Coalfield Communities

David Anderson Excerpts

Tuesday 28th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Michael Dugher]

I am not giving way.

Earlier this year, Labour launched our Justice for the Coalfields campaign. This is about ensuring that we have proper transparency, properly acknowledging what happened in the past and getting to the truth. Without the truth there can be no justice and without justice there can be no reconciliation. The first step is for the House to acknowledge what the 1984 Cabinet papers spell out. Just like Saville and Hillsborough, we must face up to the failures of the past. We must acknowledge the truth and we must learn from what happened. The motion today provides that opportunity and I hope that all hon. Members will take it.

The Opposition have been clear that given that the Cabinet papers show that the public were misled about the plans for pit closures, there should be a formal apology for the Government’s actions during the strike. As for the revelations in the Cabinet papers, which show that the Government did try to influence police tactics, all the details of the interactions and communications between the Government and the police at the time of the strike should now be published.

Thirty years on, we still need a proper investigation into what happened at Orgreave. It was welcome that South Yorkshire police referred themselves to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, but we are still no closer to an investigation. There are serious allegations that police officers assaulted miners at Orgreave, and then committed perjury and misconduct in public office and perverted the course of justice in the subsequent prosecution of 95 miners on riot charges, all of which collapsed in court. What happened at Orgreave was not just a black day for south Yorkshire, it was a black day for this country. It is indefensible and completely shameful that there is still no investigation and the whole truth has yet to come out.

[Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is right to mention Orgreave, but it was not the only place. In Mansfield, exactly the same thing happened when at the end of a peaceful demonstration police stormed into the crowds that were left, 45 people were locked up and were banned from picketing and that case fell apart. Up and down this country, the police rampaged through villages where people had a history of being peaceful, and men were locked up who should never have been locked up because they were deliberately attacked by police who were not even from that part of the world.

[Michael Dugher]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point, born, I know, of his close personal experience. That is why we have said that we can see from the Cabinet papers that there clearly was pressure to influence police tactics. We have said, “Why do not the Government just come clean and publish all the communications between Ministers and the police at the time and clear all this up once and for all?”

What happened at Orgreave was a black day. It is indefensible that there is still no investigation, and frankly, the IPCC needs to get its act together. Opposition Members have said that if the Government cannot or will not undertake a proper investigation, they should consider initiating a swift, independent review, along the lines of the Ellison review.

As I have mentioned, the Thatcher Government’s policy chief at the time was the right hon. Member for Wokingham. In his tribute to Lady Thatcher in the House last April, he argued that all the Government had tried to do in the 1980s was modernise the industry. But the industry was not modernised or consolidated; it was completely decimated. What we saw was a systematic attempt to destroy an entire industry and an entire way of life.

What is the legacy of that? Today only three deep-pit coal mines remain open in the UK, out of the 170 in operation in 1984. Coal production is falling. It fell by 25% between 2012 and 2013, to an all-time low of 13 million tonnes. The future of Thoresby and Kellingley coal mines has now been in limbo for many months, which raises further concerns about energy security. We urgently need clarity from the Government on whether they plan to provide state aid.

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[Matthew Hancock]

I will absolutely look at that, and it is an opportunity to pay tribute to those miners who were lost and to their families. Throughout the history of mining it was always a dangerous occupation, and miners were lost in almost every community. We should pay tribute to those who died in that way.

[Mr Anderson]

The Minister is generous in giving way. The right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) said he was convinced that the Army was not involved, but some of us who were directly involved would dispute that on a personal level. The only way to get to the bottom of the issue, and other points that have been raised, is for the Minister to do the right thing and release all the papers. Do not hide any more papers, as the Shrewsbury 24 papers have been hidden; their campaign is now 42 years old. Release all the papers, and a lot of the arguments we have might disappear.

[Matthew Hancock]

The papers are being released as part of the 30-year rule, so that is happening under the normal process. Indeed, we would not be having this debate about the past had the Labour party not wanted to spend more time looking through papers from the mid-1980s than concentrating on how to fix the mess it created in this country.

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[Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)]

To help, Mr Speaker, I will not take interventions.

I was amazed by the lack of seriousness among Government Front Benchers when they thought that my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley East (Michael Dugher) was talking about Jimmy Savile. He was talking about Lord Saville’s report on Bloody Sunday and the Hillsborough report. This issue has exactly the same stature: things went on in the name of the state and, whatever our views about what happened in the past, we as representatives of the state today have a responsibility to the future to release the papers, as my hon. Friend the Member for Midlothian (Mr Hamilton) said.

This debate is opportune because there have been reports in the papers over the past few days about the state of energy supplies in this country. A recent report in a newspaper called The Register stated:

“The capacity crunch has been predicted for about seven years… Everyone seems to have seen this coming—except the people in charge.”

We saw a lot of it coming 30 years ago, but nobody listened to us. What do we have now? We have a situation in which, as we are told in the same report:

“The UK government will set out Second World War-style measures to keep the lights on and avert power cuts”.

What a farce. One of the worst things about it is that one way the Government will do so is by continuing every year to import 50 million tonnes of coal that has blood on it—the blood of Chinese miners, of Russian miners and, as we saw earlier this year, of the 300 Turkish miners who died.

The hon. Member for Warrington South (David Mowat) was absolutely right to say that we should have had a much more pro-coal attitude in this country. The problem is that they shut the coal mines when we were the leading proponents of clean coal technology in this country. The film “Brassed Off” was mentioned earlier. It was set around Grimethorpe colliery, where we were making oil out of coal 25 years ago, but it was closed on a whim and at a stroke of a Minister’s pen.

I want to ask Ministers four specific questions. They are about going forward, not about the past, and about how we should address this issue today. First and foremost, will they give a commitment to release all the papers identified from the 1980s? Without that, we are wasting our time.

Secondly, will Ministers give the Coalfields Regeneration Trust the real support it needs? People passionately support the CRT—including the hon. Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer), whom I respect massively—but the truth is that it has been cut, cut and cut again, and it has been told that it must become supported by grants because it will not be getting any public money. We need such public money to rescue these communities.

Thirdly, will Ministers accept the details of the report produced by Sheffield Hallam university, and will they work with it and the all-party group on coalfield communities to try to address the problems that there are in every coalfield across this country?

Fourthly, the Minister for Business and Enterprise mentioned the support for Kellingley and Thoresby collieries several times, but will Ministers confirm for the record and admit that the money—it is a loan, because UK Coal has to pay it back—was only lent to the two collieries if they agreed to be shut down within 18 months and not, as was said earlier, have their life extended to 2018? It is a fact that that was the only ground on which the money was loaned.

There is no doubt that we are where we are because of a deliberate policy. Through the 1980s, there was an attempt to cut back: between 1985 and 1991, some 120 pits closed. I have to be honest about the fact that many of them were well past their sell-by date. I worked at one of them: it had been going since 1825 and was on its last legs. In 1992, on the back of the election, Michael Heseltine came up with a hit list of 31 top-quality mines that could still have been producing coal for this country. By the way, there was not a word about that in the manifesto—not one word. At the time, they said Arthur Scargill was lying, but they proved that he was not, because those 31 pits were shut within weeks.

As well as the pits being closed, the manufacturing industry in parts of the world like mine was decimated. Companies such as Huwood, Anderson Boyes, Gullick Dobson and Dowty, which had been leading the world, went to the wall. I have a friend who still works in coalfield engineering. In 1984, he worked in Motherwell. In the 1990s, he worked in Ilkeston in Derbyshire. He now travels every week from Leeds Bradford international airport to Dortmund because we no longer have that industry in this country, when we used to lead the world in it. Hundreds of small and medium-sized businesses closed, including shops, and communities were decimated. The truth is that we have left no future for our kids.

I say to the Minister today: please give us justice, give us some relief, give us the truth.

[Mr Speaker]

A four-minute limit now applies.