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The Scottish government will pardon hundreds of men convicted of crimes during the 1984 miners’ strike after an independent review of the divisive and sometimes violent dispute.
Humza Yousaf, the Scottish attorney general, said legislation expiring next year would provide miners with a collective and posthumous pardon in an effort to bring closure to the mining communities and police officers involved.
“This was a bitter and divisive dispute,” Yousaf told the Scottish Parliament. “Although three decades have passed, the scars of the experiences are still deep. In some areas of the country, the feeling of being hurt and aggrieved is still corrosive ”.
Yousaf and Neil Findlay, the Scottish Labor MSP who campaigned for the review and recommendation for clemency, said the UK government should review a decision in 2016 to reject requests for a UK-wide public inquiry into the surveillance of the strike, which lasted from March. 1984 to March 1985, and in particular the so-called “Battle of Orgreave” in South Yorkshire.
Yousaf said Scottish miners were disproportionately punished. Around 500 Scottish miners were arrested and 200 of them were fired by the National Coal Board, about 30% of the UK total, although only 7% of the UK workforce worked on Scottish pits.
Findlay said the findings of the Hillsborough investigation and the release of UK government cabinet documents on the strike had confirmed the long-standing view among miners that the surveillance of the strike was politically motivated.
“Most of them were fabricated accusations of minor breaches of the peace and affected people who lost their jobs, lost their dismissal, their livelihoods; many were blacklisted. Many never recovered, ”he said.
Yousaf said officials still need to draft the legislation and establish the criteria to be used. He said it was unlikely there would be legislation before parliament is dissolved for the upcoming May elections in Holyrood.
John Scott QC, a human rights specialist who led the review, recommended that the qualification criteria should cover miners convicted of minor common law offenses of breach of public order or bail, who had no other convictions and who were fined. .
Alex Bennett, 73, was among a group of miners gathered outside Holyrood prior to Yousaf’s deposition. He said he was arrested while picketing the Bilston Glen coal mine in Midlothian, and that he was summarily fired by the coal board, leaving his young family in poverty.
“I was blacklisted. I couldn’t get a job for three years, ”he said. “I am 74 years old on my next birthday and I have never had a parking ticket.” To be forgiven, he said, “would correct an evil.”
Andrew “Watty” Watson, 55, a Fife train conductor instructor who has campaigned for nearly 10 years to be exonerated, believes he was the youngest miner ever to be convicted during the strike.
A week after his 19th birthday, Watson made several V-signs on police vans taking non-striking miners to the Comrie coal mine in Fife. He was arrested and convicted that day for breaking public order, and four days later the coal board fired him. He was reinstated a year later, just weeks before the scheduled date for a labor court, and says he lost four years of pension contributions.
Watson said he was elated to learn that he can now be forgiven. “To burden me for 36 years with something as trivial as what I did? Living with that for 36 years has been difficult, but I am a fighter and I got over it, ”he said.
Tom Wood, a former Lothian and Borders Police Deputy Chief of Police who served at the Bilston Glen Coal Mine in Midlothian during the strike, said many officers were very uncomfortable with picket surveillance. Many came from mining areas, but they also felt that miners who wanted to work had the right to do so.
He said 55 officers in his force received serious injuries from the pickets, including fractures and torn ligaments. Some miners were convicted on serious charges for acts of violence. “It wasn’t a picnic,” Wood said.
Even so, he said that the then government and the National Coal Board overreacted. “With regard to the miners who were arrested simply for violating public order and later fired and subjected to a black ballot, this extrajudicial punishment by the coal board was spiteful and excessive.”
He added: “The real lesson of the miners’ strike is what did not happen afterwards: [there was no] rebuilding, retraining and no investment in mining communities to give people hope. The mining villages were literally emptied.
“It is highly unlikely that we will see another major industrial dispute like that, but in a post-Covid and post-carbon era we will see further industrial decline. How we handle that post-industrial decline will be critically important. That for me is the main lesson of the miners’ strike ”.
