After years hidden away, Oldham’s memorial to six local volunteers who died fighting fascism in the Spanish civil war has been restored to public view, marking both a victory for campaigners and a renewed tribute to the town’s proud International Brigade heritage, says ROB HARGREAVES
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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
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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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PETER LAZENBY is fascinated by a book of cartoons that shows how newspaper cartoonists were employed to, on the one hand, denigrade and, on the other, to defend the miners’ strike of 1984-85
Remembering KEN CAPSTICK, vice-president of the National Union of Mineworkers Yorkshire Area