[2][3][4][5] Journalist Alastair Stewart has characterised it as "a defining and ghastly moment" that "changed, forever, the conduct of industrial relations and how this country functions as an economy and as a democracy".

[7] Historian Tristram Hunt has described the confrontation as "almost medieval in its choreography ... at various stages a siege, a battle, a chase, a rout and, finally, a brutal example of legalised state violence".

[12][13] Gareth Peirce, who acted as solicitor for some of the pickets, said that the charge of riot had been used "to make a public example of people, as a device to assist in breaking the strike", while Michael Mansfield called it "the worst example of a mass frame-up in this country this century".

[12][16][17][18] Following the 2016 inquest verdict into the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, previously censored documents suggesting links between the actions of senior SYP officers at both incidents were published.

Bill Sirs of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (ISTC) rejected such calls on the grounds that industrial action by steelworkers at the integrated complexes could incapacitate the rolling mills and billet forges, and cause job losses.

Mick McGahey, the deputy leader of the NUM, was particularly concerned about the picketing of the Ravenscraig steelworks in Scotland, which he had campaigned to keep open, and negotiated agreements to maintain supplies of coal to the plant.

[31] An agreement between the NUM and ISTC over deliveries of 15,700 tonnes of coal per week to Scunthorpe broke down after an explosion in the Queen Mary blast furnace at the plant on 21 May 1984.

Attempts by the ISTC to persuade the NUM to deliver more coal did not bring immediate results, with the divisional official Roy Bishop writing on both the physical dangers to the workers by the Queen Mary and the possibility of irreversible damage to the furnace.

[36][37][38][39] Closure of the Saltley works secured victory for the NUM and nine days later the Conservative government of Edward Heath agreed to meet the union's demands.

[42] In addition, events in the early 1980s, such as the national steel strike of 1980 and the riots in inner-city areas such as Brixton and Toxteth, had led police forces to train officers to deal with mass protests differently.

In Maltby, roughly 6 miles (9.7 km) from Orgreave, a large group of young mineworkers besieged the town's police station on Saturday, 9 June.

[46] Speaking at a well-attended rally in nearby Wakefield on Sunday 17 June, Scargill made an impassioned plea to close Orgreave with mass picketing.

[1] When the pickets surged forward at the arrival of the first convoy of lorries, SYP Assistant Chief Constable Anthony Clement ordered a mounted charge against them.

[59] Writing for The Guardian in 1985, Gareth Peirce said that the events at Orgreave "revealed that in this country we now have a standing army available to be deployed against gatherings of civilians whose congregation is disliked by senior police officers.

It is answerable to no one; it is trained in tactics which have been released to no one, but which include the deliberate maiming and injuring of innocent persons to disperse them, in complete violation of the law.

After the 2012 report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel, NUM leader Chris Kitchen called for the investigation into the force's practices to be widened to cover the Orgreave clashes.

[53] The programme reexamined the evidence that the SYP had deliberately attempted to co-ordinate arrest statements in order to charge the miners with riot.

[67] A Labour MP, Helen Jones, responded in the House of Commons by expressing her "deep concern", saying that the decision "calls into question whether the IPCC is fit for purpose".

The tragedy of this failure is that not only have those miners who were arrested been denied the justice and vindication that would come from such an inquiry it meant that an early opportunity to investigate the culture and operation of the South Yorkshire Police never took place.

Freeman said that he had "never encountered it before or since" and "I knew in my own mind that was wrong, and I can clearly remember saying to colleagues that I was with that day, 'I will not be making an arrest on that operation', and I didn't.

[72] It was a disciplinary offence not to write in their pocketbooks, which were considered "contemporaneous notes" and "very difficult to amend without it being obvious, and therefore persuasive, credible evidence in a courtroom".

Video taken by the police's own cameramen and footage recorded by filmmaker Yvette Vanson demonstrated that the reverse was true, and that the stone throwing had been a response to the unprovoked first mounted charge.

[82] In 2009, Nicholas Jones, a former BBC journalist, said: "I got ensnared by the seeming inevitability of the Thatcherite storyline that the mineworkers had to be defeated in order to smash trade union militancy."

Jones said that the media may have been guilty of "a collective failure of judgment", and if its "near-unanimous narrative had not been so hostile to the NUM and had done more to challenge government then Thatcher may have been forced to reach a negotiated settlement during the initial phase of the dispute".

[85] Paul Routledge, a journalist and biographer of Arthur Scargill, suggested that the National Coal Board (NCB) had used the Orgreave dispute as a diversionary tactic to concentrate pickets in one location and relieve the pressure of policing working pits in Nottinghamshire.

"[86] David Hart, a right-wing political activist and adviser to MacGregor, the NCB, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed that Orgreave was "a set-up by us".

[87] Inside the NUM the failure of the mass picketing tactic led some in the regional union leadership, especially those influenced by the Eurocommunist wing of the Communist Party of Great Britain in Scotland and South Wales, to turn towards a "cultural politics" approach of building a mass movement in the country to support, through solidarity and practical help, the striking miners and to force a political concession from the government.

Irvine Welsh's Skagboys opens with a journal entry detailing the lead character Mark Renton's experience at The Battle of Orgreave.