Born Under Punches Read Online Free Page B

fought back with anything they could get their hands on. Bricks. Stones. The long-standing pacifism of the labour movement forcibly abandoned. The jubilation of the previous day forgotten. It was a bloody rout, culminating with the arrest of Arthur Scargill.
    Once released, Scargill wanted the forthcoming talks with the NCB to be conclusive: ‘I hope we will be able to lay the foundations of a settlement.’
    It wasn’t to happen. The government had seen what happened at Orgreave. Dissent quelled by force. Riot police and scab labour to keep production going. And, with the media collusion, no public outcry at the tactics.
    NCB chief Ian MacGregor was instructed not to co-operate. To sit out the strike. Starve the miners out if necessary.
    The police blueprint for Orgreave became standard operating procedure for dealing with conflicts during the strike. Coldwell was just one in a number of similar battles.
    The success of these operations opened the doors in the government’s collective mind. Allowed the unthinkable to be thought. If they could get away with this, they reasoned, they could get away with anything. No one else will fight back if the miners lose. They’ll be too frightened for their own jobs.
    We can get away with anything.
    Anything.
    So they did.
    Then came the wholesale dismantling of the country. Assets stripped, sold off. Public utilities that we already owned were sold back to us –
    No. – were, sold back to some of us –
    No. – were selectively sold back –
    No. No good.
    Larkin sat back, clicked SAVE. Time for a break.
    He closed the lid of the laptop, cracked a can of Stella, put the TV on. News. He watched.
    The man walked into Newcastle Crown Court expensively but soberly suited and styled, self-importance fronting his every step, stonewalled by minders and solicitors, leaving cameramen and gawkers scrumming in his wake. His face was drawn and haggard yet arrogant and defiant, like a fading rock star refusing to cede ground to changing fashion or disappearing youth.
    The Ten O’Clock News voice-overed in news-with-a-capital-N tones:
    â€˜Clive Fairbairn, seen here on the first day of his trial, was found guilty on sample charges of supplying class-A narcotics, conspiracy to supply, conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, attempting to bribe a police officer and grievous bodily harm. In his summing-up the judge said –’ the screen swirled to a transcripted graphic ‘– “This is one of the most serious cases I have ever been associated with. Your willingness to exploit the weaknesses of others and callously profit from that is, in my opinion, shockingly unparalleled.”’
    Cut to the reporter standing outside the Crown Court, brow furrowed, eyes dancing with manic glee. The look said: career-making story means bye-bye regional, hello national. Desk drawers emptied, phone call awaited.
    â€˜Now we’ll take a look back at the career of Newcastle’s Mr Big, one of the most notorious gangland figures ever to come out of the north-east.’
    Black and white footage of 1960s-era Newcastle montaged across the screen; old streets, poor people and bad housing morphed into images of bars and clubs awash with ale and martinis, the women beehived and desperate, the men Brylcreemed and hungry. Soundtrack by the Animals, dancing by Douglas Bader. The report a big production number wobbling between terse moralizing and jocund voyeurism.
    Fairbairn’s verdict meant media open season, the new palliative of hate, a cloaked music-hall villain drawing the general public’s fire, leaving secret empires undisturbed, secret histories untold. Stephen Larkin, watching, took another mouthful of beer and tuned out. He knew a Stalinist exercise in airbrushed history when he saw one.
    Once, Larkin himself would have been scrumming outside the court, fighting to be first with the news, his name in print, his by-line in the