Flyer advertising the Battle of Orgreave film showing in Hackney
The Hackney and Islington Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) is holding a showing of the film, The Battle of Orgreave, this Saturday. The police assault at Orgreave, which took place 30 years ago this June, was one of the most violent confrontations in the 1984-85 miners’ strike.
Jeremy Deller, the 2004 Turner Prize winner, will introduce the film and there will be a post-film discussion on the theme: Fighting then! Fighting against cuts! Fighting for justice!
Panel guests include: Voice of Youth, a Daymer representative, Mike Simons (working on a film called “Still the enemy within”) and Judy Beishon, Hackney TUSC candidate. The event will be chaired by Lesley Woodburn, Islington TUSC candidate.
The Battle of Orgreave
Saturday 29th March
2pm
Rio Cinema, 107 Kingsland High Street, Dalston, London, E8 2PB
Entrance £7/£5 concs/£4 under-18s
In 1984 the National Union of Mineworkers went on strike against the Thatcher government’s pit closure programme. The dispute lasted for over a year and was the most bitterly fought since the general strike of 1926, marking a turning point in the struggle between the government and the trade union movement.
On 18 June that year, the Orgreave coking plant was the site of one of the strike’s most violent confrontations. It began in a field near the plant and culminated in a cavalry charge by police through the village of Orgreave.
Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave, staged seventeen years later, was a spectacular re-enactment of what happened on that day. It was orchestrated by Howard Giles, a historical re-enactment expert and the former director of English Heritage’s event programme. More than 800 people participated in the re-enactment, many of them former miners, and a few former policemen, reliving the events from 1984 that they themselves took part in. Other participants were drawn from battle re-enactment societies across England.
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) is hosting this film showing as the miners’ strike of 1984/85 shows the critical role that trade unions played then – and can still play now – in the battle against the government’s and the bosses’ attacks and in the struggle to defend communities.