Please excuse me for borrowing Juvenal’s oft-quoted line. But the horrific conclusions of the recent enquiry into the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 must remind us all of its relevance once again. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-19582072
The appalling events during and after that April football match are now known to have been caused by the negligence and incompetence of paid officials of the club, the police and the judiciary, compounded by a comprehensive cover-up of the facts. Coincidentally it occurred in South Yorkshire, where the local authorities had been accused of malpractice just a few years earlier during the miners’ strike. But some commentators will be quick to question whether coincidence is the right word. Was the questionable ethos of that police force unchanged?
The unimaginable grief of the families of the victims can hardly be assuaged by these developments; but many will now find a grain of comfort in the knowledge that their loved ones were innocent of any blame. RIP.
Boadicea's Chariot 
So sad.
I recall back in ’79 being involved in a ‘crowd crush.’ Absolutely terrifying, we’d watched the John Tate / Gerrie Coetzee boxing match at Loftus (Pretoria.) A 50,000 stadium, which would you believe had 80,000 people crammed into. (Some say more, lots more.) All was well until we left the stadium, entered the street and then the push started, you literally have nowhere to go but whichever way the crowd is pushing, talk about a sea of humanity, whenever I see similar events on the news I go cold. fortunately we didn’t have barriers stopping our ‘progress’ I recall telling myself to get to the side, any side, I did and obviously lived to tell the tale.
I remember watching the Hillsborough tragedy as it happened, an absolute disaster. As a frequent spectator at sporting events and a father I can almost understand how the families must feel.
Those responsible must be held to account.
There but for the grace of God ……
Thank you for this dignified post Janus. As a scouser myself, I do hope the guilty ones are brought to book.
OZ
To be honest, I am not entirely certain as to the point in punishing incompetence. As far as I can tell, there was no malice of forethought. Nobody gained by the tragedy.By all means remove them from their posts and make sure that they cannot repeat the mistakes, but I am not sure that punishing those responsible achieves anything except to create more misery. It certainly will not bring back any of the dead or heal any of those injured. I doubt that a day has gone by when all of those who were responsible have not regretted the disaster and their failure to prevent it. Vengeance is not justice. It is an unattractive notion that has been imported into Britain from the Middle East via America.
I refer to the event itself, rather than any cover up that may have taken place subsequently. Those who may be responsible acted deliberately and for that they should be punished.
Tremendous steps were taken following Hillsborough that have led to vastly improved stadiums (a) all around the country and probably the world. There is better policing and crowd control and there are safety measures in place to decrease the likelihood of repetition. That is real justice.
Thank you, Janus.
Yes, from The Telegraph:
“It has long been established that the police’s loss of control, and specifically the decision to open an exit gate and allow Liverpool fans into an already over-crowded central terrace, caused the disaster.
In the aftermath, however, police blamed drunk and ticketless fans, an account that has now been comprehensively and definitively exposed as a deliberate attempt to shift the blame.”
The families involved were right to continue the fight.
Agreed, Sipu. There may not have been malice aforethought, but there was plenty afterwards by all accounts. The families of the 96, the people of Liverpool and the City itself suffered years of vilification as a result of the cover-up and THAT is the wrong that needs righting, by criminal prosecutions if necessary.
OZ
I second OZ’s comment.
Sipu, I think I am, finally, beginning to see where you are coming from – it does not mean that I wholeheartedly agree with you but perhaps understand a little better!
It’s probably a little late to remove those responsible from their posts – many are probably enjoying their un-deserved pensions.
I, personally, doubt that many, if any, regret ‘the disaster and their failure to prevent it.’. If they did they would have spoken out at the earlier enquiry.
Those responsible for the ‘cover-up’ should most definitely be prosecuted – if for no other reason that to proclaim loudly and clearly that it does not matter how long it takes to discover a cover-up those responsible will be prosecuted and will suffer the consequences of the law.
The fact that the outcome was better facilities and organisation is neither here nor there – and it most certainly is not ‘justice’ to those who suffered from the event or the cover-up.
Nazi thugs have been prosecuted when they were in their 80s and 90s, so I do hope that those responsible for the cover-up and smearing the reputations of the victims get severely punished. I’m not sure I agree with you, Sipu, that the consciences of those responsible have been working overtime since the disaster. More likely they have spent the time counting their lucky stars.
I wonder why this has raised its head again right now?
What is it covering up this time?
Why are these dreadful accidents/incidents always attendant at football matches? They do not appear to happen at other games?
Doesn’t say too much about the fans does it?
And yes I do believe that a lot of those fans were drunk and ticketless which probably didn’t help matters.
People seem to forget that most football crowds were notorious in the 1980’s for rioting, drinking, fighting and incredibly destructive behaviour in town centres.
There should be accounting for the whole thing but I certainly don’t think the fans were the whited sepulchres they are being currently painted.
The same thought had occurred to me, Christina. One reason why people were so ready to believe the official police account of the fans’ responsibility for the Hillsborough tragedy was the terrible reputation of English football fans at the time, four years after the Heysel stadium incident, also involving Liverpool fans. I expect the police and coroner thought they would get away with this because the dog already had a bad name.
Indeed football fans had a terrible reputation, but it was the usual story, a relatively small disruptive element gave all football fans a bad name. This report refutes this completely. The relatives of the victims fought a long and hard battle to clear the dead of any blame for their own fate.
Good for them, and for exposing the cover up. This is justice at last.
Growing up in Merseyside, stories abounded; horrific stories, whispered, about so and so who had woken up next to his dead son in the makeshift morgue at Hillsborough, or such a one, who had also gone mad with grief. We always knew the truth; there is not only a sense of injustice but also of violation. I think that it is proof, if ever needed, that Thatcher needed the police in order to implement the class warfare of miners and unions and such like. Some may displute that; many of you probably will. But the layers of history are unpeeling to reveal something much greater; much more sinister than previously thought; it has shades of Tianenman Square or the middle east where dictators / governments are free to turn on their people at whim. And until such time as those who conspired are prosecuted, I will never consider Britian to be a democracy again.
Yes, Claire. A great feeling of injustice. Nothing will bring back those who died, but this cover up was well known and extensive.
It is not my idea of democracy at its best either.
To compare Tienanmen Square with Hillsborough is laughably obscene!
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What democracy? Hasn’t been any of notice in the UK in decades, at least the last thirty years.
Oh dear, your slip is showing again. 😦 Drunk and ticketless fans were not responsible for the disaster, even if you’d like them to be.
As for ‘democracy’, are you suggesting the UK was somehow more democratic pre-1980? In what ways?
You must be content to have landed in a country where the police are notably free of corruption and violent tendencies. 🙂
Claire, you’d have us believe that killing 96 football fans was part of a Thatcher conspiracy. To achieve what? To weed out labour voters? Is your second name Barking?
I never said they were responsible for the incident obviously the crowd control was, just that they didn’t help matters.
I’m quite sure a lot were both drunk and ticketless, had their behaviour in the past been civilised they would never have erected the fences to keep them in which ended up killing them!
Try the average football fan behaviour of the UK past in the USA and there would be a damned sight more than 96 dead, shot by the police and most wouldn’t think that they didn’t deserve it. Why should people have to put up with riots in the streets over some stupid game?
Funnily enough the last riot like that was in Canada over a ice hockey game, not too long ago. Needless to say the Mounties didn’t take too kindly to it either, they all ended up in jail and quite right too.
Boadicea, I am thrilled to have made some headway! 🙂
I remember the incident, but I do not know the facts anymore than anybody else here. I am entirely skeptical about enquires that take place years, and in this case decades after the event. Somethings are easy to prove, such as documents that have been altered. But, relying on people’s verbal accounts has proved itself time and again to be completely unreliable. The famous gorilla experiment proves that witnesses statements are unreliable http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo. So too do people’s memories. Experiments have been done, most famously following 9/11, where people were asked to write down what they saw, felt and experienced in the immediate aftermath. Several years later, they were asked to restate those same experiences. The changes were dramatic and even when confronted with their original statements, some could not believe what they had written.
It seems to me that there were far too many people trying to enter the ground. That indicates that many were ticketless. Common sense dictates that many would have been drinking before hand. That is a far more likely situation than the reverse. Inevitably when there is a large crowd of people pushing, some, especially those on the outskirts are going to think it is quite fun to push and shove. Crowds act hysterically when under pressure. While some of the guilt lies with the authorities, some too must lie with the fans. The 96 victims may or may not have been entirely sober ticket holders, but there were undoubtedly some fans, pushing and shoving who were not.
It is largely because of the endless search for someone to blame that is part of modern culture, that those in authority sought to cover up evidence. With the blame comes a level of retribution that achieves little but merely turns people into a hate-filled vengeance seeking society and destorys still more lives. The purpose of an enquiry should be to prevent such events reoccurring. It should not be about punishing people. Quite frankly when I see some of the families of the victims spouting off on TV about their fight for justice, when in fact what they mean is vengeance and financial compensation, I have zero sympathy for them.
Once again the people who create this situation are the politicians who seek political capital, the lawyers who seek fees and the journalist who seek to sell news. Personally, I think it sucks.
While on the subject, when I was up in Scotland, I met a barrister who was one of the lead lawyers on the Bloody Sunday killings enquiry. He told me that the British army was 95% to blame for what happened. This is more than 40 years after the event. While I am sure that he believes that based on the evidence he has seen, what he has not and can never know is what it was really like to be there at the time. He is a really nice, bright chap, but he has made a shed load of money out of the enquiry, and what the hell has it achieved?
Sipu, “The purpose of an enquiry should be to prevent such events reoccurring. It should not be about punishing people.” Really? This is as a fine generalisation as one might wish for! The enquiry was intended to apportion responsibility and therefore bound to lead to blame and punishment.
sipu, 17, Amen.
I suppose that it is possible that I have been closer to having being there and done that than some of my fellow cherished Authors. I was a travelling football fan in the days when we were treated as total scum by the home police wherever we went. That was just the way it was. I have been herded, penned and abused from Aberdeen to Greenock and from Anfield to Paris. It came with the territory. We were football fans and, therefore, trouble. I am not, saying, of course, that the Embran polis were any better – they used to give serious grief to visiting Weegies of whatever hue.
Back then, we were marched to crumbling grounds with appalling facilities and marched straight back to our cars, trains and buses after the game. You had no chance of going to a pub for a drink on either side of the game so you got tanked up on cans beforehand. Liverpool fans were no different from the rest of us in that respect.
As I remember it, however, the ticketless travelling fan was very much an English thing. In all-ticket games in Jockland the police and steward cordons would check if you had a ticket before you got near to the turnstile. If you didn’t, you were huckled away. So, you did not bother travelling to away games if you did not have said ticket.
I distinctly remember reading at the time that a different culture had evolved among the travelling fans of all of the big English teams. If enough of you turned up without a ticket there was a good chance that the police would let you into the ground anyway because it was easier to contain you there than it was to let you roam the streets. The closer it was to kick-off, the more likely it was that you would get in. I’m not claiming some sort of Jock superior morality here. Just a different way of doing things. Much bigger crowds to deal with for a start.
All that said, the results of the independent enquiry have shaken some of my long held beliefs. I thought that I knew why the police used to do what they did to us. They were having to deal with large and often violent groups and their experience and their training led them to concentrate, quite rightly, on crowd control rather than on crowd safety. I respected them in those far off and very different days for their public service and dedication. I truly trusted them as our guardians.
Tonight, I am not so sure that they still deserve that trust.
And yet, JM, Scottish football fans are regarded as much better behaved than the English variety. They drink just as much, I’m sure, but then start dancing and singing instead of looking for trouble.