SEVEN YEARS after the police riot against the miners at Orgreave, they have adwho often ask potential employees for their OPRIS numbers if their CV indicates employment with Shell. Other companies have no obvious use for such details, OILC points out, as the system is entirely internal to Shell.
Activists
Ronnie McDonald, OILC chair claimed that anvone could ring Shell House in Aberdeen and ask for OPRIS information: "The OPRIS system is being used to single out trade union activists', he stated.
A spokesperson for Shell in Aberdeen admitted that what he called an 'OPRIS bar' was imposed on some 473 individuals who had occupied installations last year, but was lifted on December 21 1990. He categorically denied that such information had been made avilable to competitors. 'Whatever else we do, we ob serve the law of the land', he ctatar. mitted that it was them, not the NUM, that started the violence. This was just days after the case against miners' leaders Arthur Scargill and Peter Heathfield was dropped.
Instead of continuing to try to jail 39 miners for life for their part in the Orgreave mass pick.
police have paid them £425,000 in an 'ex gratia' payment. A South Yorkshire cop admitted that 'things we did in those days ...make me shudder even now..I can still hear the screams..!
What was the reaction of Labour leader Neil Kinnock? A final admission that he should have backed the miners against the police, after years of vitriol against the NUM?
Instead Kinnock true to form, compounded his lack of support for the miners in the past by presenting the Daily Mirror iournalists that hounded and vilified the NUM leadership with a Reporters of the Year award.
The Yorkshire NUM Council ronounced itself 'disgusted' They will certainly be joined ir their reaction by any socialist worth the name.
But the vindication of the miners in the route is not the only reason for the left to celebrate. Elections to the executive of the NUM shortly after the legal victories produced a solid left majority for the first time in many years.