The Workers V The State

A former senior Scottish police officer has broken ranks to talk about how he was “so appalled” by the behaviour of colleagues during the miners’ strike that he refused to be part of the policing operation during the year-long dispute. The officer, whose 30 years of service included time in  Lothian and Borders and  Glasgow, said that fellow officers used to boast to him about taunting them during the bitter conflict in 1984-5 to  provoke a response that would lead to arrests. He claimed officers from the Metropolitan Police who were asked to work in mining areas in Scotland and northern  England had a “gang ment­ality” and admitted to him they enjoyed a “good battle” on picket lines. Some thrived on being known as “Maggie’s boot boys”. The officer said: “There were miners stood legitimately on picket lines and when they got pushed they’d end up getting arrested for breach of the peace..." The retired officer also claimed that miners who continued to work during the strike were the ones responsible for a breach of the peace, with large policing operations used to get them past the picket lines. He said: “My opinion was that the ones causing the breach of the peace were the ones still going into work and not the strikers..."

The anonymous police officers views are supported by another senior officer. A former Cleveland Constabulary officer said he was so disillusioned with the behaviour of a number of police towards striking miners that he also asked to be excused from attending picket lines during the 1984/85 dispute.

"I was appalled at the conduct of a number of officers, generally members of the Metropolitan police who we described as the Banana Squad – all bent and yellow," said the officer in a letter.

Our pamphlet on the miners strike of 84 , the Strike Weapon,  explained that the police and the judiciary were not neutral, nor impartial and were criminalising miners in a way meant to discredit them in the eyes of other workers whose only information was the distorted images fed to them by the media. Our pamphlet explained that the function of the state - the police and courts -  is to defend the interests of the capitalist class.

However, the Socialist Party does not seek to direct attention to the monkey but to seek out the organ-grinder and in this article we said  "Obviously the government has instructed the police to use tough tactics in dealing with the strikers. The well-known television picture of a police officer beating a defenceless striker with a truncheon is but one of numerous examples of police brutality in a battle initiated by the state. But as ordinary workers, paid to do an unpleasant job, it is not the police workers on the picket lines who are to be blamed: the real culprits are the legally respectable and physically secure boot-boys who pull the strings of the state."