Former home secretary Jack Straw today accused Margaret Thatcher's government of creating a "culture of impunity" in the police that was on display in its handling of the Hillsborough disaster.
Angering Conservatives, the Labour MP said the police felt they could "rule the roost" in the years after the 1984 miners' strike in which they played such a crucial role on behalf of the then prime minister.
Mr Straw expressed regret that a review he ordered in 1997 had failed to "get to the bottom" of the tragedy or the police cover-up laid bare yesterday by the Hillsborough Independent Panel report.
But he suggested the behaviour of South Yorkshire Police reflected a culture presided over by the Thatcher administration.
"One other reflection I have about this is the state of the police generally in the late 1980s, and the fact that the Thatcher government, because they needed the police to be a partisan force, particularly for the miners' strike and other industrial troubles, created a culture of impunity in the police service," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"They really were immune from outside influences and they thought they could rule the roost, and that is what we absolutely saw in South Yorkshire."
Labour frontbencher Andy Burnham said yesterday's report raised questions for the Thatcher government, which he said "saw everything through the prism of football hooliganism".
"Of course there had been problems but it led to some terrible abuses when it came to policing at football matches in the 1980s, people treated in ways that were just totally unacceptable, and I think that was where things got out of hand.
"The welfare, safety, of ordinary people was cast aside as some very heavy-handed approaches to policing were adopted.
"There are questions for that government that arise from that report - I'm not making a political point because everyone's got questions to answer, ourselves included.
"Everyone needs to have an open discussion about how this culture of negligence, the sheer mendacity of the police force in pursuing the victims and survivors of that tragedy, how on earth as a society we ever let that to happen."
But David Mellor, a Home Office minister in the 1980s, described Mr Straw's claims as "patent nonsense".
"I'm astonished that he should divert attention away from what we should really be talking about today, which is how we bring to book those police officers who perverted the course of justice by altering the statements of their colleagues," he told the BBC.
"I was a Home Office minister for five years in the 1980s, I took through Parliament the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the first time tape recorders and microphones were introduced in police stations to ensure that the police could not fit up defendants by inventing confessions.
"Our conscience is very clear on the police."
He added: "Jack should have a quick lie down I think and wake up in a rather more sensible state of mind."