Today’s announcement that the Independent Police Complaints Commission will not be investigating police conduct at Orgreave should come as no surprise to anyone who has looked in to the IPCC in the past. Their handling of complaints generally is toothless, as you would expect from an organisation that investigates itself for wrongdoing. Any major incidents of policy malpractice have usually come about through investigative journalism or whistleblowing. The IPCC never declared the police institutionally racist over Stephen Lawrence, the MacPherson report did. The IPCC didn’t uncover police corruption over Hillsborough, it was an independent panel. In much the same way the Israel never finds any wrongdoing in the actions of Israel, the Police never find any wrongdoing in the actions of the Police.

Orgreave was the great symbolic clash between the miners and the police, or rather between striking workers and the establishment, who used all the tools at their disposal; MI5, the military, the BBC and the police; politicising these services and turning them against British people who were exercising their democratic and human right to assemble and protect jobs. Special Branch, GCHQ and the NSA were utilised to spy on the National Union of Miners, agents provocateurs employed dirty tricks, slush funds were incorporated, false allegations were made regarding the financial dealings of mining leaders, forgeries were produced as evidence, British overseas enemies were rolled out as supposed backers of the NUM – all at the behest of a Prime Minister who viewed ordinary working men as “the enemy within”. Thatcher got a taste for war in the Falklands and was now practicing class war.

The refusal of the IPCC to investigate is laughable when put alongside the following information: 95 workers were arrested and charged for a range of issues “crimes” including unlawful assembly and riot after Orgreave. All charges were dropped and lawsuits were brought against the police for assault, unlawful arrest and malicious prosecution. South Yorkshire Police paid £425,000 compensation and £100,000 in legal costs to 39 workers in an out of court settlement. Settling out of court is possibly the only thing that stopped a full prosecution of individual officers, but the compensation shows that the police knew who was really culpable, who the aggressor really was and who were the victims.

The BBC have yet to admit to their own role in misleading the public over Orgreave. To this day they refuse to investigate or apologise for switching the footage on the news that evening to make it look like striking workers had charged the police, when in fact the original charge came from police on horseback towards miners who were peacefully demonstrating. The BBC admits a “mistake” but not a deliberate attempt to obfuscate or mislead. For footage to be reversed in the days of film it would have to be cut and re-edited, that doesn’t happen by mistake. Sadly, was we all now know, this isn’t the BBC’s worst moment from the 1980s which appeared rife with corruption, cover-ups and child abuse.

Now of course, the Police are facing their own series of cuts. Once it would have been anathema for chief police officers to boo and jeer a Tory Home Office Minister but this is what has been happening in recent years as the cuts bite. The police always thought they were the protected species amid Tory politics and ideology. They thought, if we break strikes, club workers and make it impossible for people to picket then we’ll be alright – not so. The police are now experiencing the kind of harsh neo-liberal “modernisation” that other public services have gone through and expect support from those same trade unions they infiltrated under-cover and undermined. Perhaps the Niemoller poem should be rewritten with the following epilogue – and then they came for the police, and there was no one left to speak.