Accounts differ about how Scargill was hurt

Press, 20 June 1984, Page 10

Accounts differ about how Scargill was hurt

NZPA-Reuter London

The British miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill, was in hospital with head, arm, and leg injuries yesterday after clashes between the police and pickets as Britain’s bitter coal strike entered its 100th day.

More than 80 police and miners were injured in the most violent battles so far to stop coal lorries leaving the Orgreave coking-plant, near the Yorkshire city of Sheffield. Miners set cars and barricades ablaze and hurled a barrage of bricks and bottles at lines of police armed with truncheons and plastic riot shields. Mounted police charged in return. The police said that they had been outnumbered two-to-one by some 6000 pickets. Almost 30 officers were hurt and 100 miners arrested in the fiercest hand-to-hand combat seen on the picket lines.

Mr Scargill, president of the 180,000-strong National Union of Mineworkers, was one of 54 miners admitted to hospital with what a spokesman said were slight head, arm, and leg injuries. But there were conflicting reports on how he suffered the injuries. “This guy hit the back of my head with a bloody riot shield and knocked me to the ground,” Mr Scargill said. But the police said that he had slipped and knocked himself out on an old railway sleeper. Speaking from his hospital bed, Mr Scargill rejected the police version. “I don’t think I would be in here if I had just fallen over a sleeper,” he said. One senior officer said that Mr Scargill’s presence on the picket lines had been provocative and that it had been a miracle no-one was killed.

two miners have already died — one in an accident

concerning a coke lorry leaving Orgreave — since the strike over plans to close 20 pits and axe 20,000 jobs began in March. It has halted two-thirds of the country’s 175 pits, and a stockbroker Simon and Coates put the cost yesterday to the Government at £ 1 billion ($1.3 billion) — of which almost 5 per cent had gone on policing.

Television cameras showed yesterday the police truncheoning several miners to the ground, and South Yorkshire police chief, Peter Wright, said that they could risk disciplinary action. “No provocation can really justify unnecessary and abusive violence,” he said.

The Opposition Labour Leader, Mr Neil Kinnock, described the scenes as horrifying and urged Government action. The Leftwinger, Tony Benn, asserted that the dispute was reaching “civil war proportions.”