 Good morning and happy new year everyone and welcome to the first meeting of 2022, session 6 of the Qualities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee. First agenda on our item is consideration of a negative instrument. I refer members to paper 1. Do any members have any comments on civil partnership supplementary provisions relating to the recognition of overseas disillusions, annulments or separations of Scotland amendment regulations 2021? I'm not hearing any no members have indicated that they have any comments to make. That being the case, our members can pent formally not to make any comments to the Parliament on these instruments. I can see everyone nodding. Thank you very much. That is therefore agreed and that concludes consideration of the SSI. The next item is to begin taking evidence on the minor strike part in Scotland Bill. I welcome Richard Leonard, MSP, who is joining us for this item. I welcome him to the meeting. I also welcome to the meeting Nikki Wilson, President of the National Union of Mine Workers in Scotland. Robert Young, board member from the Coldfields Regeneration Trust, Alex Bennett, former minor and Professor Jim Phillips, of economic and social history in the University of Glasgow. For connectivity purposes, Robert Young and Alex Bennett will be contributing by audio only this morning, and I refer members to papers 2 and 3. I ask members to indicate which witness you are directing your questions to, and we can then open up the floor to other witnesses for comments. If other witnesses wish to respond to a question, please ask them to indicate that by typing R in the chat function on BlueJeans and I'll bring you in if time permits. Members can also use the chat function on BlueJeans to indicate if they want to ask a supplementary question. I'll invite each of our witnesses now to make short opening statements, as, if they wish to, I'll start with Nikki Wilson, please. Yes, good morning and thanks for the invitation, convener. I'm Nikki Wilson, I'm at present President of the National Union of Mine Workers. I started an industry in 1967 at Cerdown Collarine Steps and moved to Longanic complex thereafter. I first became involved in the union in 1972 and have been secretary of the Scottish branch of the NUM since 1989. I was a participant in the strike and remained in the dispute to the end, so I have good knowledge of what happened then and in the intervening years after it and before. That's my background. Thank you very much. Nikki, can I now ask Robert Young, please? I'm Bob Young. I was chairing the National Union of Mine Workers at Cormorate Collarine and I happened to have Arthur Scargal down my pit the day the strike started. I started in the pit in 1958 and I've worked in four pits of Francis, the Michael, the Welleslayer and ended up at Cormorate Collarine. I was chairman of the strike centre here in Dunferman. I was obviously involved with the strike all the way through and at the end of the strike I was dismissed from the cobalt while I was dismissed by the cobalt for my actions during the strike. So I had a lot of involvement in the strike and I can certainly fill you in with any questions you may have. Thank you. Robert, can I now move to Alex Bennett, please? My name is Alex Bennett. I started in the coal industry in 1962. I was a member of the committee at Moctirell Collarine and I was elected chairman of the National Union of Mine Workers in 1979. I was very much involved in the strike and I was a member of the Central Strike Committee in the Lodians. I was participated in the strike and I was arrested at Pilsen Glen. The only time I've ever been arrested in my life, and I'm now 75 next week. Two weeks after I was in court, I was fined £100 and I received a P-45 through my door to the manager to tell him that I was normally dismissed. The main man behind all the dismissals in Scotland was Albert Wheeler, and I have no doubt about that. I hope that that comes out in the hearing today. Thank you, convener. Hi everyone, I'm Jim Phillips, Professor of Economic and Social History. I've been researching the coal industry and its history. The history of the strike since around 2006. I've authored a couple of books on the strike and on the miners in Scotland across the 20th century. I worked with John Scott on the undertaking and completion of the independent review of policing in the miners strike. I'm currently writing a book on the theme of justice and the strike in 1984-85. Thank you very much for the invitation to come here today. Thank you very much and thank you to all of you for your opening remarks. Will I move straight to questions and I'll start with Fulton MacGregor, please? Is that me on? Thanks, convener, and happy new year to have a day including our panel members. I just wanted to say as an outset that I'm the MSP for Co-Bridge in Crescent, which is a very rich mining tradition. I think that one of our witnesses has mentioned curbed down, which is in steps, which is in my constituency, but the Auckland Geek memorial site is in my constituency as well. If I could put on record my thanks to Willie Dylane and his team for the absolutely fantastic work that they do for the memorial every single year, which is an absolutely fantastic commemorative event, and I would encourage all members—I know Richard Leonard here and he attends regularly at it as well—to come along to that to see a mining community very much in action. I guess that I've got quite a few questions. I'm really glad to see the bill making its way through Parliament. It's long overdue and it's about time, so I want to put that on the record right away. I think that it will come as no surprise that I stand in complete solidarity with the mining communities that have been affected by the strikes. Obviously, our business today is to scrutinise the bill and see how we can make the bill better. I want to start by asking the panel, in any order that you wish to take, convener, about the lasting impact of the strikes in the subsequent charges and prosecutions and the impact that that had on the mining communities, such as in Moody's Burn, Oakengeek or Cardown or anywhere in the country. As I say, I'm happy to take it in any order. Fulton has done exactly what I'm not looking for by putting it back to me to bring it up again. Given that it's the first question, why don't we start with Alec? Thank you. I can cover the question. I was based in the Lothian's Coalfield, although I was worked at Malkdenhall. There was quite a lot of activity around Bilsenglenn. There were no just miners from Scotland for their attendance, but there were also miners from Durham. It had a lasting effect on the community. Farmers were split in the middle. It was unbelievable, some of the things that went on. One of the things, I don't know if it's been recorded, but Bilsenglenn, most of the miners that were stacked in Scotland, when I worked in Malkdenhall, there were 46 men stacked, there was arrested at Bilsenglenn and there was lads at Bilsenglenn who worked in the Durham Coalfield and not one former miner at the Durham Coalfield was stacked for being arrested at Bilsenglenn, even though they attended the courts in Edinburgh. So, there was a distinction between what was happening in Scotland and the rest of the Lothian Coalfield, on the dismissals, certainly on the dismissals, and a few, well, it's well documented on all the filons that was ever made out of the miners, right? Whether it was Billy Elliot or Brastoff or Wide, everyone come out in favour of the national union of mine workers. That gives you an idea what the effect is like in the many communities and it's coming up for 38 years. It's a long time and there's still divisions. I think that this question is quite wide, so we'll hear from everyone. Robert? I agree with what Alex Scott said. I live in Dunferno and it's not so much a small community, but our pit was out to Oakley Cymru pit and you had Oakley Blair Hall, Valleyfield, small villages. The knock-on effect of that was that, obviously, the shops, the clubs, the pubs, everything started to close down since our industry went to the wall and that's been the main contribution, really, of the closure of the pits. As Alex says, we've had a city snuck here in Scotland where I used to go out to the pit in the morning as the chairman and make sure that the firemen were allowed in just to cover the pit. As soon as they changed the policing and that was to take the five police away and put police from Edinburgh and Glasgow in their place, the whole situation changed dramatically and that's when the conflict started. Trust me, it wasn't us that started the conflict and I was one of the guys that was at Ord Grieve and when you look at the film of Ord Grieve you would think that it was us that started the trouble. If somebody would only show the true film Ord Grieve when the police charged us with the verses before anything had happened, then they would see the reality of the situation. We were well set up by the media and by whoever took the decisions in and you can have your own guess at who took the decisions about the mine and strike. I think that there is this belief that Arthur Scargal snapped his fingers and the miners all went on strike but the actual facts were that in the two years leading up to the strike in Scotland, we'd already had six pits closed, Wales had seven, the north east England had five and some of those areas had been agitating on our national executive to get an action which subsequently led to the overtime ban in October 1983 but that is why the difference between the strikes that I was involved in before in 72 and 74 was that that was about terms and conditions wages. People knew within our industry that we were fighting for our very survival. We'd seen what happens to communities when a pit closes and because of the close-knit community around about some of the collarys, the on-going adverse effects that it had. I've been a member, I was a former member, a trustee of the Coldfield regeneration trust since 1999 till this day and some of our communities have still not recovered properly from the effects of that. I know that people on the committee are probably too young to remember it in a way but it's important that the background is there because that is why I think that the strengths and solidarity was so strong during the strike because we knew why they stood and tried to fight to save our industry, save our communities or we lay and were back and gave up and we tried that it didn't work and I think that in the subsequent years the number of pit closures as well by the end of the 80s we went down to one complex in Scotland and there was 11 pits and 85 at the end of the strike in three workshops. That is how rapid the deterioration around industry came which a lot of us knew would happen if we didn't win that strike and unfortunately we didn't but that's my view of the on-going effects of the strike. Thank you and Jim. Thank you convener. What Nicky has just been talking about really is the unjust transition that took place. It was hidden, it was hidden from the communities by the government, the government at the time had plans which they denied the existence of for the closure of pits and the redundancy of about two thirds of the Scottish mine workers between 1984 and 1990 which came to fruition. It's entirely fitting that the Scottish Parliament I must emphasise is to the fore here in delivering potentially justice to miners because the strikers in Scotland and Alec was alluding to this before were twice as likely to be arrested as strikers in England and Wales and there were three times more likely to be dismissed as a result of the strike activities as strikers in England and Wales. Many of those arrests took place within communities and that's one area of the bill that I have a slight reservation about. The bill makes provision for the pardon from strikers who had convictions that arose from events on picket lines, on strike-related demonstrations and other related gatherings but it doesn't make provision for miners who were convicted after incidents in communities. I think that's an important efficiency, we might have time to explore that a little bit further but the first thing I'd like to add at this stage is that many of these incidents were created by the tensions and the conflicts that were introduced to mining communities by the actions of the national coal board and it's absolutely unprecedented decision during an official industrial dispute to organise a strike-breaking effort and they exposed these communities to conflict. They left the strike breakers within the communities alongside the strikers. I think that what's remarkable looking at events in the long run is how little tension there actually was within those communities. It's remarkable how restrained miners and their families were individually and collectively when faced with that level of stress. Thanks, Jim. Pam Duncan-Glancy wants to come in for a brief, I guess. It's too Jim, is that correct? It is. Thank you, convener, and thank you so much to all the panel who have spoken already. Before I go on to the kind of questions later that I sought to bring today, I just want to also send my solidarity to the miners who were on strike in the early 80s. I was really young at the time, but I heard a lot about it in my family. The name Arthur Scargill was something that was quite common in our household and so I do send my solidarity to those communities and particularly in Blantair, for example, across the Glasgow region that I represent. My specific question was in a follow-up to the point that you just made, Jim, around what was going on in communities. I think that you said that the board had caused tensions by exposing strikers to conflict. I was interested to hear your point about those people in communities not necessarily being covered by the bill. Can you talk a little bit about the sorts of things that are going on in communities and what was happening to those people who are not going to be part of the bill unless it is changed, which I hope that we would be. We'd have to say fairly minor arguments between individuals within communities, in streets, outside houses, outside shops, but those arguments were not normal. It wasn't a normal social situation and that's one thing that I'm very keen that the committee comes to appreciate, that this was a highly abnormal social situation. Nicky and Bob and Alec have outlined the immense economic difficulties confronting those communities. Those communities were defending their economic future and the defence of that future involved the arguments between neighbours over the strike. I feel a certain amount of empathy for those people who were arguing with their neighbours about their actions in breaking the strike. That immense pressure on the kind of harmony within communities wasn't normal for people to gather outside their neighbours' houses. It wasn't normal to break windows. It wasn't normal to attack people's cars. It wasn't normal to fight in the streets outside chip shops. Those are the things that happened during a highly abnormal social situation. It seems to me that one of the slight dangers within the bill is that we are creating a hierarchy of justice. There is the deserving of justice, which includes miners who are arrested on picket lines, and the undeserving of justice, young lads at the time who got into fights with strike breakers in the street on the way home from a picket line or from a lot of other going around business. It's understandable that we've arrived at this situation, but I would like us all to be aware of how abnormal and how conflictual that social situation was and how that conflict was imposed from outside of mining communities by policy makers at the UK level and by employers, specifically the co-board that was providing organised transport that was co-ordinating that activity with the police. It was behaving in highly provocative ways at the time. I think that Jim Phillips raised a really good point there that will probably be the bulk of her discussions when taking evidence on the bill, and that's around the scope of the bill. Jim, you've raised something until you provided that evidence. I hadn't actually thought of myself about the offences that were committed in the communities surrounding the miner strike, but I wanted to ask as well about whether the bill clearly defines miners and what a miner was. Should the scope be increased for those who perhaps supported miners on the strikes, such as family, friends, and were also charged or convicted? That would be a question for you, Jim, but for the other panellists who were there, was that something that happened? Were friends and family members convicted as well as miners or is that not really something? Because, a bit like Pam, I was only a pup as well when the strikes actually took place. I was about six years of age, but, like everybody that was in those communities, it shaped our upbringings that we heard about through school. I can even remember it being talked about in primary school. That's how big an impact I had, but I would be interested to hear from those who were there—wasn't just miners that were ultimately charged or were their others—and, therefore, should the scope of the bill be increased in that respect, Jim? If I could come to you first, and then maybe to some of the other panellists who want to come in. I suggest hearing from others first, because I'm very young as well, I'm floating. We're not going to be able to have everyone in the panel and 20 members need to be a bit more selective, please. I was just going to follow on from Jim and say what people—it's hard to picture it—but the national co-board, some of the people that went back to work in my experience, in my area, I was in joint charge of the Cerdown strike centre during the strike, and we covered quite a vast area that's been related to the filtering. One of the things that the co-board done, for instance, there was a guy in Cumbernauld who went back to his work, he'd previously worked at Cerdown and he was working at Francis. When they got him a car, the co-board actually supplied the car, allegedly, bought him the car to get his work. The other things that happened, and thankfully there were few and far between in our area, but one day a person could be on strike and the next day the co-board could persuade him, because throughout the strike there were various brides offered about a bonus at Christmas time, all your holiday pay, all the rest of it. That was an on-going process that the national co-board were carrying out. When there were spontaneous demonstrations—that's what they were—it was because people found out that the guy that was on strike was no longer on strike, and therefore a group within that, be it wives, daughters or other family members, had a spontaneous reaction to that and had a demonstration at the house. I know that some of them did get arrested. The problem is that the union organised—because we organised demonstrations' picket lines, we had an inclin and a record kept to everybody who was arrested, but not on the community side. I would support what Jim previously raised. It is important to remember that not everyone was organised through the official means during the strike, and those spontaneous demonstrations, if you like, within the communities or disputes should be covered in the pardon. Fulton, do you want to hear from somebody else? If somebody else wants to come in, convener, I realise that there are four witnesses today, but if somebody else wants to come in on that. I am particularly keen just now, or is Nicky covered? I move to Maggie, please. Good morning to everybody. Happy new year to the panelist for being with us this morning. I am sorry that we cannot be meeting in person. Can I, like Pam and Fulton, have already expressed my solidarity with the miners, their families and communities that were affected and continue to be affected by what happened in the 1980s? I was not in the country at the time. I was growing up in Zimbabwe, but it did permeate our media in Southern Africa. Like Fulton, the bill is long overdue, and I look forward to helping to support its progress through Parliament over the next few weeks. We have had quite a lot of discussion about the scope of, both in terms of definition of, minor in terms of the constraints that are placed on what offences are included. Thank you, Jim, for outlining some of your critiques of those constraints quite clearly. I think that we will return to those. I was going to explore those a little bit further, but I think that those have been covered. If I can turn to justice issues a little bit more. Bob and Alec, you both mentioned that you had been dismissed as strikers, and you said in your opening remarks that you had been arrested. Can you describe for us what that was like, from the police point of view, but the justice system as well? How was that for you? What was your experience of that? First for Alec, and then I will come back in. Okay. It was a terrible atmosphere. During a minor strike that started in March, and nothing really happened until June, when police arrest. It was Bob Young already says it wasn't the local police who were initially on the picket lines. It was police outside, and there had been a changing attitude in June 1984 when they were making mass arrests, and it was done with snatch squads. They were just picking out individuals. I was picked to probably because I was chairman of the Murfyrhaw NGM. I was arrested along with David Harrell, who was the delegate, and during when he was the secretary of Murfyrhaw, we were arrested at the same time, and really it was terrible. But it wasn't later on that we realised that Fielder's instruction was that anybody that had been arrested wasn't just going to get fine, they were going to lose their job, lose their redundancy pay on it. I was an official of the minor's union, and then we used to sit and, with memory, get made redundant, and I knew exactly what I would have got. I would have got made redundant at that time. I would have qualified for £27,000 in 1985. I would have got that, and it's still better to this day that I was the rider because of the attitude that the cobald in Scotland was. Thank you very much for that, Alex. Bob, do you want to say something about the justice and the way that all of that was handled? Yes, thanks, Maggie. I have to go, since I was arrested more than once. I was arrested quite a few times. The funny thing was that I was only charged the ones, and that was a cut more. There were 135 arrests. I might be wrong with that number, Maggie, but there were 130 arrests in two years, but we were both contributors to the national union of mine workers. I think that tells a story in itself. If it hadn't been for a friend of mine, Margot MacDonald, who was actually working for STV at the time, when she made three television programmes about me, I might have been like that. I never got my job back. I never got my redundant. I was sacked twice. Initially, for my absence, then I was sacked when they closed Cymru pit and I never got offered a transfer. Can I just say this, convener? People have to remember the psychological side of the minor strike. If you get into a November-December time, after being in strike eight or nine months, and you wonder why there was trouble out in the streets, people had lost their holidays, there was no money coming in for Christmas, and you have to understand the psychological effect that was having on people. I know for a fact that there were two guys for a side dockyard who were working on a side dockyard when they were arrested with us along at Catmore. Now, what happened to them? I am assuming that they got fined along with us, but they are never going to get the... They are in the same position as us, and that is wrong. They should be in the same position as us. For a life in me, I cannot remember their name, convener. I think about the psychological effects of this, and then the actions that took place outside in the community. Just a final wee question, if I may, Joe. From your research and from the people that you have spoken to and the work that you have done on this, what is your view of how the justice system functioned? Was it in your view fair? Was it dealing with the situation appropriately, or were there significant issues with the justice system through all of this? I think that there are very strong circumstantial evidence of collusion between the police and the co-board officials. The criminal justice system clearly worked as a strike-breaking and disciplining measure. It supported the co-boards' victimisation of trade unionism and trade unionists. The ways in which miners were compelled to plead guilty in order to return to the picket line is something that we have not spoken about yet. There may have been about 800 convictions in Scotland for strike-related offences. Many of those were, in effect, false confessions, or they were pragmatic exercises by miners in order to avoid periods of detention and remand in order to return to their communities and to support the strike. Sheriffs imposed very strenuous bail conditions on miners who appeared before them, and those bail conditions included a requirement not to attend picket lines and strike-related demonstrations. There was a thoroughly anti-trade union atmosphere in which criminal justice was exerted against the strikers. It is a sorry episode. Thank you for laying that out so clearly, Jim. I'll leave it there, Jim. Thank you. Alexander Stewart, please. Thank you, convener, and good morning, gentlemen. Thank you very much for your opening statements. I'm Alexander Stewart. I'm a Conservative member for Mid Scotland in Fife, and I've stood in elections in 2016 and 2021 in the constituency of Dumblane and Clack Maninshire. The area that I have represented and supported over the past few years has still the scars of the minor strike, and that one is deep. I have been well aware of that over the tenure of my membership here as a member of the Scottish Parliament. Today, I'd like to tease out some aspects about the strike itself. I do remember the strike. I remember the visual, the reports, the media coverage, and, for me, it certainly was one of them, or it appeared, the perception was. It would be good to get your view on that as well. The perception was that it was one of the most bitter and divisive industrial disputes in my lifetime that I can remember. It went on for a considerable length of time. Newspapers and media published and produced photographs and films that showed real aggression and tension across the situation. When we look at that, we think about the policing of that. The police element was very strong. There was no doubt that there was tension and even aggression that seemed to come through from the perceptions that I had from viewing and just seeing the structures that came on the screens. It would be good to understand where and how that tension has erupted. There were about 1,350 arrests and that went to about 470 court cases. As Professor Phillips indicated, about 85 per cent of the cases themselves led to conviction. It will be for Nick initially. The tension, aggression and the whole concept of creating, was that really what it was like on the ground? You have talked about things at the beginning of the strike that were quite low-key until things changed, but when it did change, is that the real perception of what it was like on the ground within some of those mining communities? Myself, convener, sorry. I think that, to be quite honest, it depends where you were because somebody alluded to it, Cartmore, Hunterston, Ravensgrade, Boulson and Glen. Those were places where mass arrests took place, but I could tell you about picket lines that were there during the strike, where there was a word friendliness between the pickets and the police. There was an understanding and there was no arrests. The policy was related to that during the mass arrests, it was actually May, and we had the first use of mass arrests at Hunterston and Ravensgrade before Orgreave even took place in Scotland. I myself was arrested at Ravensgrade and was actually in charge of the picket line that day. What subsequently happened, just to talk about the feelings and the judiciary. I was a test case for all the miners arrested at Ravensgrade for legal aid. I do not know why it was me, I had a wife and two kids at the time, and whether it was that, but I had to attend the sheriff's chambers, and the late Manus Aguire, Tomson Slatter, he represented me. He won the case that the miners arrested at Ravensgrade should be laid, because with no income and all the rest of it, are very little. When the sheriff conceded that he would give the legal aid, Manus McGuire, I remember him asking, does that mean that that is everybody as a test case? The sheriff said, no, everybody will be treated individually. That is where it happens. We also have a lot of proof, and we were getting leaked faxes at that time—that is how long the quote was—but the Procurator Fiscal's Office in Scotland faxed the national coal board every day with every miner that was arrested. That was collusion again between the judiciary, if you like, and the coal board. Where was it in general? No, I cannot say that it was in general. If you were at Bulse and Glen, Ravensgrade, Hunterston and Cartmore, but in most other places and pick-at-lines, there was an understanding that it was not as bad. I suppose that the answer to your original question was that it depended on where you were. If you think about Ravensgrade, why was there about 25 police vans lined up every time the lorries came through? They weren't there because they were thinking that there might be arrests. There was arrests through the snatch squads, which is how I get arrested. Incidentally, I was the last person arrested, and they always left one van and took the other ones away to Hamilton, their motherwell police station. I sat for over an hour. We were one policeman in the back of the van at Ravensgrade until the empty ones brought them all back before the next convoy came in. I was chatting away with a policeman and he told me that he said, We don't want to be involved in this. I said to him, we'll open the door and let me out, but he wouldn't concede to that, so I didn't get away in that sense. However, the attitude of the police that I found in a lot of the cases and pick-at-lines, I don't think that they were very happy about what they were doing. There wasn't always the arrests and all that, as I say. It depended on where you went, and certain areas, the mass arrests, were certainly pinpointed to take place. That's what happened. Thank you. Professor Phillips, what do you think of—there have been some views and opinions expressed and you've done quite a lot of research into the way that people were treated when they were arrested and the convictions that they received? Some people say that the pardoning of that is giving the impression that there's a bit of rewriting of history taking place when they went through the judicial process. There was a situation or circumstance and they did receive that criminal offence and conduct. Do you think that that was something that the judiciary was heavy handed about? It's quite obvious from the miners themselves and what they've said this morning that they believe that there was collusion between the judiciary, the coal board and maybe others, and the police, as to how that was managed. It would be good to get your view, Professor Phillips, on some of that, because you're the academic here who's looped at some of that, and it would be good to get your stance on some of it. Thank you. Some of those others who were involved were members of the UK Government at the time. I read the minutes of the Cabinet Ministerial Group on Coal that was chaired by the Prime Minister. Those unambiguously indicate that that big mass round-up of arrests at Ravenscraig at Nicky Wilson was just talking about took place after the Prime Minister had asked the Secretary of State for Scotland to inquire as to why miners were being allowed to take the open road to attempt to blockade Ravenscraig and Hunterston. There was political interference with the police in Scotland, which is an important part of the story. As far as the broader issue is concerned, the courts dealt with miners that were put in front of them by the police that were unambiguously concentrated on trade union activists, on trade union officials at Pitt level, people like Bob, Ally and Nicky. A disproportionate high number of those who were arrested and later convicted and sacked were trade union representatives. They were community representatives as well. That was part of the effort that was undertaken by the cobald in collusion with the police in pursuit of the UK Government's policy at the time of moving Scotland out of coal mining. It was a hidden agenda. I do not wish to come across as being in any way conspiratorial because there are documents that point to the plans that the Government had to reduce coal mining in Scotland. The disciplinary effort, the criminalisation and the victimisation, was focused on trade union and community leadership in order to make the transition out of coal mining a lot more rapid, because it was removing blockages and bus opposition to that approach. I want to thank the panel for its candid testimonies this morning. I was quite young at the time. I was a nine-year-old girl from the north-east, but if you asked me some of the most defining moments, news worthy moments of my childhood and reflecting on the memories of that time, it would certainly be the minor strike up in the top three of that. To hear that lived experience today has been really important and I really thank you for that. Gym, of course, for keeping note of that and keeping record in the work that you do, it is extremely important that that is documented for history. My question is really about the pardon itself. Does the panel feel that there is any alternative to a pardon? Do you feel the right and proper means to go about what we are trying to do here? I wonder if I could go to Nicky for that first. I think that I would go back to the point that Jim Phillips made initially, because it was something I had a number of discussions with the Scottish Government officials who were drawing up the bill. I thought that the community said that things had been covered in a sense, but unfortunately, I do not think that the wording completely covers it. The important thing is that we need to widen it to include those who are involved in some disputes and maybe arrests in the communities that they are covered by the pardon. The point that Bob made earlier about others, other workers, because there were other workers joined as in the picket lines at various times and it may well have been that they were arrested. Again, does it need to be tweaked a bit to cover that? In general, I think that the other point that came, and I managed to attend the eight meetings at John Scott and his inquiry team, I assisted them in setting them up in the different areas in Scotland. There was a question about compensation and I realised that it was not covered by the John Scott inquiry, but it did raise its head at a number of the meetings. My view is—I have no clue about law or anything—that there were 206 men sacked in Scotland. Far more pro-rata than anywhere else in the United Kingdom, certainly Wales and even in England, we were far, far more likely to be sacked because of the hard attitude of the area director, Albert Wheeler. I do not know how it would be done, but whether the bill could relate to some way of looking at possible compensation, especially for the men who were sacked. People at Alec—he knows that he said that—but Alec was blacklisted from getting a job by a number of firms for a number of years. He eventually got back into mining in a way that a contractor worked in mining years later. Those guys' careers, for a one-off instance and arrest for breachery peace, lost all their employability, lost their pension rights. Even the guys who were one tribunal for over the next small period of time after the strike, they were never reinstated, they were re-employed, which meant that all their previous service, everything about their pension, did not count any more. There is a big injustice lurking in the background in the compensation aspect. I do not know if that is something that could be looked at to somehow get in there and see if there is any feasibility or possibility for those 260 men or their families now for the ones that are deceased to be compensated in some way. In general, I have got to say that the NUM in Scotland and nationally, which I represent as well, really do welcome the fact that the Scottish Government has brought that forward. We did think that it was a brave step in the sense because we have been arguing for years for this, but until 2015, as Jim referred to, 30 years after when the Cabinet paper started coming out, it was proved that a lot of people always suspected that the finger of government was conducting the strike in the background, and that is why it took so long to bring a lot of this to the fore. That is my view. Certainly, the community side needs to be widened out, and I would say that the compensation of poslo, if it could be fritted in there somewhere, it would be a brilliant move by the Scottish Parliament in that sense. Your candid testimony. I want to touch a little bit on compensation and the psychological impact that the strikes had in communities and in people who are participating in it and their families. Maybe Bob and Alex, if we could hear a little bit about the feeling among the communities at the time about the way they were being treated and the impact that that has had in the long term, both emotionally and psychologically, and financially. I had hoped to hear reviews on compensation, so I heard yours, Nicky. I think that some form of compensation looks to be appropriate, but it would be good to hear what Bob and Alex think of that as well. Thanks, convener. I am the only miner in Britain that has been fully reinstated, convener and industry, and it was because of Margo MacDonald and the programmes that he made about manufacturing that the coal board went to my tribunal and lied, but, fortunately, I had kept record of all my interviews with the coal board without telling them and was able to use that as a means of proving my innocence, if you would like. If I was to give you three good instances where I lived, unfortunately, there were two guys who went back to work. I was going to cry in my name, but I won't. No far from me. My cats got poisoned. When I phoned the police, they were saying that the police could do. My car windows got broken. When I phoned the police, the police said that they didn't have anybody that they could send down. When my front window got broken, the police could not send in anybody down. At the same time, the police were sitting outside the two guys' houses on a 24-hour basis to protect their homes. That was the way that we were treated as individuals. That was the difference between fears of striking miners and the guys who went back to work. The guys who went back to work were alluding to the fact that there were offers being made. There were 10 guys who returned to Comrypit late on in the strike. Every one of them was offered a financial contribution to go back to their work, and when the strike finished, the 10 of them immediately got redundancy. That was the way that the coal board was dealing with people and dealing with us. The only conversation that did have an effect in communities with all of the millicide and the law was just that it was built for the house miners from Maltenhall. After the strike, families were getting substantial redundancy payments, and the family of the miners who were sacked were getting nothing. I know with me that in certain circumstances marriages broke up, and kids were like these miners. It was honestly really careful to see some of the things that went on. It still exists in the name. I just want to make a point that Alex Stewart, MSP, had made with the police in, and it was so many things that were reported, and so many things that were reported. As I said, I covered Maltenhall as the chairman of the NEM at Maltenhall, and we were at Maltenhall, and it was only last year when the soldier died in jail after stealing all the money. When they shot the soldiers up the Pentlands and stole the money. Now the inspector informed me and other two officials in NEM that they had a problem up in the Pentland Hills where soldiers had been shot and had been in a robbery, and we agreed to stand in the packet and allow the police to go to their jail to pursue whoever did the shooting. That was working with the police. That was working with the local police, and that's what was achieved when everyone was localised, but when it was changed we didn't care for any inspectors where our body was, so there was a lot of good will, and Nicky mentioned it previously on all, a lot of the police didn't want to be in the packet line. I mean they lived in the mining communities, their brothers were miners, and a lot of that didn't come out. It just seems to be a one-sided affair that came out during the strike where there was a lot of good stuff. NEM, especially NEM, was working with the police to help where injustice was taking place in the communities. Thank you. Can I ask a short supplementary, Joe, if that's okay? Thank you both for that testimony. It's shocking some of the experiences that you're describing, and I thought that I had a real understanding of how bad it was, but that's really incredible. What do you think accounts for the difference in the number of arrests and the number of disciplinaries and dismissals in Scotland as opposed to elsewhere in the UK? If it's okay, I'll maybe ask Jim and Bob if he could. I have to put it down to all, but we were dealing with whoever was in charge of the policing in Scotland, and we don't know who that was, but whatever directs in all but we were gave contributed the arrest in Scotland. There can be no doubt about that whatsoever, because, as Nicky says, we went picketing down to other places and we never had the problems that we had up here with regard to the arrest. Whoever was dealing with Albert Wheeler and whoever gave the instructions to Albert Wheeler—wasn't my Gregor who told Wheeler and was my Gregor giving the instructions why a political leader—I couldn't approve that, but at the end of the day, I'd leave it up to other people to make their own mind up about it. I think that it's unambiguously clear that the individual concerned Albert Wheeler, figurehead for the national co-board in Scotland with his officials, saw a future for a very much smaller industry in Scotland that would be concentrated on the pits supplying the long Gannock power station, and possibly including still the two big Lothian pits that we've heard about, Bilston Glen and Montynhall, but that required much stronger managerial control over those workplaces. It required coal to be extracted at a much greater rate, much greater worker effort. Corners were likely going to be cut in terms of health and safety. For a variety of reasons, the effort was designed on reducing the role of trade unions within a much reduced industry. Closing it all together in Ayrshire after Lanarkshire, reducing it further in Fife, and concentrating on West Fife and bits of the Lothians. That required the attack on trade union and community leadership. I thank all the witnesses for coming along and giving evidence today. Like most of the members, I was also very young when the minor strikes were happening, however, I remember the horrific scenes on television. At the time, I was very young and I did not understand what was happening. However, today, I am absolutely welcome that we have had such a great insight and lived experiences from the people that it happened to. Thank you so much for coming on today. My question is about the lasting impact on miners and mining communities. Given that the impact of strikes continue today, more than three decades later, I would like to ask you your views on what the lasting impacts of the strike and its policing on miners and mining communities are. My question would be first to look for a bit on the side of research. I would like to ask Professor Philip and then if I could ask Nicky Wilson as well, please. Thank you. In brief, I think that there is a tendency to exaggerate the damage that was caused socially, culturally to those communities. Yes, as Bob and Alec have been telling us, rightly, employment economic activity was radically reduced within those communities, but when we speak to people, our friends and neighbours within those communities, we find communities that are still very cohesive, very progressive, very positive about the present as well as the future. They are not looking back all the time, they are not obsessed with the past, but they are determined that they receive justice for the wrongs that were committed against their communities in the past. They are good places, good people live there, and they are proud to have friends within those communities. Yes, thanks. In the long-lasting effect that I mentioned earlier since 1999, I have been a trustee on the coal fuel regeneration trust. Because of the work that is done in the communities, Jim is right. Communities are not just mining communities, but I think that it is more inherent in mining communities. There is an inborn strength there, because miners looked after each other, they went to work together, families were in need to look after each other, and that still exists to this day, I believe. The economic effects are obvious because of the job losses, especially when somebody was remote communities in parts of Ayrshire, some of the S5 villages in Stirlingshire, the villages where there was virtually a pit and a village in a community built around it. When that was lost, it has never been replaced by other forms of employment or otherwise. The legacy of that still exists today, but I do not think that there was a mistrust to the police for a long time after that. Most of it, and people should remember this, is that the vast majority of miners that were arrested during the strike had never had a previous conviction before or after that, and therefore there were a lot of blind citizens. I think that today, I am not saying the disrespect to police, you might get the odd ones. Everybody knows that police must exist to look after our communities, keeping them safe and all the rest of it, but Jim is right in the sense that that legacy of the way that police were used, not at the rank and file police, but somebody a way up higher made decisions on the mass arrests, and that stigma of a guy may be losing his job in the 206 cases, or even being arrested and being classified as a criminal, stuck for a long time and still exists, and that is why I think that it is so important that this committee, and hopefully the Scottish Parliament, passes this bill to some of the suggestions that has been made because it will right a wrong for many, many years. Generally, we are law-abiding people in mining communities, same as other communities, and that will continue, but to write that wrong will be a brilliant move and I hope that it is successful. Thank you. Thank you for your responses there. Nicky, just talking about when you said writing that right to a wrong, obviously lessons were learned as well. So many decades later, there are still strikes that happen today, a lot more controlled and maybe a lot more behaved better. Is there anything that you could compare against that time to now that you think that that has not happened in the strikes that should still happen better than what happened then? To be honest, and this is me speaking with my trade union hat on, obviously, but we have got to remember that the legislation has been changed over the years. During the mine strike, all the funds in the national union of mine workers were sequestrated in England and Wales because the strike was deemed not to be legal. That did not happen in Scotland because the person who took the case in Scotland and under Scottish law, the strike was not illegal, so a lot of the money that was passed out to other areas came through Scotland at that time. The difference is that over the years, the legislation that has been introduced has been introduced to limit and change how trade unions act in industrial disputes. Even the way that they have to get a percentage of the vote and so many members of the union have to take part in a vote has meant that I doubt if we will ever see anything like that again. As a trade unionist, we did not want that strike, but, as I tried to say earlier, we were fighting, we knew what was coming down the line and the fact that pit closures, all the rest of it, how that affected their communities, no other alternative jobs, all the rest of it. Really, our backs were against the wall and we stood for, unfortunately, we lost. What we tried to pretend did happen, there is no doubt about it, but to try and relate to what happened then and today, I do not know, I do not think that it would happen again. I think that it is very much difficult for trade unions to organise workforces than it was then. We had a nationalised industry, like other nationalised industries, nearly 100 per cent of trade union members. It is so much more difficult now for trade unions to organise the present type of workforces that we have. I do not think that it can make a comparison to what happened then and what could happen today, to be quite honest. Richard Leonard, I thank you very much and I very much appreciate the opportunity of asking a question this morning. As Karen Adam said, the strike was a defining moment in modern Scottish history and I think that this will be a defining moment for the Scottish Parliament to make sure that we get this legislation right. I was old enough to be around during the minor strike and was living in Stirling at the time and the Paul Mays colliery was one of the flash points that precipitated the national strike. A couple of points I wanted to make, convener, if I may. First of all, Bob introduced himself as the NUM chairman at Comrie, Alex Bennett introduced himself as the NUM chairman at Mungton Hall, and Nicky Wilson, now the president of the union, was also very active. We need to understand that this was a clear attempt to decapitate the leadership of the union and that has got to be recognised in our approach to what happened and what we now need to do. Alex has spoken about his own experience, and I was in preparing for today reading the testimony of Kathy Mitchell from Cacoddy, because it was families as well as the miners themselves who were affected by what happened. She told of her husband John, who was blacklisted, who was convicted of obstruction in 1984 and fined £5, and it resulted in him losing out on a £26,000 redundancy from the Francis Colliery. Those were very real challenges. That is why it is perfectly legitimate for us to look at compensation, because there was a clear financial hardship and detriment that was caused. I hope that, during the course of the deliberations in the Parliament, that is something that we will address. One of the arguments that has been put against that—this is what I wanted to put in my question, convener, to probably Nicky Wilson, who is the most appropriate person to respond to that—is that people say that we no longer live in an age where there is a unitary UK Government that we have devolution. Therefore, why should the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament be responsible in any way for what happened back then? Of course, there is now a Scottish Parliament, there is no longer a Scottish office, there is a Scotland office. We no longer have eight police forces, there is one. The national coal bar does not exist in the way that it did. My question to Nicky is, does that mean in your view that an apology is impossible and that financial compensation could not be met? As I say, from the NUM's point of view, we really welcome the fact that the Scottish Government has taken that step. We think that it is a brave step because, over the years, many attempts have been made to the Westminster Government. We thought that we would be successful when Amber Rudd was the Home Secretary in Westminster when she agreed that there would be an inquiry into your grief and all the rest of it under Theresa May at the time, and then it all changed and it all got dropped. I think that, in fact, we have now got a Scottish Parliament, which is so important to the Scottish people. I think that we can, as a Scottish Parliament, if there is a means to do it, have a thing or have the compensation put in line. If we try to think back as we progress through the years, hypothetically, if there was still a coal industry or a national coal board, would it be the Scottish coal board, for example? Responsibilities have changed and passed down the line. Equally, the responsibility is looking at how 206 people lost their livelihood for haul-trade offences because of the vindictiveness of an area director that we had at the time, Albert Wheeler. It would be a brilliant step and a very brave step and progressive if the Scottish Parliament did make that decision to have a compensation scheme put in place for the remaining miners that are still living and the families that are the ones that have sadly passed away. Thanks very much. That concludes the questions from committee members today. Thanks hugely to all the panel for your insight. I was about 17 or 18 at the time of the strike, so, while I did not live in a mining area, I was old enough to know that a great wrong was happening in our nation at the time, and it has been really important for us to hear directly from all of you about just what the implications and continuing implications are for that. Thank you all very much. I will suspend briefly tonight before we move to our second panel. Thank you. We will now hear from our second panel, and I welcome to the meeting Jim McBrearty, immediate past president of retired police officers associated in Scotland, and Tom Wood, former deputy chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police. I invite each of you witnesses to make a short opening statement starting with Jim McBrearty, please. As a brief introduction, I joined Lothian and Borders Police 1981, the son of a staunch trade unionist and indeed a shop steward at the Grangemouth plant. I was stationed at Leith police station, and in 1984-5 I was removed from my local community reserve dedicated beat officer to police the miner strike, both at pits and also at the homes, cars and property of return to what winers who were being attacked. I police the strike from the start to the finish, and retired from the police service as a detective superintendent in 2012, and I joined the retired police officers association of Scotland in 2020. I was the president of the association, and understanding the importance of the review, I engaged with the review team on RPOS's behalf and indeed on a personal basis, and I ensured that it was an engagement plan for us to work with the review team and the resulting outcomes and outputs from it. My name is Tom Wood. I was a chief inspector in Lothian and Borders Police during the 84-85 strike. I am speaking here in a personal capacity. At that time, I was not at the rank where I was a policymaker, but I was privity in the policy being made, because at that time my job was as a force information officer. I was working throughout the strike, the gold commanders, the assistant chief constables who were running the police operation, both of whom are now sadly dead. I just say that my experience is limited entirely to the east of Scotland and mainly to Billson Glenn. I cannot comment, I have no knowledge about what happened elsewhere. The policing of the strike was not centrally co-ordinated, and so there were differences from force area to force area. I think that somebody in you at this morning's panel made that point. First, to say that 84-85 was a terrible year for a lot of people. The mining communities, obviously, and we were acutely aware of that. Many of us lived close to, lived in, mining communities, and we knew the people who were on strike very well. It was also a bad year for the wider community, because, as Jim Smith just said, we had to strip away the whole of our community policing model during that year, and that meant that, alongside the mining communities, it also suffered. 84-85 was the year that heroin really took a grip of any of our inner-city areas, and it was a time when we could least afford to be liked on street policemen. From a police point of view, somebody earlier this morning said that it was a job that we did not want to do. That is absolutely right. No one wanted to be policing a labour dispute. No one joined the police to police a picket line. We did not want to do it, but, in essence, we had no choice because our job is simple. We got to protect life and property, and we had to facilitate peaceful picketing, of course, but we had to protect the human right of people to go about their business unmolested. We had to protect the rights of miners who wanted to work to be able to go to work and for those working miners and their families to go about their business unmolested. That has not changed, convener. If the same circumstances arose today, frankly, the police service would have to do the same job today. The police service was a long, exhausting year. It really was, and we stripped away our resources. There were quite a number of injuries, but we were lucky in one way in that we had very, very good police commanders at that time. The police service—I can look back how in almost 40 years of police service—hasn't always been well-led, but it was then. We had two assistant chief constables running the police operation, who were both steeped in the mining communities. One of them had been born and brought up in the mining community, had worked all these days in the mining community, and the other one had been a miner. He'd been a Bevan boy just after the end of the Second World War. They were acutely aware of the stresses and the strains and the issues within the mining community. We also had, very fortunately, a very, very fine chief constable at that time. He's still alive Sir William Sutherland, who was the best of his generation, and I can say that now looking back over 40 years. Did we have violent confrontations? Yes, we did. Yes, we did. There were mainly on the days when visiting pickets came to Bilseng Glen. For most of the rest of the time, we had a good relationship with the local miners and the local mining leaders, who, as I say, we knew. We did not have a good relationship with the coal board, or indeed the national union of mine workers hierarchy, which is different from the local leaders. We sometimes found out that the coal board was game playing and was trying to manoeuvre us into doing what we didn't want to do. To say that there was collusion, and somebody mentioned earlier that there was collusion between the coal board and chief constables, is just not true. I was there, and I can tell you that it just was not true. The chief constables made their own decisions. The other thing to say is that the criminal justice system, of course, is very distinct from policing. For anybody to suggest that the police and the procured fiscal and sheriffs are in some kind of lock step, they have not met the fiscals and the sheriffs that I have met over my career. Those people are fiercely independent, so the decisions that they took are for them. To suggest that collusion is just not true, it is not within my experience. I will come in quickly and appreciate the time to talk about this review. When the review was announced, there was a great deal of suspicion among the retired police officers that it was just an attempt to rewrite history and to gain compensation. That is why a lot of the retired police officers did not participate in it. John Scott made reference in his report to the fact that they feared litigation. That is not what they told me. They said to me, quite simply, that they thought that this was a political gambit to rewrite history. I took a different view. I thought that there was use in this, because I think that there is no lessons to be learned. I wrote an article about it a while ago, and I sent it in a copy to the committee. Some of you may have read it. Five years after the strike, I was a divisional commander in a mining area, an ex-mining area, and I was horrified by the extent of which many small mining towns had been completely hollowed out and were in a desperate condition. Unemployment fabric had not been kept up in many of those small towns and, of course, into that void and vacuum stepped crime and drugs and deprivation. My firm view at that time is that there are enormous lessons to be learned, not so much about what happened at the picket line but what did not happen afterwards. Somebody said earlier in the morning that it is unlikely that we will have a strike like this again. I think that that is right. It is unlikely that we will have a strike like this again, but we will still have to manage post-industrial decline. I think that that is the major learning point. As for this review, I think that John Scott's team did a good job. I think that they did great evidence-gathering. They saw the flaws in the remit and simply said about policing when it should have been about criminal justice. I think that John Scott, with his experience, managed to change that and he managed to do a very good job of him and his team, and they should give it a congratulations. On my personal viewpoint, I have no objection to the recommendation that John Scott made. I think that the sacking and blackballing of miners who had been convicted once of simple breaches of the peace were disproportionate and spiteful. I think that the patterning of those men who have lived their lives under that is fair and just, but that is a personal viewpoint. Very lastly, and I am sorry to have gone on about this, I think that sometimes we forget that after the strike, what a contribution was made to the community by the miners' leaders. I think about our area, and I am only talking now about East of Scotland and the Billson Glenmont in all the area. Many of the strike leaders went on to enter local politics. One became a very prominent member of Parliament and was united for his services. Others became very good long-serving councillors who did enormous good work within the local communities and who we worked with very closely. It gives me that, almost 40 years later, was still divisions between us. In fact, when I meet those people and I have met them over the years in various roles, there is an awful lot more that joins us than divides us. However, I think that I would like to place on record what a remarkable job after the strike that those men did and their contribution to public life. Thank you both for those opening statements. We will now move on to two questions. I again start with Fulton MacGregor, please. Fulton MacGregor, can I thank both the panel members for their very in-depth and fit-time-moving testimonies? I think that it is useful to see, because we heard earlier in the constituency that I come from and others. I am very aware of the impact that this has had on mining communities and miners themselves. To hear that reflection on how police officers in the main would have been impacted, because I think that it is coming across quite clear from early evidence anyway that the vast majority of police officers, including yourselves, did not want to actually be doing that job. You did not come into the police to do that. You were talking about that 35 years ago. We could all hear the emotion in your voice and you were recollecting events, which were clearly uncomfortable for you. Thank you very much for that. You went on to touch on—that is the benefit of making a good long statement like that, so do not apologise for it. You went on to touch on where my main question is. It is about the impact of communities' mining communities after the strikes, and you have said something about it. Are you able to talk a bit more about how communities were impacted? What were the relationships like with police in mining communities in the years and decades that followed that, if there is any comment that you can give on that, based on the fact that I know that you have already alluded to it? To be honest, one or two individuals obviously felt that they were being very hard done to, and they had been. It is one thing to be arrested for a push and reach of the piece, it is quite another to be sacked and then to be black balled. The black balling is the most insidious of those punishments, because it goes on and on. It is not just a case of being sacked for your place of employment, but it means that you cannot get employment in other areas of the industry that you know and that you work in. I can understand the bitterness. I attended one of the miners' meetings out in West Lothian that John Scott held, and I enjoyed it very much. I met a whole lot of other people, a whole lot of the miners' leaders who had known during my police service, and we had a good chat about things. One of them said to me, I said, you are a brave man turning up here. I said, really, I said, we are all 70-year-old men. What does it say about us that we cannot sit down and have a conversation about something that happened 35 years ago? There was a bit of this among some. Generally, there was not. Generally, we made an effort after 1985 to get really back in to the mining communities. However, some of the small mining towns, where a local pit was the only point of employment, were desolate. I remember when I took up my role as a divisional commander in the division. I am not going to name it. I drove through all the local towns, and some of them, the street lights were even out. The whole places had been hollowed out. Young people had left to seek jobs elsewhere, shops were closed, there had been no investment or employment put back in. The dreadful waste about that is that we had a tremendously skilled workforce there that could have been allowed to weather on the vine, allowed to go to waste. I thought that that was a tragic aftermath. I saw it close up over years, and I saw the long-term consequences of it. As I said, there were drugs and crime and hand-in-hand with decoration we did. As I said, that was always, to me, the huge learning point from the miners' strike, and indeed from other post industrial declines. It was the same thing that happened with steel, the same thing that happened with shipbuilding, and the same thing that happened with oil. That is why it is so important to have these conversations so that we learn lessons. If I can add to that, I was a keen football player as a young lad. One of the things in policing back then was that each of the divisions had a football team. I can recall that we would play minor teams. There was no violence either on the picture or after it. If anything, we would go for a beard to socialise and chew the fat. When I saw this review being taken on and saw what the report contained, it worried me that we were painting a picture of them and us. The them and us only occurred when the miners from Elf Strayer came to our local area and we did not know who they were. They did not know who we were. Interestingly, some of them commented on how it was their duty to be arrested and taken off the picket lines so that the NUM would have a face of taking part. That is sorrowful, to be honest, but our role after the miners' strike was to engage and to bring back the relationships that we had, which were strong and positive throughout the whole time. I have one further question, but I just wanted to comment. I put on record the impact that it has had on communities, because it is quite tailing and the impact on communities has been longstanding in many ways. I wanted to ask a question about the scope of the bill. You have heard the previous panel about that. Obviously, the current proposed scope of the bill is for miners to be pardoned and what a miner is defined. In your experiences, you have been wondering how often other people might be involved in the picket line, who might not be miners, might be family or friends, might even be the best in what you said today, might be even some off to police men and women. Was that a common occurrence, or was it mainly miners who were being arrested? Or was there a neighbour or a friend or a family or a spouse or a son or daughter? Was that something that was happening? Not in my experience. Quite a lot of the arrests for the most serious offences—I will talk about the most serious offences in a minute—were not on the picket line at all, because they were about assaults and intimidation at the homes of working miners. At one time, at Wilson Glen, we had a number of people show up trying to get muscle in on the action, including the left-wing people who were through selling the socialist worker and trying to get themselves into the action, as it were. The local miners' leaders gave them short shrift. They were not going to be hijacked, and they were not going to have their dispute hijacked by outsiders who had got alternative political agendas. That happened a little bit at Wilson Glen, but not very much, because, as I said, there was an awareness among local miners' leaders that they did not want the dispute subverted for other political purposes. As I said in my brief introduction, I was on police duties, policing the picket lines from start to finish off the strike. I never arrested anyone, not once. Was I pushed? Was I shoved? Absolutely, but that was in nature of the business. Bearing in mind, you are standing next to people who would know you by name prior to the vehicles that were coming back into the picket to bring the miners in. We would be talking about what was on the TV the night before, how the families were doing, and General Chitchat. As Tom White rightly says, when there was infiltrators, that is when the mood changed. You could literally smell it because a lot of the miners who were brought in from strange areas were there for one reason, and that was to rumble up both the miners who were on the picket line and also the police. That was when things changed. When we had the local miners doing their picket line—I will not say that it was pleasant—it was absolutely not, because those men and their wives had a point to make. Legally, they were making it, but when that changed, the whole tone dropped remarkably. Can I just add one thing, just to add for information of context? The operational commander made the decision that we would not wear protective equipment, even though we had it. We had helmets and we had shields, and we had protective shin guards and all of those things. We had them since the early 1980s, after the Scarmin report, the Tuxteth riots. We had all that kit, but we never used it. That was for a part we could maybe have done with it, to be honest. We might have sustained less injuries, but it was decided not to do it because it would escalate, and it would up the ante. The last thing that we wanted to do was to up the ante because we knew sooner or later, but sooner or later, we would have to go back and police those communities with consent. Somebody mentioned this morning—it is a very good point—that, for the vast, vast majority, the mining communities were good, decent, hardworking people. They were the kind of people that the police absolutely depended on to a system. Therefore, it was madness to drive any unnecessary wedges in between ourselves and the mining communities. All that said, and come back to this fundamental point, we had an absolute duty to do to protect the rights of people to go about their business and molest it, and that has not changed. One of the things that Fulton's question was leading to is that I am concerned that, perhaps with the definition of a miner, you mentioned that perhaps spouses were at the picket line, so that we are concerned that a wife or partner was arrested at the picket line, and that building is a part of them. Obviously, we do not want to be spending huge amounts of time trying to sort something that actually never happened. Is that a worry about something that never happened, or where were their wives' partners arrested? Like Tom said at the start, I can only speak for the bolstering, the pits that were within Lothian and Borders areas. I cannot recall seeing ladies being removed from the picket line. What I can recall is seeing people who were perhaps not miners but who were held bent on causing trouble and, quite frankly, coqually winding things up. They were perhaps removed. What happened to them, because, as you can imagine, when people are removed from the picket line, they are taken away from the hotspot and removed for the purposes of process. That process can be many things. It could be certainly told to go away and they took the warning and they would walk away, or, depending on the gravity of what they have done, they would be arrested. I cannot speak for whether the wives, the sisters, the aunties, the young… I have no recollection of wives and people like that being arrested within the year. We did have people coming along to cause trouble. What they would do is go behind the picket line and throw things over the top—ball bearings and pieces of metal and stuff—on to the police lines. However, as I said, there was a degree of self-policing amongst the picket themselves. Those people were given short shrift. It happened now and again. I do not want to make too much of it, but it did happen. It was very quickly snuffed out by the miners themselves. Thank you very much, Fulton Ew. Thank you very much, Joe. Good morning to both Jim and Tom. We have heard this morning about challenges and accusations of collusion of political interference in policing. I hear quite clearly your refutations of that, but we have also heard—and we know from some of the narrative around this—about quite a client media. One of the things that I am not sure had come out very much prior to this for many people was the disproportionate impact on Scottish mining communities compared to elsewhere during the strikes. More Scottish miners were arrested more than lost their jobs than elsewhere. I just wanted to explore a little bit about how some of that might have arisen. When you were sent to police the picket lines, how were the miners described to you? What were you told about them? What orders did you receive? Were you told what the operational outcome of that policing procedure should have been? From memory, Maggie. I need to put the glasses on. I did not need that back in 1984, for sure. What we were told was the numbers of miners that were on the picket line. We were told where they were in relation to the entry point of exit. In other words, were they on both sides of the road of entry? Were they on one side? We were also given an indication of the mood of the miners. I say that because that gives you an idea of what you are going to be faced with. We were not marched on to the picket line. We simply got out of the vehicles that we arrived in. We walked towards the picket line. We would say hello to how we are all doing today, and it would be a bit of banter, a bit of good fun and a bit of good nature. Maggie, I emphasise again that whole warm attitude changed when we were told that today we have Yorkshire miners and Durham miners. I made reference to the smell. Forgive me, but those people were not in a sober state most of the time. Those were people who were being fuelled to come on to the picket line and express their wishes in quite a hostile way. That was when the whole attitude would change. You could smell it as you walked towards the larger than normal crowd when we had the miners from elsewhere being brought on to the picket line. That was when it was time for us to steal up and, by that, I mean not being as casual in our approach to being more robust. We knew that it was going to be a stronger push and shove. Do not forget that those miners were fit men, extremely fit and strong men. Should they wish, they could have bowled us down the street. Very seldom did we get bowled down the street, but we did get pushed and we did get shoved and we did get swore at. Once the miners who were going in to work had gone in, the pressure was off again and the miners who came from elsewhere would retire to either the local miners' welfare or back to their buses that they came up on. Indeed, we were left with the local miners having the conversations that I spoke about earlier. Does that answer your question, Maggie? No, that is helpful. Thank you, Jim. Tom, if I could just ask you. Again, we heard from the evidence this morning that it appeared that certain individuals were targeted. I hear and I take on board what Jim has said about miners coming from elsewhere to join pickets and being the touch points quite often. Were you aware of any specific targeting of individuals? It seems that active trade unionists targeted more than others. Was there any operational decision around that? Any discussions about that kind of focus on police activity? No, there was not. There was no arrest policy per se. What happened in the mornings was that we got there about half past five in the morning, six o'clock in the morning. The operational commander would get on the buses and would walk up and down the line saying hello to everybody and thank them for coming and all that stuff. Then we just gave what intelligence we had about the numbers that were going to show up. The difference between when they were visiting pickets and when they were not visiting pickets was for chucking cheese. One of the reasons that the officials were arrested more often than others was that they were truly front leaders. They were trying to lead and show their leadership, and therefore they were in the front line. Because they were in the front line, they were the first to be grabbed. It is just as simple as that. What happens with police arrests is that when a police officer arrests someone, he is up to them as an individual and a corroborating officer to present the evidence that they have, and that goes to the fiscal who makes the decision and it goes to the court and the court makes the decision. It is an individual officer who does that. The idea that there was a huge arrest policy is just not the case and cannot be in the Scottish system. That is the reason why local officials and leaders were arrested was because they were leading from the front and therefore they were in the front line. Tom, you spoke earlier about your role and the police's role to protect the rights of people going about their business. Miners and striking miners were going about their business. I wonder if you could give us a little bit more of a flavour of when violence did occur. What were the flashpoints around violence? You spoke there about the trade unionists leading from the front. We have all seen the horrific video footage of some of the violence that happened on picket lines. Can you give us a little bit more of a sense of how those incidents arose? Of course, I can say one thing. One of the things that I'll ampear about was the media coverage. It stopped now, thankfully, and it stopped thanks to the intervention of John Scott, principally, was that it kept showing pictures from England, it kept showing pictures from or a grieve of horses charging in and running fights. None of that ever happened at Wilson Glen or to my knowledge in the rest of Scotland. As I say, I restrict myself to my knowledge at Wilson Glen. You've got to be very careful about the conflation of media coverage because it can be very, very misleading. You're absolutely right in that it was the human right of striking miners to peacefully picket. Dead right, absolutely. It was the role of the police to facilitate that, which we did. It was also the right of the people who wanted to go to the work to go in without being impeded and assaulted and then deviated. We were the meat in the sandwich trying to hold that balance. Now, when did the flashpoints come? On the picket line, the flashpoints invariably came when they were visiting pickets. Sometimes, as Jim said, they obviously along bus ride and arrived to Gwadavive, or whatever it was, a day out. At that time, the local strike leaders often felt that they had to show themselves. They had to show their metal, and so they were in the funny. Those were invariably the flashpoints. The flashpoints after off picket line were just as important because they involved the families of working miners and people who wanted to go to work or were seen to be colluding with the picket management. They happened in the housing areas, in the streets, around the mining communities, but not on the picket line. Those were the main flashpoints. Alexander Stewart Thank you for your comments so far. I would like to retrace some of them in my first question. As I asked initially when we had the minus error this morning, my perception as a youngster in those days was that that was a very bitter and divisive industrial dispute. You have given today, Tom, that you had no choice but to manage and to do what you did in supporting the community in your role as police officers, and the peaceful picketing was your intention to manage. That comes over. However, what we also heard this morning from the miners was that they felt that there was a change in the policing attitude when it stepped from being local to then being much more of a national flavour. They believed that there was a mind step and a change in policy and procedure when that happened. Did you envisage any of that? Did you interpret any of that or see any of that? The miners today really did express that it all started off at a reasonable level when they knew the people and the police that they were working with on a weekly and monthly basis. However, when police came from other areas, that did not seem to be the same accord that took place. More aggression or more confrontations might then have taken place at that stage. Can you maybe enlighten us on your views on that? Yes, I can. First, as people have said, the reason why the 84-85 strike was so long and bitter was because it was very, very long. I was a young teenage policeman in the 1972 strike and it was more violent actually, a lot more violent, but of course it lasted only three months and that was the difference. The 84-85 strike, the miners recollection is right, it started off in the march and the spring weather and it was all fine. Then, as the strike went on, clearly the striking miners became more desperate and the violence escalated and we started to get these travelling pickets that were described. However, can I just say to you, and can I make it absolutely clear, and I speak for our area only, that we never had outside officers coming to Lothian and Borders Police. There were never any outside officers on the picket line at Bilson Glen. Now, we did send officers to help Fife and Central Scotland Police at that time because they were much smaller forces. As I said at the beginning of my evidence, I can only speak personally for Lothian and Borders and we made a policy, a firm policy, that we would not have outside officers on our picket lines and that whatever possible it should be local officers who were to the front. So, do you try to keep as far as we could this connection? The procedure that Tom is talking about is called mutual aid and it is something that is jealously guarded within policing. In fact, only in the last five or six years have I known the great metropolitan police service of London to ask for mutual aid, but I can categorically state that I knew every police officer who was standing next to me on the picket line in 84.5 as being local, but to Lothian and Borders Police. I would seek clarification from those who spoke this morning, saying that it was when officers came from other areas. What did they mean by that? Because as a leaf officer, I had nothing to do with mining. There were no mines in leaf that I am aware of. It certainly dug plenty holes, but there were no mines in leaf. When I was therefore abstracted from my community to its discontent and removed to police the mining, I would be regarded as an officer out with the area. So, when I moved out to Bilstein Glen, the Bilstein Glen miners would not know me to start with, but they did as the weeks progressed, and they would get to know you at Moncton Hall. They would get to know you at Polkemic. They would get to know you, so, for us to say, and as Tom rightly says, we never had mutual aid—in other words, officers from another force area brought in to help us with Lothians. However, as the picket line numbers increased, we would therefore mobilise ourselves to ensure that, if the focus of the picket was at Polkemic, at Moncton Hall or at Bilstein Glen, the numbers that we were able to deploy would be moved about the area, the force area, to ensure that we could help. If I may touch on people saying that there was a sea change in the way that policing attitudes were going on, very sinisterly, a lot of police officers and their families were targeted on the streets during the minor strike. They were being spat on. They were being assaulted as their kids went on to buses by families of miners who were on strike. When words like that get round, I can assure you that it is only human reaction to realise that suddenly the game had changed. However, the game had changed on both sides. The game had changed when police officers themselves, their families and their wives were being attacked on the street, going about their lawful business of simply going to the shops. When those things happen and that is fed into police officers, you suddenly realise that this is not the happy-clappy event that we thought we were dealing with at the outset. Suddenly there was a sinister turn to this. Forgive me, but human nature being what it is. You are there to protect yourselves and your colleagues, your families and their families, as best you possibly can. It does change. It is an attitudinal change and I hope that it is understandable. You identified the length of time that the duration of the strike probably went through phases as to how things are. In my view, as someone who only watched and saw, I certainly saw different phases of it from the media and the television and the things in my timescale. We all understand that the pardon is intended to remove the stigma and that is the crux of where the bill is trying to go. However, by pardoning what was seen as a criminal conduct, is it not just rewriting history? It would be good to get your take on that. It is a difficult one. I speak personally on balance. I think that the people who were convicted of a simple push-shub—what we call a push-shub of each of the pieces—and who were thereafter sacked and blackballed, I think that that was disproportionate. I think that that runs against natural justice, to be honest. Now, if that is pushed out and people who are salted to place or people who are convicted several times or people who are convicted of more serious charges, if they are pardoned, it is a completely different question. I do not think on balance that that would be appropriate just to give a blanket pardon to people in that situation. I think that there are appeals procedures and there is the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission, et cetera, et cetera, who are well equipped to deal with that kind of complexity. However, personally, if we are only talking about people who have a single conviction or a breach of the peace and who have been punished extra judicially thereafter, I think that it is in the interests of natural justice that they be pardoned. I do and that is a personal view I have, but I would draw the line there. I think that one of the concerns among my former colleagues is that there is drift and that people are pardoned for all sorts of more serious criminal offences involving assault and intimidation and things like that. I hope that that lets you know where I come from on this. Can I add through the convener that one of the notes that I read about this pardon is the inclusion of section 41a, where it was referenced as merely being obstruction of police officers? Forgive me, but section 41a of the Police Scotland Act 1967 covers a whole multitude of things, including assault on a police officer. When I read that there was consideration being given to a pardon for section 41a, I would ask that the panel, through the convener, considers exactly what that offence was. If it was police assault, then there should be some form, I would hope, of understanding to what extent that police assault took place, because it is not merely obstructing the police officer. It can be far more serious than that. I think that one of Tom's and Mine's colleagues many years ago had her leg smashed and broken during the minor strike. I think that section 41a was libled for that, as opposed to a common law assault, because if an officer in uniform is assaulted, invariably it defaults to section 41a. I ask you to be very careful that the inclusion of section 41a to your bill is not seen to rid the police assault aspects of what that may include. Thank you for being so frank and also imparting your knowledge and wisdom as to where that could go if we, as a committee and as a Parliament, do not look at all the aspects of it. On the surface, it comes across as what you would expect, but when you dig deeper, there are further elements and layers that need to be advised and looked at to ensure that we get the parity that is required. Thank you, Jim and Tom, for speaking so plainly this morning. What is apparent to me is that there has been an outstretch in hands of trying to build some bridges between the police and the miners. We heard of the witness statements this morning saying that, when it came to the community police, the police that they had known and grown up with and family and friends, there was some understanding and some unity there. We have also heard that there are still some discrepancies between witnesses' testimonies, between yourselves and the witnesses that we heard this morning. Even in those many years on, there is still some friction there, but also in terms of what I see as a power imbalance. Where did that power lie at the time? I think that that is something that us as elected representatives really have to remember that the police force, the miners and the extended family and the ripple effects throughout communities were all the victims in this case. The people being held to account should be the ones who are making these decisions without thinking through the ramifications for everyone involved. I would like to ask you—you spoke a bit about pardons and being very careful on how that is implemented and you spoke about visit 41ne. In terms of a pardon, what is your opinion on pardons for the miners? Do you think that there are other alternatives that could be suggested or do you feel that pardons are the right way to go? It is very important that we get that right. I will tell you why. It is about the credibility of these inquiries. There is a degree of scepticism out there about 35 years, 40 years afterwards, revisiting those things and rewriting history. There is a concern about that. It is very important that the outcome is seen to be fair and balanced with the proof of the pudding and all that stuff. That is also important, because those independent inquiries that are changed by a John Scott have immense value because we can learn lessons from them to take forward. If they have to retain their credibility, I think that the outcomes have to be seen to be fair and balanced. It is a very difficult question, but I attended one of the miners' meetings with John Scott. I sat next to and listened to the testimony of miners who had been arrested. Union officials had been arrested on the picket line, had been fined £50 for each piece, whatever it was, but then had been sacked and then had been blackballed. Their whole lives had been marked by the incident, and they were otherwise law-abiding, highly reputable citizens and just good people. How do we put that right? The only way—I think that John Scott had the same conundrum—he is a lawyer and he would have recognised the difficulties at partners. In this instance, he thought that it was the only thing that could be done. I have to say that he was right. It is very difficult to see any other way that he could write that wrong. You cannot give them their jobs back as miners when there are no jobs for miners and they are 70 years old. It is very hard to fill in that gap where they were badly done to. It is a token, but it is a very important token. If it is important to those men as they reach all the age, I reach the conclusion that I think that it is right. I say again—I do not want to repeat myself—we have to be careful that we do not extend the pardon and push it out and pardon people who were found guilty of more serious crimes. I think that that is the balance that we have got. Thank you very much, convener, and thank you to Jim and Tom for your really candid, honest and open evidence this morning. I would like to echo what my colleague Karen Adams said about stretching the hands across miners and police over the years. It has come across really strongly that there is a sense of that. Where I want to ask a couple of questions is just where there are a few areas where things do not necessarily add up from what we have heard from this morning and from yourself, so it would be helpful to get a little bit of clarity. It is absolutely the case that, as you have noted, the job is to protect people and their livelihoods in their homes. It was put to us earlier that, in some cases, some people did not have that protection. In particular, people who were striking did not have that protection. Someone will have heard the evidence where they spoke of the cat being poisoned and the windows being smashed, and they are not getting the same protection from police, perhaps, as people who had gone to work. I would like to understand a little bit more about that and your views on that. A similar disproportionate approach would be, but how would you help us to understand the difference between the way that people in Scotland tended to be treated, as opposed to elsewhere? We know that there were more arrests and there were more people proportionately who lost their jobs. How would you help us to understand a bit more about that? That is the first kind of area, and I will move on to one of those things briefly after that. I heard those remarks this morning about miners who were striking not being afforded the same service from the force. My mind went back to when we were drawn out on night shift, and, as we regarded it, it was security patrols. We were housed, as it were, in vehicles to protect striking miners and return to work miners, their property. What happened was that returning miners started to go on numbering and had pockets of them. There were confrontations between the growing number of return to work miners and those who were remaining on strike. I would question what was said this morning, because my experience as a front-line officer who would sit for hours on end in a vehicle looking at the front door of a striking miner's house to make sure that those who had returned to work did not carry any acts. Thankfully, none did take place, but the intelligence was indicated that it possibly would take place. I would dispute what we said this morning, as someone who was there took part in the protection of the striking miners whilst they were at home. I would question what we said to you this morning. At the start of the strike, there were a lot more striking miners than working miners. There were a couple of handfuls of working miners in March 1984. As time went on, more and more miners started to drift back to work. That opened up wounds in small mining communities, where there were a great deal more working miners than striking miners. At the start, it was very simple, because there was only a handful of working miners that we had to go about their businesses. As the year went on and it got into winter, and it was a bitter winter, that was the other thing that was a real factor. Colliery's pits tend to be built in the most windswept, cold places. It was a bitter winter, but none of that helped. You had deprivation starting to creep into the families of striking miners. They saw working miners going back, and the whole thing was drifting. There was a point in time where, in the winter of 1984, that became really difficult. When you are dealing with thousands of police officers and thousands of miners and hundreds of incidents taking place, sometimes dozens and dozens in a day, I am not saying what the chap said this morning was wrong. I cannot comment. What I can say is that we tried, and the operational commander who was a great man, to be as even-handed as he could be. That even-handedness was really his central mantra. He came from a mining community, and he knew the stresses and strains in the mining community, and he knew that we had to go back in there once it was all done and re-establish relationships. Least the damage that Stunus mended was always his view. Everybody should have got the same service, and if, on occasions, somebody did not get the same service as somebody should have done, that was a failure, but it was nothing to do with policy. That is the point. I appreciate that. That is helpful to understand. The last question that I have is about the relationships between other police authorities and the national co-boards. You spoke earlier briefly about those relationships, but it would be good to understand a bit more about them and how much conversation went on about individuals themselves, where they were, what they were doing and the approach that you might or might not want to take with them. I can tell you about that, because I was close to the policy. There was no relationship, and there was one occasion where—I can tell the story because my old chief told it to John Scott where he got a phone call one afternoon from somebody in the co-board and encouraged him to do more to do something or other. It was a very short conversation, because Sir William Sutherland said to him that he would do his job and I would do mine, and the phone was put down. I cannot speak for what happened in other force areas. What I can say is that knowing the chief constables of the time, Pat Hamill, Sir Patrick Hamill and Strathclyde and the other chief constables, I cannot imagine any of them taking direction or encouragement from the co-board. We were very aware that there was some gameplay going on on both sides, also by the co-board. The redrawing of lines in the road and stuff like that was playground stuff, at where the co-board overnight would paint a line on the road and say that was their property and the pickets were not allowed over it, all this nonsense. I remember Hugh Watson dealing with that very, very prematurely and saying, you know, no, this is the way that we are going to do it, and this is my responsibility. I am putting things very much in the place. Again, I cannot speak for what happened elsewhere. I do not know, but I can tell you for sure that there was no direction or collusion, and somebody mentioned this morning that there was collusion between the co-board and the sheriffs and the Procurator of Fiscal Service. No, no, I am sorry. You simply do not know the people, the Procurator of Fiscal Service and the sheriffs of that time, or of this time, are fiercely independent. When I say fiercely, I use the word advisedly. The thought that they would take direction or be influenced by members of the co-board or anybody else is incredible in the true sense of that one. Pam, you asked the question about the way policing was being done. At that time, there were eight police forces in Scotland, and I went on through my career to become a national public order commander, so I could reflect on my time as a front-line officer and how we were ordered, how we were fed intelligence, how we were made aware of how policing was to be done. I hope that we assure you that the way we were policing the minor strike was in a far lesser regimented, disciplined way by which things would be done. For example, when we had major public disorder in the streets of London, Manchester and Birmingham, which I can recognise as being tactically very challenging, the way we were asked to police the minor strike was on a far more softly approach. If I can use the pun, it was dealt with in a way where, as Tom rightly says, I can recall Hugh Watson, the former police commander for the force, coming on to the buses that we had when Arthur Scargal came to town and his entourage. It was done so that we could still police the streets with credibility in those communities throughout that whole year-long event. Please be reassured that there was no underhand, no spinning of the tactics. The tactics have changed enormously for public disorder, but back then we policed it as we thought we would in an appropriate way return to the communities that we once policed on a daily basis. Thank you, convener, and thank you to the witnesses for coming along today to give evidence. I know that it is probably not easy going back that many years to think about what happened then. Thank you so much for being so honest in relation to that you had to do a job that you did not want to do and you had no choice but, as a police officer, you had to protect life and property. Jim, what you talked about is that your families were just walking down the street, were attacked, spat on, so what you were going through. Also relating back to what Tom talked about and Jim on pardons and how we need to be very careful in relation to giving who the pardons are, especially not to people that you have said have actually done something very more seriously, like you mentioned, a police officer that the women in her serious injuries. I want to touch on it a little bit about yourselves here. What impact the minus strike had on you when you looked back at the time and now, today, when you are talking about it? Pam, I can talk personally about that from a family point of view. The reason that I mentioned in my introduction that I was the son of a staunch trade unionist and a shop steward, he never spoke to me for four months. He could not come to term with his son policing something that he firmly believed in until Arthur Scargal became far more high profile. My late father would not talk to me across the dinner table. My mother was the United Nations in our family. She tried to bring us together, but my father was so steeped in trade unionism. His role as a shop steward was to look after men. I can say men, because back then, in the petrochemical plant, men by and large were there. I can assure you that the impact of the minus strike on me was immensely personal, even in my home life. As far as later years are concerned, as I said two or three minutes ago, I can reflect on the way that we were asked to police versus the way that now we are trained in a far more disciplined and more regimented way of doing things. For me, I fully sympathise with the miners. I fully sympathise with them. I hope that the truth that gets told is listened to and considered when it comes to considering the patterns as we take that forward. That is an interesting question. The minus strike is one of those things. As you go through a police service, there are certain milestone markers and turning points in your service where you were doing certain things at certain times and you always take as a point of reference. The minus strike was one of those. I was a career detective and I was called away from a child murder investigation, which I was very deeply involved in, to come and take on this role as a chief inspector and work with the minus strike. It was a big change for me. I was very disappointed at being called away from the murder investigation, because those things become very personal. The thing that I am banging on a bit about this morning is the secondary consequences of those things. We tend to think of the minus strike and it was picotending that was horrible, but we do not think about the secondary consequences enough. I saw those secondary consequences up close and personal five years later when I was a divisional commander policing an ex-mining area and saw the devastation—I use that word advisedly—to some small mining communities. Somebody said this morning that these had grown back, and they have grown back. They have grown back as commuter towns, but for 20 years, 25 years, they were hollowed out. The damage done there is inculculable. We do not know what health consequences were from that. We do not know what the crime consequences were. We do not know what the addiction consequences were of that. We will never know, but what I saw five years later in some of those communities was desperate. I say again that the only value of us sitting here talking about this is lessons learned, and for me that is the big lesson. I think that we have frozen. Thank you. Can you hear me okay? Yes, okay. I have frozen there, sorry. Thank you so much for being honest and responding to that. Jim, I wanted to touch on something that you talked about later on. You became a public order commander, and looking back, is there anything that you would have looked at that you would have done differently if you were in that role at that time in the police? Still, Pam, to be honest. Back then, when the minor strike first started, we were talking local police officers, policing local mines, policing local miners that were on strike, because that is all it was. There were no return to work miners. Those things seemed to be the tipping point when minor started to go back to work. Those were the tipping point for when the attitudinal change took place, people became more hyped up about the whole thing, fully understandable. Would I change anything? Not really, no. Public order, public disorder is a very strong thing to have in a community, very strong. When we see, as I am sure we all do, the images of London, Manchester, Birmingham and the riots that took place, that is a different mindset to what we had in the communities. We knew most of the miners locally by first names, as they did us. Tom made a very good point that a mining community is a very close knit community, and when there was something that took place, such as a child murder or something along those lines, those were the communities that we would reach into, and they would help us. That has not changed. That has not changed at all. I go back to the last words of Hugh Watson. We are here because we are coming back here. We are here because we are going to come back and help those communities and work through this, because the writing was on the wall six, seven months into the strike that things were going to be different. If I am just to jog the corporate memory of what it is, the 84.5 strike was, in some respects, the last throw of the dice for the NUS, as far as mining was concerned, because it came through the early 70s miner strike. We had seen that change of what had come out. When it got to 84.5, we were in the realms of, this could be our last stand. Sadly, history will show that, perhaps for those communities, it was their last stand. There were efforts made to go back in, and it just did not happen. I will start with one thing. You asked what would be different. There would be some things different. Officers now going into a situation like that would have to be wearing personal protection equipment, helmets, body armour and shields. The changes in health and safety over the past 35, 40 years have been enormous. I remember he was making the decisions at the time about whether we would wear protective equipment or whether we would not have already spoken about that. It was a very brave decision that he made, because what he was in actual fact saying was that, yes, we are going to accept some kind of injury, but we are going to do it because we do not want to be seen to be escalating this dispute. This comes back to Jim's point about his vision about going back in and how to play it as low-key as possible. He thought that by gearing ourselves up in helmets and all that sort of stuff would be raising the stakes. He made the decision not to be a brave decision. I do not think that police commanders today would have that discretion. I think that you would have to be wearing your helmet and your shield. Thank you very much. Thank you, convener, for the opportunity to ask a couple of very brief questions. Language is extremely important, and the choice of words in this session has struck me. I want to begin by asking Jim McBride, who used the expression about infiltrators. Presumably, you do not consider Nicky Wilson, Alec Bennett and Bob Young to be infiltrators. How many of those 400-odd convicted miners we are talking about would you classify as being infiltrators? Language, I thought, that Tom Wood used, which I have seen him use before, really resonated. You spoke, Tom, about the coal board exercising extrajudicial punishment that you consider to be spiteful, disproportionate, excessive and so on, because somebody, perhaps, simply sacked for a minor breach of the peace offence was subsequently sacked and blackballed. Under those circumstances, what do you think the most appropriate remedy is? You spoke about the lives changed and the lives lost and the cost of people's destiny being changed by that simple act, which is extrajudicial punishment, as you describe it. So, in those circumstances, do you not think that there is at least a case for some form of compensation to be paid to people? I will answer that first. I am not sure I am the best person to judge that, but I have been struck by the tremendous damage done to people over a long period of time by what I say, and I use the words advisedly, of extrajudicial punishment. That is what it was. It was completely disproportionate to be sacked and blackballed for a straightforward breach of the peace. In terms of compensation, to be honest, Richard, I do not know what would compensate someone for that kind of damage and unforeseen consequences. I am quite sure that those men who were on the picket line when they got arrested had absolutely no idea what the long-term consequences of that would be. How could that be? As for compensation, I do not know how much—what would compensate you for that kind of hurt, for that kind of grievous wound through your life? What are we talking about? How do you put pound shillings and pens against that? That is why I think that John Scott was right. Some of my trolleys will not agree with me on that, and that is fine. However, all that he could recommend was a pattern to try and make some symbolic healing to what was a dreadful experience for them. I have spoken already about secondary consequences. That was a secondary and a very grievous consequence for them, particularly the blackballing for them for years. I remember that I was at one of the meetings and speaking to a man about my age who said that, for years and years and years, he had made excuses not to go on holiday to Florida with his family. He had all sorts of sighted and all sorts of excuses for not doing it. He was not feeling well any of his sore leg. The truth was that he thought that when he presented himself at US customs, he would be turned away because he had a conviction for a beat to the beat. That is appalling that that man's life and his family life had been so badly marked by such an incident. As it happened, he was wrong. It would not have been registered, but he did not know that, and so it had changed his life market. The other thing is that, by outsiders, we are not talking about miners' officials. We are talking about a very, very brief time. I think that it was about the autumn of 1984, when things were reaching a peak at Bilsong Glen, there were small numbers of extreme left-wing activists who came on the scene sensing an opportunity to cross trouble—the troublemakers who arrive at any scene like that. All credit to the local miners' leaders. They were given short shrift. They were recognised for what they are, and they were chased away before they could cross trouble. Richard, you asked about my use of the word infiltrators. Tom has obviously covered it there. The infiltration to the picket lines were those who would not be usually on-point, as it were, for the picket lines of the day. I tried not to give this example, but I think that it captures it quite well. A good friend of mine was on the picket line, and there was a guy who put his son out when he stood up. He was so tall, so big, a straffing big man, but he was on the front and he was pushing and he was shoving. Because of his size in bulk, it took four officers to keep this man back. He would not heed the warning, so he was removed from the picket line and taken through the police lines to where the police vehicles were. On the way back, the friend of mine had a hold of his wrist, because back in those days, we did not have handcuffs, but he had a hold of his wrist. The friend of mine had a fit of hay fever sneezing, so he let go of the arrested miner's wrist, whereupon the miner reached into his pocket and gave him a clean handkerchief. He said to him, there you are, officer, that might help to help with your sneezing. That connection being made, my friend said to him, what on earth are you doing? He said, your heart is not in this. I can tell your heart is not in this, but you just wouldn't take the warning off. You have to stop pushing because you are causing a problem. His reply, which is quite remarkable, was, I have done my duty, son. I have got myself arrested. That is what I was sent here to do. He was from Durham. When I talk about infiltrators, there seemed to be a desire on their part to show strength. Sadly, in showing that strength, the local miners, the officials from the local pits felt as though they had to up their game as well. So, when Nicky and, forgive me, I cannot recall the gentlemen who spoke earlier on, spoke about being arrested several times, it was possibly because they felt obliged to up their game and make it that they were seemed to be leading, as Tom said earlier on, from the front. The infiltration was by and large when we had miners coming in from other areas with a reason for being there. The raison d'etre for this man, this man I spoke about, was that he was there to be arrested. Thank you very much. I think that that is the end of questions from the committee. We have taken it a bit longer than we had expected, but thank you so much to both of you for giving us your time that has been really helpful to the work that we have got to do. That brings us to the end of the public part of our meeting. Our next meeting will be Tuesday 18 January, when we will meet in private to consider our draft programme on the petition to end conversion therapy and to consider our future work programmes. I now close the public part of the meeting and move into private for the final items of our agenda today. Thank you all.