for the miners charged with riot faced life imprisonment, and there was no doubt that the state was more than willing to hand down such a punishment. Fortunately, the fate of my clients was to be decided by their peers, twelve men from Sheffield and its environs, who sat on the jury for forty-eight days as the evidence unfolded – in front of His Honour Judge Coles, no less . . .

I shared Bernard’s anger at the response to the strike, but in my line of business I have to direct that anger forensically at those in front of me in court. That I did in my week-long cross-examination of the man in charge of the police at Orgreave on the day: Assistant Chief Constable Anthony Clements, a man with greying hair and a small moustache. He came into the witness box and answered Brian Walsh with a firm, steady, well-spoken voice. He appeared to have a complete grasp of the ‘facts’ surrounding 18 June, and his demeanour was one of a reasonable man horrified by the violence he had seen: his last words to the prosecution were: ‘In thirty-three years of policing I have never seen anything quite like it.’

Listening to his description of his deployment of Police Support Units (PSUs), officers with long shields, short shields, horses and dogs because the stone-throwing at 8 a.m. was of such intensity, I realised that I had to undermine this voice of authority with evidence. In my experience, policemen cannot always be believed, but I had to demonstrate this to the jury.

As I challenged Clements about the details of his evidence and suggested that his men had gone berserk, his protestations about their bravery and the violence of the pickets became more vociferous. He admitted that he had sent in the horses without warning, and when I asked him if he was worried that some of the 6,000 demonstrators might be trampled underfoot by the galloping horses, he replied, ‘Not in the slightest.’

Clements alluded to a restricted-circulation manual of instructions written by members of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) for use by the police in public-order situations. I was thus able to call for the manual to be disclosed: only a few pages were shown to us, but this move enabled me to expose the premeditated nature of their strategy. Clements said that their orders were to ‘disperse the crowd and make arrests of the criminal offenders’, and when I pressed him, he conceded that this didn’t mean just stone-throwers.

‘So no one had the right to be there?’ I asked.

‘That is right,’ he replied.

In one short answer Clements had summed up the situation in our so-called liberal democracy: simply by deciding that a protest is not in the public interest, the police can criminalise ordinary people for demonstrating in support of their basic rights.

Then I asked him about the case of Russell Broomhead, who had been beaten about the head with a truncheon by an officer said to be PC Martin. The assault was shown on national television, and yet despite the fact that Russell had sustained severe injuries, he was later charged with riot, just for being at Orgreave. According to Clements, ‘If he was in that situation, he probably was rioting.’

Over many days I cross-examined Clements about several issues, such as the wall of reverberating noise caused by the police banging on shields to intimidate the miners; the fact that the police spat at, punched and kicked those arrested; the use of illegal head-locks to restrain prisoners, which leads to the blood circulation being stopped. There was a particularly shocking stretch of film shot by an amateur cameraman/miner who had hidden himself up a tree close to the action. Unbeknown to the riot squads below, he captured a sequence depicting a snatch-squad of two or three officers who targeted a perfectly innocent picket, pinned him to the ground and throttled him with a tight lock around his neck with an arm and truncheon. As they maintained this hold, he was dragged protesting along the ground towards the police lines while being audibly abused by the police. Other issues included the deployment of officers without identification (once again a feature of G20, 2009); the arsenal of weapons produced in court, which Clements insisted were ‘an important element in the day’s happenings’, but not one of which was mentioned in his statement, nor was any evidence of their use ever produced; the case of photographer Lesley Boulton, who was famously protecting her head as a mounted policeman swung at her with his yardstick – she was calling for help for a seriously injured miner – and nearly had her skull smashed in the process. And much, much more.

I had got Clements to build up a picture of his version of events for the jury: that Scargill had provoked his men at 8 a.m.; that the use of horses (which advanced at a walk) was justified; that deploying riot police in ‘snatch-squads’ was necessary because, following a ‘push’ of ten minutes against the police cordon, there was a hail of missiles; that by 8.20 a.m. ‘the sky was black with missiles’; and so on.

In his book Bernard Jackson describes how Clements spoke as if this was reality, and not merely opinion: ‘But I knew something which Mr Clements didn’t know. I knew that a trap was being set for him, and with each answer he was getting himself deeper and deeper into a morass from which he would find it impossible to escape. I could not wait for the trap to be sprung.’³

And that afternoon I sprang it.

I asked that the jury be shown the police’s own video of the day. This came as bit of a bombshell to Clements and the court. They knew of the film’s existence, but thought the defence didn’t.

The first videotape, timed and recorded from the roof of a building behind the police lines, was as clear as daylight, and contradicted all of Clements’s assertions. There were hardly any pickets at 7.30 a.m.; there was no action by miners, no stones, nothing. In fact it was really boring.

Tape 2 showed a build-up of pickets, but the scene was still peaceful. The occasional plastic bottle was seen floating through the air, but mostly miners were standing around, shirtless, talking, and the sky was definitely not black with missiles. At 8 a.m. Arthur Scargill was nowhere to be seen; the ‘appalling crush’ against police lines was timed at fifty-eight seconds, and was no more than the sort of ritual push that happened on all picket lines, more symbolic than effective. But then suddenly the cordon parted and the horses cantered out, straight at the gathered protesters.

There it was on the police video: no barrage of stones, just horses charging into a crowd of unarmed men; there followed the assault of the short-shield officers; then the sound of clapping from the police cordon, as miners tried to carry away their bleeding and injured comrades. It was shocking.

In court, it was some consolation for the defendants to see the disintegration of Clements under fire – and then he dug another hole for himself by insisting that Arthur Scargill had slipped down a bank and was ‘not hit by anything carried by an officer’. When I was dramatically able to reveal a photograph showing the attack by two policemen with short shields on Arthur and those around him, I felt my job had been done for the moment and I sat down.

The trial continued as the prosecution began to put the individual cases against the fifteen in the dock, and as the weeks went by a pattern began to emerge of at least two officers to each defendant being arrested, and statements being dictated by members of the Serious Crime Squad to ensure that a case was foolproof. But there were some more surprises to come . . .

Bryan Moreland was a thin, worried man from Durham who had been terrified by mounted police chasing fleeing pickets and had been struck by a long-shield-carrying officer. He had lost three stone waiting for the trial and his marriage had collapsed under the pressure.

Bryan’s lawyer, Vera Baird (later to join Tooks and then become Solicitor General in Gordon Brown’s government), suggested that there was strong evidence that the officer concerned may have forged a signature on a fellow officer’s statement. When the incriminating statement was found to be missing over lunch, the judge was furious and the game was up: a few days later the case against Bryan was suddenly dropped. There was huge relief all round at this decision, and it gave hope to defendants and barristers alike that maybe we were beginning to expose the frailty and falsity of the prosecution case.

On 18 June 1985, as the trial crawled forward, we celebrated the anniversary of the Battle for Orgreave with a party that Arthur and Anne Scargill attended. There was a cake, and an excellent wig-and-gown impersonation of Ed Rees, one of the barristers. Bernard made a moving speech on behalf of the defendants, insisting that their faith in their leadership had not diminished: the fight had been right, and now they were confident that their great legal team would make sure that justice was done. I looked across at Gareth Peirce, solicitor and friend, and caught her eye – then held my breath and, although not a believing man, prayed that he was right.

The remaining individual cases were put by the prosecution, who accused the miners generally of erecting barricades and wires across the lane up to the village, of hurling bricks, and so on. Miners are not angels, and by the time the protesters had been driven up the field by short-shield units, been charged at by horses and witnessed their comrades being beaten and battered, they instinctively retaliated. By 1.30 p.m. on that day, stones were being hurled at the police, and although I don’t condone it, who could blame them? As for tripwires and mallets and a catalogue of other weapons, there was no proof whatsoever of them.

‘Geordie’ Foster was an amiable, easy-going guy accused of throwing half a brick. In fact the photos show in his hand a pork pie, which he’d just bought in the village – and very annoyed he was not to be able to eat it. Nevertheless he was accused of riot.

Gradually the claims of the police grew more and more hollow, and the recurring themes of falsehood and cover-up began to pall, but fortunately there was another moment of light relief.

Greg Taylor was an exuberant Welsh barrister representing gentle Bill Greenaway, fifty-one years old, who had had his wrist fractured in two places, and James O’Brien, who had a terrible gash over his eye from a truncheon blow: a photograph showed the blood streaming down his face and torso as if from a war wound. Both incidents occurred over the bridge near the village of Orgreave, where miners had finally fled to escape the marauding police.

A number of officers claimed that they had been injured by bricks thrown by miners which had bounced off the ground. PC Kearns from Merseyside, ex-army service in Northern Ireland, claimed that he found Orgreave ‘frightening’ and reported a bouncing half brick hitting his wrist. Another officer, Sergeant Smith, provided a graphic description of the propensities of a bouncing brick which was nothing short of Olympian. Akin to a knight in shining armour he advanced carrying a long shield, wearing padded gloves, a body protector, shin-pads, a cricket box and a riot helmet. Lo and behold a full house brick ricocheted off a nearby long shield onto the ground and bounced up underneath his own long shield hitting him in the groin with such force that he fell to the ground.

Greg put this convoluted sequence to the test. He entered court bearing a bright orange carrier bag containing his experimental equipment. From the bag he withdrew an ordinary house brick and in his lilting Welsh accent put the following questions to the officer: ‘I thought you might be interested, we’ve been doing a little practising in the car park. We’ve been throwing bricks, full house bricks and do you know what? No matter how hard we throw them or at what angle we can’t get them to bounce. Now there’s interesting, isn’t it? But just in case, we threw some half bricks . . .’ He produced one from the bag. ‘And would you believe it, they won’t bounce either. We’re not having much luck with bouncing bricks.’ Laughter in court! An offer to bowl one down the aisle in court towards the witness box to finally prove the point was smartly declined.

Then Paddy O’Connor, representing George Foulds, accused of stone throwing, asked another officer, Sergeant Hill, under cross-examination whether he had noticed anything distinctive about his client. He hadn’t. When asked what George had said, the officer maintained that he had stated ‘I ain’t been throwing or owt’. Paddy then asked George to stand and say something, but the prosecution and judge quickly intervened to stop him. We all knew that George was a Scot with such a broad accent that none of us could understand a word he said. A Yorkshire ‘owt’ would never have passed his lips. Eventually the jury would have heard George in the witness box and the game would have been up.

Another day Vera Baird, a strikingly tall figure in court, wished to demonstrate the incredibility of some police evidence, and when she came to cross-examine one of the officers who had been dressed in riot gear on the day, she carefully took him through what he had to wear and carry, putting on the equipment herself. First she placed on her head a large blue riot helmet, with a visor covering her face; then she produced a full-length riot shield strapped to her left arm, behind which she stood; and in her right hand she wielded a truncheon. Under these conditions she could barely see the witness box, let alone identify anyone, run after them and arrest them, with both her hands already full. It appeared to the jury from this simple exposé that officers who claimed to identify and pursue rioters in this gear were talking out of the back of their helmets.

Still the trial continued, and Yvette filmed the defendants for the documentary for Channel 4, taking them back to Orgreave for the first time since that day to re-create what had happened to all of them, which was simultaneously a traumatic and cathartic experience. Young David Bell had had his leg broken by the police; Dave Coston from County Durham was watching, horrified, as many miners were forced down the steep railway sidings onto the live railway tracks below, when he was ‘stabbed’ in the kidneys with a truncheon; Eric Newbiggin had been beaten so badly with a truncheon that his skull had been fractured; sixteen-year-old Kevin Marshall was pushed onto a car bonnet and struck by an officer, then dragged by one leg, hopping on the other, as he was arrested by the men in blue. There was so much independent photographic evidence, from photographers who had taken risks to record the events, that it was possible to verify these attacks, and it became impossible for the police not to be revealed as fabricators.

Over the weeks and months Yvette developed a friendship with some of the miners, which has lasted to this day, but it was a nerve-racking experience – filming, hearing evidence day after day, living and breathing the events over and over again. In particular, the interview that Yvette undertook with Arthur Critchlow on the steps of the ‘police holding centre’ is distressing, compelling television. Arthur had been in hospital for two weeks and had to have fluid drained from his brain, following a cosh on the back of his head by a policeman. He is such an honest, brave man, and it is painful to watch him sobbing as he relives the humiliation that he and his family suffered at the hands of the authorities – whenever I see it, the footage still leaves me crying along with him. But Arthur is proud too, and he was determined that his story should be told and his actions vindicated: ‘When my children know I’ve been to prison, they won’t be ashamed. They’ll hold their heads up high and say: “Our dad’s Arthur Critchlow, and he fought for what he knew was right.” ’

On 17 July 1985, when this epic trial was just two days short of a half-century, the prosecution caved in. Undoubtedly the jury had come to see that the defendants in the dock were ordinary men fighting for their livelihoods, and that the police evidence about organised violence was simply not true. The final straw came when a policeman who was about to give evidence passed the Orgreave plant on the road into Sheffield as he drove to court – and had to turn back. Word went round that he was ‘sick at the sight of Orgreave’.

Eventually Bernard Jackson and his colleagues received damages for wrongful arrest and malicious prosecution, but their lives had been traumatised and their pits were duly closed.

Bryan Moreland lost his health; some – such as David Bell – lost their lives prematurely. Who knows what ordeals these men really experienced? They were not perfect, but they were honest, decent men. And what of the police who perpetuated these acts? Not a single one was disciplined or charged with assault arising out of the events on 18 June 1984.

What was deeply shocking was the role of the media in the strike. On 20 June 1991, Tony Benn, MP, asked a question in the House of Commons:

Is the Leader of the House aware that the award of £500,000 or more in damages and costs to thirty-nine miners who were injured, maliciously prosecuted and in other ways damaged by the South Yorkshire police is unprecedented in the history of British law? Does he recall that on 19 June 1984 the then Prime Minister and the then Home Secretary, who is now a Commissioner in Brussels, described what happened as ‘mob rule’, that the then Home Secretary said that those charged with riot might face life imprisonment, that the case was tested in the courts and that the courts threw out the charge of riot, and that the men were proved innocent?

Is the Leader of the House aware that the other day when the settlement was made it was clear that in so far as there was violence, it was on the part of the police, and it was admitted during the riot trial that the BBC transposed the film to show stones being thrown before the cavalry charge although the police video confirmed otherwise? Indeed, the ministerial responsibility for what happened was established on 22 July 1985 when I made public the text of the ‘public order tactical operations manual’ which the Home Secretary had approved. This is a matter of ministerial responsibility on which the Home Secretary should make a full statement.⁴

But I don’t think he ever did.

This trial was only part of a much bigger picture. Similar charges were brought in relation to other days at Orgreave, involving a total of nearly 150 miners. Between January and September 1985 not one defendant was convicted of such allegations and not one police officer was disciplined, let alone charged.

These outcomes received nothing like the banner headlines that blazoned the original events. An honest and dignified community had been vindicated. But the much-acclaimed victory of capital, and the demise of union power, has been a hollow and short-lived affair. It heralded unmitigated privatisation, untrammelled deregulation, and the growth of a society built on asset-stripping, self-interest and a culture of unashamed bonanza bonuses. Regularly described now – twenty-five years on – as a shadow economy of sub-prime mortgages, unsecured credit and derivatives, it apparently went undetected by those who took up where Margaret Thatcher left off. The damage is immense and is wreaking havoc among the working population with ever-rising levels of unemployment.

None of this is the result of unseen and unpredictable international forces, but rather it is the consequence of deliberate policies aimed at bolstering the institutions of capital, and readily explains why striking miners were demonised as the ‘enemy within’. Lest anyone should doubt this analysis, just take a look at the Ridley Report, which had been commissioned by the Tories in opposition, and which had drawn up contingency plans over ten years before the strike for a premeditated confrontation and defeat of the miners.

It was in the midst of a spiralling economic downturn on 11 March 2009 at the House of Commons that some of us who had been closely involved with the miners’ strike launched a new People’s Charter for Change.⁵ It set out six policy priorities concerning a new model for the finance industry and an end to expenditure on war and weapons; new jobs with an emphasis on green technology; an end to half-baked privatisation programmes; renationalisation; affordable social housing; free education for all students; and equality in the workplace. It is an attempt to reset the agenda and the objectives for a future marked by social justice, rather than the excesses of market indulgence.

As for me, I was privileged to be made an honorary lifetime member of the National Union of Mineworkers. I had got to know Arthur and Anne Scargill very well, and admired their tenacity and courage. Both had been subjected to the full panoply of state surveillance and pressure, coupled with outrageous and scandalous claims in the tabloid press, yet they stood firm – and Arthur was totally right in his predictions about what would happen to the mining industry. I represented him on various occasions and was impressed by his leadership qualities and his outstanding oratory, and as far as I am concerned he has definitely earned his place in history.

Unsurprisingly, my association with Arthur resulted in a few snide comments in the legal profession – in some quarters I was regarded as some kind of armed revolutionary – and it was at about this time that I ran into trouble with the Bar on account of someone’s animosity getting the better of them. A serious but false accusation was made that I had in effect been fabricating defences for miners and coercing other barristers to fall into line, and in addition it was suggested that I was ‘touting’ for work.

The allegations surfaced at the very time I commenced the defence of miners charged with riot at Orgreave, and I felt that this was no coincidence: the stress of knowing that a major investigation into my behaviour was taking place would, it was doubtless hoped by some, destabilise my work. This matter took more than two years to resolve, by which time the strike and the trial were over, and no charges were preferred – and I subsequently learned from one of the investigators, a former police officer, that they had found no truth in any of the allegations, just as I had proclaimed from the start.

One of the most important lessons I learned from the experiences of the miners in the face of aggressive public-order policing tactics and policies was the need for vigilant independent observers, such as Policewatch in Sheffield. Without the benefits of their accounts (written and taped) and the prolific photographic material from professional and amateur bystanders, it would have been far more difficult to challenge and controvert police testimony during the trials. As a result, it occurred to me that the protection of the right to collective protest required a proactive approach pioneered originally by Liberty, under its former name of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), when it was monitoring the activities of the black shirts and the fascists in East London in the 1930s. With others I helped to establish a voluntary ad hoc group which we called LOG: Legal Observers Group. It was intended to provide a service to those organising protests, demonstrations, marches and picket lines. We recruited qualified and trainee lawyers working in pairs, in fluorescent marked bibs, to monitor police action in a systematic way. On-the-spot legal advice was available, together with cards setting out the participants’ legal rights and telephone numbers of on-call solicitors. In this way, one observer kept an eye on proceedings, maintained contact with headquarters and compiled an end-of-day report, whilst the other recorded events of interest either in writing or photographically.

One of the first occasions this idea was put into practice was for the dispute between Fleet Street printers and Rupert Murdoch’s News International in 1986. It was the second protracted and bitter struggle to challenge Thatcher’s industrial legislation. The scenes outside the new Wapping plant were exceptionally violent, with 1,262 arrests and 410 police injuries over the course of a year.⁶ The police were accused of being heavy-handed and aggressive in dealing with strikers and residents alike. I witnessed this at first hand on more than one occasion when I attended as a legal observer.

Yvette was pregnant when we went the first time; we had no idea it was going to turn into a dangerous scrum, otherwise she would obviously have stayed away. It was extremely scary being suddenly thrust into a maelstrom of hundreds of protesters and unrestrained riot police, some on horseback, who rode straight at us. Had I not unceremoniously shoved Yvette into the gateway of a block of flats, we would undoubtedly have been trampled under the advancing hooves. I rushed Yvette to the house of an acquaintance who I remembered lived in Cable Street – ironically where there were confrontations in the 1930s between the Jewish and East End working-class communities and Oswald Mosley’s Fascist ‘blackshirts’. This friend kindly took in a shaken Yvette, while I went back out to try and observe and record the frightening events taking place. Our endeavours worked well and there developed quite a large and active network of members of LOG. There seems to be an equivalent today – advice on setting up such a group can, of course, be found on the Web.⁷

It’s strange, and worrying, how history seems to repeat itself. In 2006 I was approached by a young group of independent documentary-makers to participate in a film uncannily entitled Taking Liberties, the same name as Yvette’s film in 1984. This later film catalogues the destruction of civil liberties by the Blair/Brown government, and the opening sequence so mirrors the one in the first documentary that it makes my heart sink.

Two decades on from the miners’ strike, the sequence is of a police roadblock set up to deter protesters against the use of American bases in the Iraq war from reaching the US Air Force base at Fairford in Gloucestershire. Like the miners, the protesters are turned back, this time imprisoned in their buses and escorted by police outriders all the way to London – a journey of several hours, allowing no stops even for basic necessities.

The similarities are chilling. Have we come so far from the roots of our democracy that now state interference allows such humiliation to be routinely inflicted on our own citizens? In the case of both the miners and the Fairford protesters, the police action was unlawful and the House of Lords gave an important ruling supporting the right to peaceful demonstration. That, of course, received far less publicity than the original roadblock.

Most recently in April 2009 these issues surfaced again during the Metropolitan Police handling of the G20 protests. Perhaps the most significant aspect of this concerns the Met’s public statements about what had happened before they realised that there were photographers capturing numerous incidents on the streets. It appears that most of the images which then appeared on our television screens were from people who happened to be nearby at the time. In the case of Ian Tomlinson, a news vendor who died, the initial response was that there had been no contact with police. The second response was that there had been some contact but it had been carried out in order to move Mr Tomlinson out of danger. Once photographic material became available neither of these versions could be sustained and subsequently an officer was interviewed in relation to possible charges of manslaughter. Again this demonstrates the absolute necessity for independent monitoring and observation.

It is utterly reprehensible, therefore, that in 2008 the government should have pushed through Parliament provisions within the Counter-Terrorism Act which potentially outlaw taking photographs of officers on duty. The new offence contained within Section 76 is worded as follows: ‘eliciting, publishing or communicating information on members of the armed forces, intelligence services and police officers which is likely to be useful to someone committing or preparing an act of terrorism’.

This provision went largely unnoticed and received scant public debate. It is a thoroughly oppressive measure because of its unlimited scope and because it does not require any intention to assist ‘someone committing or preparing an act of terrorism’. For example, were I to photograph a member of the Household Cavalry standing guard outside a Royal palace, and then put it on YouTube, this could undoubtedly be ‘useful’ according to the section. Clearly it is arguable that under this provision the police are empowered to prevent the photos being taken in the first place, by confiscating the camera. This is not a matter of concern only to members of the media, but to all of us.

Tooks Court was an important resource during the miners’ and printworkers’ disputes, providing high-quality defence for many hundreds of strikers. But the set was not designed just to give human-rights advice; it was to have another function as well: to bring together like-minded, caring people to form a community, ending the splendid isolation of old-style sets.

Getting this mix off the ground on a day-to-day basis cannot be achieved by barristers, who are usually not sitting behind their desks every day of the week. They are often away from chambers for long periods, doing cases in far-flung places, and we rely heavily upon a team of people – clerks – who are there all the time: to pick up the phone, field emails, slot cases into the diary, negotiate fees, right through to finding lost items of clothing or (in my case) a collapsible bike: I swore blind that I’d left it in chambers for safety. One clerk, Lennox, checked every frame of the CCTV, while Kieran and Natasha scoured the locality. I still maintained that it must be there somewhere, until weeks later while walking to Farringdon Tube station I found myself admiring an identical red Brompton – same pannier, same bell, same lights. As I dreamed of past pleasures, I slowly realised that it was mine, chained by me to a lamp post in a rush to catch a train. Explaining to the clerks how the bike had suddenly reappeared was like watching judicial expressions of disbelief in the Court of Appeal on a bad day.

Fortunately, the clerks have been at Tooks a long time, most of them for the best part of fifteen years, and they are used to my moments of madness. Martin Parker, the senior clerk, is a tall, slim, stoical Scot – and he has to be stoical when you consider the range of demands placed upon him 24/7. He and I have been Arsenal fans for years, but I think we’ll get over it soon . . . He also plays a mean guitar. His quiet authority is matched by his attire, and as he arrives each day – in a black wide-brimmed trilby hat, a neat overcoat concealing a crisp shirt underneath, with a pair of imposing braces – he could be mistaken for Clint Eastwood. He has kept the helm steady through thick and thin with a cool nerve. He would make a brilliant poker player.

The team alongside him is loyal and fun. You need a sense of humour, otherwise the job would drive you nutty. Lee Wakeling has a taxing task, literally: he deals with the fees and finances. Without him keeping an eye on everything, we would all dry up with worry. The vast majority of our work is publicly funded and, quite rightly, every minute expended on a case has to be accounted for and explained. Lee ensures we forget nothing. But, like all the other clerks, he often works well beyond the call of duty. Anxious about the welfare of that wandering red bike, he personally drove a hired van to ensure that, along with other personal effects, it got to The Hague for me to use during a case I was undertaking for over a year.

Lee sits opposite Carol Thomas in the ultra-modern premises we recently leased, instead of the cramped, Dickensian conditions we endured off Chancery Lane. Finding somewhere upon which everyone could agree was like cooking by committee: it takes for ever and you’re never sure that you’ll be able to recognise the finished product. After six years of tortuous searching there was unanimity for a striking conversion in a small street off the Farringdon Road in Clerkenwell – a little to the left of the Guardian, as we liked to describe it. Originally the building housed stables for the workhorses used in Smithfield. Now it’s just unbridled lawyers, cheek by jowl with graphic designers and motorcycle couriers. The building has been cleverly redesigned around an atrium, so that every working room has natural daylight from above, as well as large windows. This futuristic architecture provoked one newspaper cartoon that depicted me as Captain Kirk astride the Starship Enterprise.

Carol is hugely experienced as a clerk and she has been a friend for many years. After a spell abroad in the West Indies, she returned in 1993 at exactly our moment of greatest need, after a series of rapidly changing senior clerks. Knowing everything there is to know about the mysteries of clerking and who to contact to get things done, she took on the task. Since then Tooks has been on a settled path, with her successor Martin and twelve other clerks, while Carol has taken over the coordination of the many extramural activities the set undertakes and has helped us create a unique and vibrant ambience. Throughout the years, I have kept in mind the example set by Anthony Masters, the writer I met right back at the start of my career. At the heart of his endeavours was a belief that literature and the arts are gateways to a better quality of life for everyone. This was the stimulus for his initiatives, aimed particularly at motivating children and harnessing their natural creative abilities. ‘Book Explosion’ workshops and ‘Event Operas’ were spontaneous enactments of real-life events, which he staged using merely found objects.

By 2009 I like to think we have definitely achieved a unique kind of community. But not only in the way you might imagine.

Look up, not down. That is what I try to do when I am walking around the streets of London (though sometimes it’s a bit tricky, given the potholes, and is certainly to be avoided while riding a bicycle). There is a fascination and an intrigue in the world above our heads – always some fresh perspective or insight to behold. The blackbird riding a moving CCTV camera; the bicycle tyre looped over the top of a thirty-foot-high lamp post; a small tree struggling to grow between the roof-tiles; two window cleaners sitting in their cradle between floors, ten storeys up, drinking tea and reading newspapers.

This exercise in inquisitive observation and enquiry has been part of my daily life since an art teacher at Highgate insisted on making his pupils aware of the environment we moved in, and especially aware of the extraordinary visual pollution with which we put up, and to which we become anaesthetised. A Royal Academician whose Welsh mountain paintings and seascapes are without equal, Kyffin Williams was an inspiration. His work communicates a feeling for the atmosphere of a moment, but he also keeps an acute eye on the smallest detail, which at once lends both depth and life to his pictures. He would get us slovenly lot of schoolboys to describe what we had seen on the way to school: no, not what we had ‘seen’, or what we had looked at – which might be rather obvious – but what needed to be ‘looked for’, and then questioned. He started with things beneath our feet, then moved on to things above our heads. This soon became a competition in the obscure, the outrageous and, sometimes, the fantastical, but it set us thinking, and responding, and for me it led to an entertaining and educative search for differences, for shades, for reflections, and for the unnoticed but enigmatic detail.

This last aspect was at the core of Kyffin’s art. Sadly, he died not long ago, but a perfect example of his talent hangs beside my front door: a simple, almost single continuous-line ink drawing of an elderly Welsh countryman, gently walking off into the distance. Everything one needs to know about the man is in the contours of his cloth cap. This sort of observation is important for all of us, but particularly for lawyers, for while standing back to get the bigger picture may be desirable, the real clue may lie in the tiniest detail.

My early cultural influences opened my eyes and ears to a creative world that was as far from Whetstone as was Mars: Winifred Atwell; Quo Vadis; Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman; The Goons; the British Council 1961 summer arts course in Florence; Stoke Theatre in the Round every Saturday night for £1; the Halle Orchestra . . . and later, with my kids, the Unicorn Theatre and the Little Angel Marionettes in Islington; then, later still, Magritte and Picasso’s Guernica; virtuoso guitarist Antonio Forcione; Northern Broadside’s Cleopatra Off Broadway, with a stunning Ishia Bennison in the title role and a charismatic Barrie Rutter as her Antony; wonderful jazz at the 606 Club in Chelsea.

I am a firm believer that culture, or art in its broadest sense, has the capability to challenge fixed notions and to open people up to fresh possibilities and ideas. The Bar, so often represented as traditional, reserved and conservative in all things, is not often linked in the public mind with the avant-garde, and certainly not with those who produce overtly polemical works or who espouse openly political causes.

It has been a great joy to me, therefore, to have had the opportunity for Tooks Chambers to be a platform for a variety of artists and art projects. Varying widely in media and in approach, the artists involved have included Rasta performance poet Benjamin Zephaniah, who was Poet in Residence sponsored by the Poetry Society at the time of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry and as a result wrote many incredible poems based around our cases in his brilliant anthology Too Black, Too Strong; talented painters Tim Dolby, Gavin Maughfling and Val Clay; a steel band and gospel choir that included our administrator, Sandra; French designer Cyril Bresset’s fabulous fashion show; a celebrity auction for Show Racism the Red Card in sport; a celebration of International Women’s Day with excerpts from The Vagina Monologues; installation art curated by Sarah Strang on the impact of the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes; and a women’s photography collective from Madagascar, whose cameras were bought by Tooks and whose work was displayed during Black History Month. The results of these and other collaborations have been witnessed in chambers by many who have visited us, either as part of their job or as guests at special events.

Apart from inviting members of chambers to see Tooks as a resource for a wider community, these artistic projects have elicited extraordinary responses from all involved. Many barristers have spoken to me of how they have found themselves reappraising their work after seeing others interpret what they do through the prism of art. Visual translations of universal suffering, such as were displayed in Ricky Romain’s exhibition In the Absence of Justice (co­sponsored by Tooks, Bail for Immigration Detainees and Amnesty International), reminded me that we do not work in a vacuum. It can be easy to become lost in the minutiae, to refine a matter down to a tally of bald facts or statistics. This, though, is to lose sight of the very real, human cost of each and every case that is tackled and the necessity of remaining cognisant of the needs, feelings, problems and views of others.

In 2006 I was invited to speak at a fundraiser for the Marine Theatre in Lyme Regis, an event that had surprising and unforeseen consequences, for at the end of the evening I was presented with a file that revealed that my ancestors had actually hailed from Lyme.

It transpires that not only are many Mansfields to be found in the cemetery – including my great-great-great-grandparents Mary and Joseph – but in the Lyme Museum hangs a picture of one of the last ships to be built in the town on the Cobb, by one William Mansfield, a wealthy shipwright. The author John Fowles, in his capacity as Curator of Lyme Museum, wrote a short biography of William.

Uncomfortably for me, however (and not a little ironically, in the light of my stance on human rights), it appears that at the time of writing this book a branch of my family called Manfield (without the ‘s’) occupies Court Hall Farm in Uplyme, which after the Monmouth Rebellion had been put down in 1685 was apparently used as a courtroom during the Bloody Assizes – by none other than the ‘Hanging Judge’ himself, Judge Jeffreys.