The Sherwood Foresters

I've just finished watching Sherwood, the BBC drama set in a former Nottinghamshire pit village still split by the 1984-85 miners' strike, at the edge of the eponymous forest into which a young bow and arrow-wielding murderer flees (Robin Hood isn't the only literary reference - the Metropolitan Police spies sent into the coalfield at the start of the strike with the identities of dead children assume codenames of Romantic poets including Keats, Wordsworth and Byron, who lived nearby at Newstead Abbey, where the investigators meet the National Union of Mineworkers' lawyer to discuss their undercover operations).

The plot combines a crime drama based on two real, but unconnected, killings in the same area, revealing the identity of the murderers from the start and focussing more on their motivations, with a slower uncovering of secrets in the backgrounds and personal lives of the police and petty criminal characters.

The series sketches some of the background to the bitterness, with flashbacks to the 1984-85 strike when Nottinghamshire's pits and a big majority of its thirty thousand miners worked throughout the year long dispute as flying pickets from Yorkshire to the north clashed with police dispatched to confront them from the south. Although the Nottinghamshire Area of the NUM had always been on the right of the union, and split from it at the end of the strike (as it had after the 1926 General Strike), their ostensible reason for not joining the strike (the failure to call a national ballot) was always a pretty threadbare excuse, with thick seams of coal, modern mines and good wages meaning that they felt safe from the closure programme which would decimate the industry elsewhere in the country by the late 80s (they weren't: in 1992, the Tory government, which had lauded them as heroes in 1984-85 and promised them jobs for life, turned on them and shut their pits down too).

There are a couple of nice beer references: the NUM stalwart and murder victim who orders a pint of mix (mild and bitter) and the leader of the striking Yorkshire miners who bemoans the lack of Tetley's in the local club when they come down on a coach for his memorial.

Murder in Mottram

The murder of two policewomen in Mottram in the South Pennines east of Manchester has led to calls for the police to be armed and for those who kill police officers to face the death penalty.

Whatever you think of the death penalty in general, it seems unlikely that it would deter criminals from shooting at police, especially those who are cornered and desperate after a long manhunt and looking at spending the rest of their life in prison.

The call for the police to be routinely armed is equally misguided. Not only would it not stop incidents like this week's, it would also inevitably lead to more incidents like the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 in which the police kill unarmed people.

Hillsborough, truth and justice

I'm glad that the lies of the police, politicians and press about the 1989 Hillsborough disaster have been thoroughly exposed by the independent panel examining documents relating to that day, especially for the relatives of those killed whose long fight for the truth has now been publicly vindicated. But the apology made by David Cameron in the House of Commons yesterday struck me as hollow and cheap. And twenty-three years too late.

Will anyone responsible for what happened at Hillsborough in 1989 or the cover-up in the years since then be held to account for what they did? The policemen whose incompetence was the main cause of the disaster who then smeared the dead as drunken hooligans? The politicians - including the local Tory MP and the Prime Minister - who helped spread what they knew were lies in order to protect the reputation of the police? The newspaper editor who published the lies? The coroner who accepted without question the police's evidence and dismissed that of other witnesses such as fans?

I fear that Hillsborough will join a long list of incidents - Bloody Sunday, Bradford, Heysel, Zeebrugge - where even though the truth of what happened is known those responsible will ultimately escape justice.

That horse and another gate

One of my favourite films is All the President's Men, based on the book by Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. It tells the story of their investigation into the Watergate break-in and the subsequent resignation of President Richard Nixon to avoid impeachment. 

Subsequent political scandals have since acquired the suffix -gate and the phone hacking scandal at News International is no different.  The revelation that David Cameron rode an ex-Metropolitan Police horse belonging to his friend, ex-Eton classmate and now racing trainer Charlie Brooks and his wife,  former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks - both of whom were arrested and released on police bail yesterday - summed up the corrupt connections between the police, politicians and News International and has led to the affair being dubbed Horsegate.

Surely a film will eventually be made about the phone hacking hacking scandal but who could possibly play the main characters?  Richard E Grant as Cameron? Dustin Hoffman as Nick Davies of The Guardian? I'm struggling with Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks to be honest.

The Sun also rises

When Rupert Murdoch flew into Britain last week following the arrest of senior Sun journalists on suspicion of making corrupt payments to police officers, there was some speculation that the daily tabloid was about to meet the fate of News International's former Sunday title The News of the World and be shut down. Instead, Murdoch visited the Sun newsroom and told staff that a new Sunday paper would be launched "very soon". Many thought it would appear in the next couple of months but shortly afterwards it was announced that The Sun on Sunday will launch next weekend. This was predicted when the NotW was shut down and the new title must have been in preparation since then.

Although it's wrong to assume that people who read a newspaper automatically share its attitudes or  politics (a shop steward at Longbridge car factory in the 70's I know says the West Indian guys on the shop floor always read the Times for its cricket coverage), I don't think there's much doubt that people only read the NotW for the gossip about footballers, soap stars and minor celebrities. That is borne out by the fact that while there was much discussion at the time as to which Sunday tabloid ex-NotW readers would now switch to, it seems most of them have stopped buying a Sunday paper. It is also doubtful if they will start buying The Sun on Sunday, especially as the editor has promised more "family content" in place of the salacious tittle tattle.

I know when the NotW shut down, many people pointed to the fact that the workers there were being sacrificed for their bosses' errors and the way to deal with such abuses was for News International to rerecognise the National Union of Journalists so that their staff would be bound by its code of conduct. I have some sympathy for that view but still raised a cheer when the NotW sank below the waves, seeing it as a small move towards to a more decent press. I would have felt the same if the Sun had also been axed. Of course journalists would have lost their jobs, just like the NotW staff, and before them the public hangman and witchfinder general. They would though then be able to write for better newspapers, or do something more socially useful, like roadsweeping.

Police and thieves

I listened to this programme on Radio 4 before about the police strikes of 1918 and 1919 in Liverpool and London, presented somewhat imcongruously by the Tory ex-Cabinet minister Michael Portillo.

One thing it blew out of the water was the idea that in the past everyone respected the police and private property. In Liverpool, there was mass looting of shops when the police struck for higher pay and recognition of their trade union.  The strikers also found that the support they expected to get from trade unionists wasn't forthcoming as dockers, railway workers and seamen remembered the beatings they'd had at police hands in the 1911 transport strike.

Although large numbers of strikers were sacked after the walkout (and then blacklisted by MI5), the police did get higher pay as a result, albeit not trade union recognition - the Government instead set up the Police Federation and expressly forbad it from striking.  As Portillo noted, the reliablity of the police to the State came in handy when the Tories were beating down the miners and printers in the 1980's.