Daniel Finkelstein’s recent column in The Times, objecting to the long-overdue Orgreave inquiry, is not a defence of liberal democracy, as he claims. It is a defence of impunity. It is an effort to preserve a mythology: that the miners’ strike of 1984–85 was not a battle between the working class and an authoritarian state, but an illegitimate uprising put down by the forces of law and order. To do this, Finkelstein marshals a narrative of inversion, in which Arthur Scargill becomes the usurper of democratic norms, the miners the aggressors, and the police the heroic defenders of “all of us”. It is an astonishing act of historical gaslighting, and it should be named as such.
Finkelstein’s argument is stitched together with threadbare contradictions. He concedes that police violence occurred, that evidence was fabricated, and that prosecutions collapsed due to lies told under oath. Yet in the next breath, he insists that the inquiry into these events is a “nakedly political exercise”, a witch-hunt launched by the left to rewrite history. One might ask: if the history is so well known (if the facts of police wrongdoing are so clear) why fear an inquiry? Why object to the institutional affirmation of what he admits happened?
Because, for Finkelstein, this is not about facts. It is about the maintenance of political authority. What offends him is not the violence of Orgreave, but the challenge an inquiry poses to the legitimacy of the Thatcherite order. The miners’ strike was not, as he claims, “thrust on to the rest of us” by a reckless union leadership. It was forced upon mining communities by a government that had planned confrontation in advance, stockpiled coal, closed pits without consultation, and armed the police with new powers of militarised containment. The NUM, for all its faults, was fighting a defensive battle against a state that had decided to break the back of industrial militancy. One that saw trade union power as incompatible with neoliberal transformation.
Finkelstein’s line that “Scargill did not even really mean it to be yielded to, since his intention was actually to depose the government” is an absurd attempt to reframe industrial action as coup d’état. But this is the trick: equating collective resistance with illegitimate revolt. In Finkelstein’s worldview, the free movement of labour is sacred (so long as it doesn’t cross a picket line), but the freedom to withdraw labour (to act collectively, to disrupt capital) is a threat to democracy itself.
It is telling that Finkelstein compares the picket lines at Orgreave to the violent far-right demonstrations outside migrant hotels today. Here we see the ideological logic laid bare: all disruption is equal, all protest potentially illegitimate. Whether the protest is by striking miners fighting to save their industry and communities, or by fascist thugs hurling threats at refugees, the threat is the same: disorder. It is a textbook example of false equivalence, and it is politically grotesque.
The comparison is not just intellectually lazy; it is politically reactionary. The miners were not targeting the vulnerable; they were resisting a programme of state-sponsored deindustrialisation that devastated entire regions. To collapse that resistance into the same moral category as far-right street intimidation is to flatten history, morality, and politics into a blur of liberal fear: fear of the unruly, the collective, the angry poor.
Finkelstein’s defence of Thatcher’s government, and his glorification of police action as necessary to “defend the freedom of all of us”, relies on a bourgeois fantasy: that the law is neutral, that the police are mere functionaries of public order, and that elections alone confer legitimacy. But this ignores what the strike revealed, what Orgreave made visible. That the law, in class society, is always already on the side of capital. That the police are not neutral arbiters but instruments of social control. That parliamentary democracy, unmoored from industrial democracy, becomes a mechanism for crushing dissent.
To revisit Orgreave, then, is not an indulgence. It is a necessity. It is a demand for justice, not only for those beaten, arrested, and smeared, but for a historical record that has been buried beneath 40 years of triumphalist Thatcherism. What Finkelstein calls “sectional justice” is, in truth, the only kind of justice that exists under class society: justice wrested from the hands of the powerful, by the victims of their violence.
The miners were not perfect. The strike was divisive, uneven, and marred by strategic errors, not least the lack of a national ballot. But to reduce it, as Finkelstein does, to mob rule and economic sabotage is to erase the social context of the struggle. It is to ignore the decades of economic neglect, the deliberate dismantling of organised labour, and the moral economy that held mining communities together.
When Finkelstein says that the inquiry “serves no one but Labour”, what he means is that it serves no one like him. It serves those who remember the helicopters overhead, the dogs on the picket line, the kettling before kettling had a name. It serves those who still carry the trauma of 1984 in their bodies and on their estates. It serves history. Not the history written by the victors, but the history lived by the defeated.
And that, precisely, is what Finkelstein fears. That the story might be retold. That the state might be unmasked. That the line between lawful authority and organised brutality might be redrawn. Not by party propagandists, but by the historical record itself.
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