31st October 2016 – There will be no inquiry into the notorious events at the so-called “Battle of Orgreave”, Home Secretary Amber Rudd has announced.

It is actually hard to understand just why this should be such a battleline for the opposition parties in Westminster. A public inquiry – more than 30 years on, nota bene – would be a costly and lengthy and would achieve almost nothing of public interest. Recommendations would be pointless since they would arise out of circumstances which no longer have relevance to the present day. Add to that the fact that nobody was killed during the incident and since there were no convictions, no miscarriage of justice, the justification for such an inquiry becomes very thin indeed.

That the police employed tactics never before seen in action is undoubtedly a fact, but establishing that it happened then would have no bearing on policing today. Indeed, historians would be better placed to document the public face of policing all through the high-profile labour clashes of the previous century. Even if it could be established through an enquiry that Orgreave represented a turning-point in the way the police dealt with mass situations, it would still have no further meaning. The very nature of such an enquiry could not exclude the possibility that it was a one-off deviation.

An enquiry cannot turn the clock back. It cannot repair the damage done by the steady closure of coal mines. No new jobs would be created. Nobody’s traumatic memories of that ‘battle’ will be erased!

The government’s priority is not auditing the history books, but dealing with the issues which face us in the here and now. The Home Secretary has, in my opinion, taken the right decision.