The Tories planned out the whole debacle of the Miner’s Strike before hand in the Ridley Report. They put in laws and made contingencies. They bought off the police and transport and stockpiled coke at the power stations. They then blamed it on the miners!
That’s politics.
What is not politics is the scandalous brutality and confrontational approach of the police. They are here to protect the public; not to be politicised and used in such a way. They were belligerent and brutal.
There is obviously a need for a major enquiry into the way the police behaved. The fact that it is once again being shelved is scandalous and displays the attitude of the establishment.
That is bad enough but the way the BBC behaved is even worse. The portrayal of the ‘conflict’ on BBC News was not merely distorted and biased; it was, in my opinion, deliberately, editorially politically manufactured to misrepresent the facts. They used editing to put events out of sequence and deliberately portray the miners as the aggressors.
Channel 4 documentation showed film evidence to show the miners being charged by the police and then retaliating. The BBC reversed it to suggest the miners attacked the police.
If you cannot trust your media to present unbiased news you cannot have a healthy democracy.
That is even worse than the violence of the police.
There should be a full public enquiry! We should know who made the decisions on Police tactics and who made the editorial decisions in the BBC.
Heads should roll!!