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The debate surrounding the British Miners’ Strike of 1984–1985 has recently returned to the public's collective consciousness in the aftermath of the Hillsborough Inquest findings and the renewed calls for a similar inquest by the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign. Opinion regarding the strike remains deeply divided.1 At the time, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher maintained publicly that she had no choice but to stand up to the country's most powerful union, the leaders of which, she argued, were ignoring economic necessity by trying to maintain a raft of uneconomic, nationalized industries.2 President of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) Arthur Scargill in turn argued that the pit closure programs which led to the strike were part of a bigger Tory plan to destroy the British trade union movement by stealth—and in doing so massively decrease the influence of working-class organizations throughout the country.3 Others involved in the strike were caught between these two polemics. Roy Ottey, a self-described “right-winger” on the NUM's Executive Committee, was fiercely committed to his union and his industry. In 1984, however, he felt that Scargill was leading the NUM to ruin on behalf of his own ideological imperatives.4 Ned Smith, the National Coal Board's Director General of Industrial Relations, was also highly critical of Scargill's belligerence. However, Smith later resigned from his post, in protest of what he saw as the “unjust and immoral” behavior of government ministers, and their apparent unwillingness to negotiate with the miners’ leaders.5 The intervening years have allowed a more nuanced historiographical debate to develop in regard to the strike, alongside, though not in place of, the polarized opinion. Some commentators have argued that the “class-war” narrative sometimes put forward by left-leaning academics is too simplistic, in that many sections of the working-class, particularly in the south-east, benefited from Thatcher's new ideological direction and actively supported the government during the dispute. This has to be weighed up, they concede, against the admittedly negative effects of Thatcherism on some parts of the country.6 While acknowledging some of those arguments, contemporary analysis from those less sympathetic to the Thatcher administration has highlighted underhand police tactics at confrontations such as the Battle of Orgreave, as well as government-sanctioned spying on miners’...