Howells comes clean over miners’ strike
Transport minister Kim Howells yesterday admitted to destroying documents and maps that implicated the National Union of Miners in the killing of a taxi driver during the 1984-85 miners’ strike.
Mr Howells said he acted injudiciously when he was an NUM official in South Wales after he heard miners had dropped a concrete slab on a taxi.
Mr Howells said he acted to prevent the union getting the blame, as it had helped to organise the movements and placement of pickets.
David Wilkie, a father of four, died in November 1984 when his car was hit by a slab of concrete thrown from a bridge.
Two miners – Dean Hancock and Russell Shankland, both 21 at the time and from Rhymney, mid-Glamorgan – were convicted of Wilkie’s murder, but the sentence was reduced to manslaughter on appeal.
They were released in November 1989, five years after the incident.
In an interview for BBC2’s The Miners’ Strike documentary last night – which marked the 20th anniversary of the dispute – the MP for Pontypridd says: “It was a reporter from PA [the Press Association news agency] who I knew. He said: ‘Are you sitting down?’ I said: ‘No, come on, what is it?’ He said some of your boys have killed a taxi driver up on the Heads of the Valleys road.
“For only the second time in my life my knees began to shake. Because I thought, hang on, we’ve got all these records we’ve kept at the NUM offices, there is all those maps on the wall. We are going to get implicated in this.
“I remember thinking I’ve got to get to that office, I’ve got to destroy everything – and I did.
“I’ve never told anybody that before.”
The killing was a key turning point in the strike, affecting public support for striking miners.
The Miners’ Strike was shown on Tuesday night on BBC Two.
