There’s no such thing as a free lunch

Because they never existed

I’ve had free lunches, and what I can say about them is that someone paid the restaurant. And what I can also say about them is that the host was generally a person of great hospitality. The third thing I can say about them is that they are no guarantee of a second free lunch. The factor that plays into the possibility of a second lunch at all is that each pays for his own first lunch. But the phrase there’s no such thing as one is widely misunderstood. Because it has nothing at all to do with who pays for what.

Today’s paper features news from 40 years ago. Dubbed The Battle of Orgreave, it can be that many of you have no idea what or where Orgreave is. It is mentioned in the Doomsday Book, the census organised by William I in 1089 after his conquest of England in 1066, as Land of Roger of Bully. By 1984 it was a small town in the county of South Yorkshire whose coal mine had closed in 1981 but whose industry at the time featured a coking plant: a factory where coal is turned into coke. The significance of its location in South Yorkshire now transpires, four decades after the fact, to be of signal significance. Because South Yorkshire is home to the South Yorkshire Constabulary, and a statutory enquiry is currently being set up to investigate its role and action in that battle: the Battle of Orgreave.

It came in the throes of a strike campaign by the National Union of Mineworkers, under the leadership of Arthur Scargill, to hinder closure of Britain’s coal mines by the British government, its National Coal Board, under the leadership of Ian MacGregor. The masses of pickets and police that engaged in running flurries of violence meant that Orgreave was reported as a scandal tainting the miners’ cause. Police arrayed in battle lines—6,000 of them—conducted baton charges against ordinary men dressed in nothing more offensive than tee-shirts and jeans. The police attacked the strikers in massed charges using batons, which resulted in much injury and bloodshed. Far from keeping the peace, the police action was entirely directed at disturbing it, at creating a conflict that they had intended from the outset to win. Nearly a hundred miners were arrested and tried. It was a sensation at the time, and it showed Britain that Thatcher would not be cowed by labour.

With that political message well home and dry, the trial of the 95 detainees commenced, and ultimately collapsed in a heap of mendacity, lies, untruths and fabrications. The police had set the whole scenario up as a political ploy. Its officers were even invited to Downing Street to celebrate their mission accomplished. And no one bore the consequences. Except for the 97 people who died.

They didn’t die at Orgreave. They died in Sheffield, at Hillsborough football stadium five years later, in 1989. The police, who are normally at football games to ensure safe enjoyment of the sport for thousands of people, mismanaged the crowd at the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest so badly, that the said 97 deaths occurred and over 700 were injured. It was again the methods of South Yorkshire police that lay at the root of the destruction.

When the 95 men tried after Orgreave were released, the police evidence having been discredited, they emerged from court to the sound of … passing traffic. Whoosh! A bus. Whoosh, some cars, and maybe a lorry.

The men felt that, with their physical suffering, their mental fight for their jobs and communities, their wrongful arrest and righteous acquittal, they had struck a recognisably meritorious blow for the little man against the oppressive state. And, outside, in the real world, no one cared. After which life went on, and the men carried the weight of the nation’s injustice in their every waking moment.

The Wikipedia article on the Battle of Orgreave includes this comment from The Guardian:

Writing for The Guardian in 1985, Gareth Peirce said that the events at Orgreave “revealed that in this country we now have a standing army available to be deployed against gatherings of civilians whose congregation is disliked by senior police officers. It is answerable to no one; it is trained in tactics which have been released to no one, but which include the deliberate maiming and injuring of innocent persons to disperse them, in complete violation of the law.”

It still does, of course. Many places no longer have police. They are called police and they use slogans like to serve and protect. But they are there now to serve and protect the state, not its citizens. They are not police, they are militia.

Orgreave might be regarded as the zenith of how evil a state can be against its own citizens, had Gaza not surpassed it. Gaza, where the targeted killing of civilians has risen above the nebulous level of political expedient to attain the aristocratic stature of a blood sport.

Here in Belgium, we value our peace because we are everywhere reminded of what it cost us. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission tends to the last resting places of hundreds of thousands of military personnel who, in the First and Second World Wars, fell when fighting to free Belgium from its foreign invader. And, whilst we lend no especial attention to them as we go about our business, we see the sites and the sacrifice touches us. When I first visited Belgium in 1983, my hostess said they’d planned an excursion to Tynecot. What was that? I asked. The largest British war cemetery in Belgium, came the reply. I was young and foolish. I didn’t understand what a British war grave had to say to me. But more importantly, I didn’t yet understand what it had to say to Belgians.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them. But who are they, and why will we remember them? It used to be that we remembered them lest their sacrifice have been in vain. But there is a change to that sentiment now, for we should remember them lest we become like them. And who they are is a matter for focus and depth of field. Just like taking a photograph. It could be victims of police lies, or surveillance equipment that conveniently malfunctions at the right time. It could be the civilians of Gaza, being murdered like sideshow attractions by their own government. Are you the next sideshow attraction? Then duck.

What makes the sport of shooting civilians as they stand waiting for food a free sport for its practitioners, is the same as what makes a lunch free. Not the price or who pays it, but an ability to forget the fact that it ever occurred. For, what never occurred can never have cost anyone anything.

Image: Ralph Fiennes as Amon Göth in Schindler’s List. In this scene, Göth is depicted randomly shooting concentration camp detainees from the balcony of his villa at Kraków-Płaszów.