A CAMPAIGNER from the decisive and controversial Battle of Orgreave during the 1984 miners' strike will the guest speaker at Bridgwater Trades Union Council AGM.

Barbara Jackson who was a National Union of Miners (NUM)picketer on that fateful day of June 18, 1984, will be giving a talk at the meeting which takes place at the GWRSA Railway Club on Wellington Road at 7pm on Thursday, January 26.

Hundreds of union members headed to Orgreave to picket the huge coking plant at Orgreave near Scunthorpe, and a violent riot broke out.

Contemporary reports said the police were reacting in self-defence to the miners' aggressive behaviour but later evidence strongly suggested that the police orchestrated the riot to strike a pivotal blow in the long-running miners' strike.

Barbara Jackson was a young NUM member on strike for the whole of the 1984/5 strike. 

She was a clerical officer at the National Coal Board Sheffield Regional Office, (COSA Section of the NUM) and was one of only nine COSA members on strike on that building.

Thirty years on, and, like thousands of other NUM veterans, supporters of the fight of Hillsborough victims’ families to bring the South Yorkshire Police to face justice, Barbara Jackson is a leader of Orgreave veterans campaigning to receive some belated justice.

No NUM picket was ever found guilty of any offence at Orgreave. 

In 2017, 33 years later, the campaigners say the case for justice, and, initially, a full government-supported public inquiry, is unanswerable.

In June 2015 the Independent Police Complaints Commission report on Orgreave said there was 'evidence of excessive violence by police officers, a false narrative from police exaggerating violence by miners, perjury by officers giving evidence to prosecute the arrested men, and an apparent cover-up of that perjury by senior officers.' 

However last year Home Secretary Amber Rudd said there would be no review or inquiry into Orgreave.