As Scotland heads to the polls, the main parties offer variations on the same script, says MATT KERR
I HAVE been to Orgreave on two occasions. I first went on June 18 1984. I was driven over by a friend who was doing his apprenticeship at Forgemasters. We arrived late in the morning. He dropped me off at the top of Orgreave Lane.
It was a fine, hot day. I walked down the lane with some strikers who had come down from Ayrshire Barony pit and we all anticipated that we would be involved in a Saltley Gate and shut down the coking plant at the bottom of the lane.
I headed down to the railway bridge. I stopped at the bridge on the narrow road. A mass of pickets blocked the way. I climbed up onto the bridge. Looking down towards the plant I could see the police in huge numbers behind long shields.
Forty years on, TONY DUBBINS revisits the Wapping dispute to argue that Murdoch’s real aim was union-busting – enabled by Thatcherite laws, police violence, compliant unions and a complicit media
KIM JOHNSON MP places the campaign in the context of the history of the working-class battles of the 1980s, and explains why, just like Orgreave and the Shrewsbury Pickets before it, justice today is so important for the struggles of tomorrow
The Home Secretary’s recent letter suggests the Labour government may finally deliver on its nine-year manifesto commitment, writes KATE FLANNERY, but we must move quickly: as recently as 2024 Northumbria police destroyed miners’ strike documents



