Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Set in the mid nineteen nineties, this fast moving thriller lifts the curtain on sex, sleaze and corruption in high places as the long reign of the government totters to an end, following the ousting of the iconic Margaret Thatcher. The novel catches the mood of those times with a host of fictional characters who engage in political intrigue, sex, money laundering and murder, pursued by an Irish investigative journalist and his girlfriend, the daughter of a cabinet minister found dead in a hotel room after bondage sex.

KINDLE OR PAPERBACK     UK    US

I never voted for Thatcher but I did support her reform of trade union practices which had got out of control in the 1970s and were crippling the country to the detriment of everybody, including trade unionists. Arthur Scargill was a hero to some but to the majority he was an inflammatory hate figure. So public opinion was against the miners and behind Thatcher. Her victory over the miners and later the print unions were among her great triumphs in which she showed a steely resolve wholly lacking in previous governments, both Labour and Tory.

Since then disturbing echoes have emerged. The Scargill claim of a pits closure list, vehemently denied by the government at the time, turns out to be true from recently released Cabinet documents. More disturbing in many ways is the realisation that the police were widely used to support government policy with aggressive and sometimes violent methods against the miners and the Fleet Street unions, which went way beyond their constitutional function of enforcing the law. This has left a bitterness among mining communities whose whole life purpose was centred on the coal mining industry. Central to this are the circumstance surrounding what came to be known as the Battle of Orgreave and the collapse of the subsequent trial of those accused of causing a riot.

The decision of the IPCC not to open an inquiry on the technical point of the time elapsed is disappointing and appears, whether it is or not, an excuse to avoid awkward revelations. The alternative of a public inquiry seems now necessary and rather than let this wound which many ex miners feel remains real and raw, fester interminably, such an inquiry should be held without further delay.