A culture of cover-ups

Five years prior to Hillsborough, police clashed with picketing miners at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire, injuring 51 picketers. It has now emerged that South Yorkshire Police engaged in similar tampering with the record of events.

Statements by 40 police officers have been found to contain identical descriptions of alleged disorder by the miners and 34 police statements, claimed to have been compiled separately, used the idential phrase: "Periodically there was missile-throwing from the back of the pickets."

One paragraph had identical wording in 22 supposedly separate police statements.

The culture of fabricating evidence that developed among South Yorkshire Police at the height of the Thatcher ascendancy casts a dreadful light on police accountability, especially since there been no hint of remorse since from the chief constable responsible, Peter Wright.

It was he who decided - unless he was acting on a hint from No 10 - that a charge of disorderly conduct was inadequate and that the evidence should therefore be manipulated to make stick the much more serious charge of unlawful assembly and riot.

Nor has this dishonesty and perjury of the evidence been confined since then to South Yorkshire Police - witness the deceptive police account put out to explain away the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests, the initial false statement that a police officer had been shot first before they shot and killed Mark Duggan or the false evidence used to entrap the environmental protesters near Nottingham without revealing that undercover officers had slept with activists they were sent to spy on.

Equally, there is now abundant evidence of MoD and MI5/6 involvement British acts of torture and rendition which the British authorities have gone to enormous lengths to deny and conceal and which the so-called Justice and Security Bill now before Parliament is designed to prevent ever being revealed in future.

The Gibson inquiry into Britain's participation in these illegal activities was suspended and then terminated, only one example of Iraqi prisoner abuse, Baha Mousa, has ever been concluded and the private inquiry by the Iraq Historic Allegations Team is allegedly a shambles - half of those working for it come from G4S.

Most seriously, the fate of at least 64 Iraqi prisoners who were being transported by helicopter to an unknown "black site" has still never been investigated.

And it is now known that a British national, Martin Mubanga, was unlawfully rendered from Zambia in 2002 when the Foreign Office consular division was ordered by No 10 to refuse him consular protection which would have saved him from rendition to Guantanamo.

• A lot of the damage to employment rights is done in the small print. Attention has focused almost exclusively around the "Beecroft-lite" proposals that make it possible for employers to sack their workers without just cause in exchange for shares worth some £2,000.

However there is a host of other, little-noted changes in last week's Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill which will severely curtail workers' rights.

The cap for compensation in unfair dismissal cases is being significantly lowered.

And there is much reduced protection for workplace whistleblowers, which will allow more abuses at work to go unreported.

It is disturbing that the role for legal officers in deciding cases is being extended, while the role for lay members at employment appeal tribunals is being cut back.

There is also a malign purpose behind the Bill's giving enhanced powers for tribunals to require payment of deposits in order to deter so-called weaker claims.

There are many other concerns too, the seriousness of which may not be immediately apparent on the surface.

The government is introducing regulations requiring claimants to provide prescribed information when using Acas conciliation services.

That may sound innocent, but there is fear that employers will then challenge claims made at the tribunal on the grounds that the worker has not provided sufficient information leading to dismissal of the claim - a deliberately nitpicking hurdle inserted, as in the notorious pre-strike procedure, to enable judges to abort action on a technicality.

Similarly, the new rules about legal officers could allow people who are not employment law specialists and have not had judicial training to decide some employment rights claims.

The government is also seeking to overturn the level playing field of employment tribunals.

Reducing the role of lay members will remove the influence of those with direct industrial relations experience.

Regulations are proposed to establish employment appeal tribunal panels where the employer representatives outnumber the employee representatives, thus undermining confidence in the impartiality of the whole process.

Whistle-blowing claims will only be successful in future if the worker believes that the disclosure was made in the public interest and can demonstrate it was reasonable to believe that.

One effect of that will be that it will limit the protection for workers who raise concerns about health and safety issues.

The regulations will also in future allow a judge who has - subjectively - decided that a claim has little reasonable prospect of success to require a deposit of £1,000 to be laid before the claim can proceed.

This will make it much harder, as was of course intended, for some claims to proceed even when in the event they would have won through.

• Next month Lord Justice Leveson will unveil his report on press ethics and governance.

In that context the lawsuits now being taken out against Mirror Group Newspapers could hardly have come at a worse time for those wanting to head off reform.

If other potential victims flood in with their own legal actions, as happened with News International, the results could be catastrophic.

Murdoch's News Corp has already had to pay out £224 million in litigation and settlement fees, is having to break up its media empire, has closed down the News of the World and faces the humiliation that several of its senior executives now face criminal charges.

If the Mirror Group suffers a similar fate, where will the buck stop?

Were other newspapers also guilty of phone-hacking, which was long pursued with impunity because editors thought they could get away with it?

Leveson, on the evidence arrayed before him, is thought to believe that self-regulation cannot be relied upon to prevent future malpractice and that some form of statutory underpinning to press regulation is now necessary.

That could mean a new regulatory body being formally recognised in law and could include a legal requirement for newspapers to sign up to this body.

This would get round the problem that antagonistic proprietors can at present simply walk away from the Press Complaints Commission and refuse to recognise its authority, as happened with Richard Desmond, owner of the Express.

Of course the riposte of the defenders of the status quo - the disgraced Lord Blacks of the world - is that this is the thin end of the wedge of state interference.

It most certainly is not, as is shown by the Irish model and by other procedures elsewhere in Europe which balance freedom of speech with systems that effectively check the worst excesses of the press that are manifest in Britain.

No doubt the Murdochs, Dacres, Barclay brothers and Desmonds will bitterly denounce what they caricature as "state control," but who gave them the right to exercise untrammelled tycoon control over what should be a freedom of speech open to all, but normally denied in their newspapers to all who don't agree with them?

• For more of Michael Meacher's writing visit www.michaelmeacher.info