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Regional secretary with the National Education Union
A year has passed since Rudd refused to set up an inquiry into Orgreave. This injustice will not stand
RICHARD BURGON on how the miners' strike exposes the class loyalties of the Tories today just as it did then

A YEAR ago this week, the Conservative Home Secretary Amber Rudd announced the government’s refusal to set up a statutory inquiry or independent review into the brutality visited upon striking miners at the Orgreave coke depot during the 1984/5 miners’ strike.

This anniversary of the government’s shameful denial of justice to striking miners got me thinking back and reflecting — not just over the last year but back through the decades.

In the time since I was first elected as an MP back in May 2015, I have never seen Conservative MPs so vitriolic, so enraged and so unmasked in their own class-conscious politics as they were when the subject of Orgreave and the 1984/5 miners’ strike was discussed in Parliament.

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