Hillsborough Police Cover Up Disgrace

And let us not forget Tony Bland. Agree totally with this except... many ordinary police officers would have been ordered to change their statements. A difficult choice for some I am sure, stand up for the truth or lose a career and pension. We would all like to think we would have done the right thing. Senior officers, if still alive, should certainly be prosecuted.

I'm sure that anybody who watched football during the 1980s - and I never stopped attending games wherever I lived - will understand Dave's point. Compared to now you were far more likely to encounter disorder at a football match. And, perhaps more to the point, on your way to or from a game. Was this ten times more likely than now? Or fifty? Or a hundred times more? I really don't know.

Yet the point needs to be made that the incidence of this trouble was never quite as high as was portrayed by news media or, indeed, believed to be the case by the general public. In this sense what was reality was probably magnified by ten, fifty or a hundred times.

And that's what we told those who didn't share our interest in the game. Until we were blue in the face. "Don't believe what you read in the papers". But they never wanted to listen.

We also told them it was a minority that was involved in disorder. Yes, of course, it was. But what is a minority? 1% or 49%? In this case it was somewhere in between but I'll never know if it was 2%, 5%, 10% or more. It varied between clubs and occasions - and here it becomes awkward - because it was occasionally worrying just how sizeable a minority was involved. Nor did I ever wholly agree when the troublesome were handily dismissed as not being "real football supporters". Bloody hell, they seemed real enough to me.

All of which meant that all football supporters were frequently dismissed as violent and, depending on who you spoke to, as mindless, thuggish, socially retarded, misogynist and racist. If Liberal-minded friends and colleagues told you so, it must have been true. The government certainly appeared to adhere to a version of this view as did the press. And - if you're dealing in negativity - the more you tell people what is true; the more they will believe you. This may explain why the Sun was confident enough to print its lies. It assumed that people would believe the nonsense. Thus, even before Hillsborough, we had the Sunday Times telling us about a "slum sport watched by slum people in slum conditions". Keep that up, chaps, and you'll soon be able to blame us for the apocalypse.

At which point I could become very political. I'm sure you know my feelings about Thatcher and her cronies anyway. But I'll leave you with a thought. In 1989 just one of Sheffield's MPs was a Conservative. Which was the one who was happy to report the police's lies to the media?

Ah yes, it was that confounded "enemy within" again.

Us!

Indeed, the so-called Battle of Orgreave

Added to what BD has said, it's also worth remembering the cacophony of lies and negative stereotypes perpetuated by the right about Liverpool in particular (and the working class more generally), which again helped make the stories from the day believable. And this went right to the top - that's why the Conservative Party is just as responsible for this as the police and The Sun, and that's why I'm unhappy that it was Cameron getting all the credit by jumping the bandwagon again, point blank refusing to acknowledge his party's role. And that's before we get onto what Boris Johnson, the man who many want to see as the next prime minister, said about the disaster few years ago...

It has been said that this has turned it from the Hillsborough Disaster to the Hillsborough Scandal, and I agree, but to me it's just Hillsborough, because it was the pinnacle of a wider social issue, a class cold war - the Tories and The Sun tarnished Liverpool because it was united in opposition to the right and a potential threat. That one quote from The Times that BD posted sums up the mentality of the right towards the working class at the time - they saw them as a threat, so they wanted to spread negative ideas about them, in order to turn people against them and vote Tory. Divide and conquer

It worked, of course - not only did they win 4 elections in a row, but there is now a middle class generation (and some of the working class too) with an attitude of condescension and mistrust towards the working class and other minority groups (immigrants in particular), which the likes of Cameron and the right wing media are exploiting at the moment, to the point where even members of the Labour Party are trying to tap into this

While football has learned lessons from Hillsborough, it's fair to say that society hasn't. While the truth is now largely "out there", it'll take more than one report to change a lot of people's attitudes and ideas

One other point about what James has said. That's the bit about the level of condescension towards certain sections of society and many minority groups. How very true.

And what did I see in the newsagents on Thursday? Every paper, bar one, led on Hillsborough. The Daily Express, for its part, carried a story about "immigrants" supposedly being responsible for a "crime wave". On a day when the press had been fingered for wrongly pointing the finger of blame here was a newspaper at it again. Dreadful.

Twas ever thus. Just as Kelvin McKenzie's Sun was used to attack the miners and then spread lies about the Hillsborough victims, so Mr Murdoch's smutty rag continues to propound its distinctive brand of bigotry.

This is an example of the modern day style of the Sun, quoted by author and football fan Felix McHugh in Damned Scroungers (available for free as a download if anyone is interested): Note the use of such right wing staples as layabouts, handouts and even, in this piece, a link between benefit claimants and crazed murderer Raoul Moat on the one hand, and heroes, nurses and schools on the other; as unsubtle a piece of Divide & Rule journalism as could be imagined:

12.8.10 HELP US STOP £1.5 MILLION BENEFITS SCROUNGERS

TODAY The Sun is declaring war on feckless benefits claimants to slash the £5BILLION wasted in Britain's shambolic handouts culture.

Hundreds of thousands of scroungers in the UK are robbing hard-working Sun readers of their cash.

They cannot be bothered to find a job or they claim to be sick when they are perfectly capable of work because they prefer to sit at home watching widescreen TVs — paid for by YOU.

Our campaign aims to crack down on fraud and has the backing of Prime Minister David Cameron, who explains below how he is committed to tackling our out-of-control welfare state.

Yesterday we revealed how patriotic dad-of-ten Andy Rolf volunteered to fight with Our Boys against the Taliban in Afghanistan, serving as a corporal.

The 42-year-old Territorial Army soldier also manages to find time to work in construction to support his large family.
Yet while Andy does his country proud, thousands more are putting it to shame.

The Sun told last week how tattooed mum-of-eight Teresa Bystram, 53 — who lives off benefits — thought that taking three of her children to crazed murderer Raoul Moat's funeral was a good use of your money.

The Prime Minister and The Sun are determined to tackle those who needlessly drain Britain's resources.

But the Labour government's legacy is a sprawling welfare system which has become a maze of handouts which are stolen on an industrial scale.

Around £5.2billion a year is squandered, including £1.5billion lost to fraud.

Of that total, £1.6billion a year is lost in administrative mistakes, while £2.1billion is wrongly paid out due to inadvertent errors by claimants.

The £5.2billion handouts bill is enough to build around 200 secondary schools or employ 150,000 nurses.

Today we call on our army of readers to help us crack down on welfare crime once and for all and bring the cheats to justice.
If you know a benefits cheat then report them, in confidence, to our dedicated email or phone line.

Simply call 020 7782 1340 or email benefits@the-sun.co.uk
Social security should be a safety net for those in need, not a ticket for grasping, lazy layabouts to lead a luxury lifestyle funded by you.

No one begrudges those who genuinely cannot find work despite their best efforts.

But The Sun is leading the charge to rid Britain of a generation of scroungers — and with your help we will succeed.

Sorry to sully the forum with the dreadful tosh above. All the best for tomorrow at Rotherham, everyone.

Pleased to read that you have some good class analysis, James - your posts and others on this this thread have been excellent.

There's been too much of a cover up for the police and authorities to try their usual "just a few bad apples" line, but even on here there's been an attempt to heap all the blame on senior officers and exonerate the poor little bobbies who were just keeping an eye out for their pensions. 

Cover ups don't happen over a pint in the pub, they happen because hierarchical institutions like the police have a culture of deference to authority, contempt for the people they're supposed to be serving and a belief that different standards apply to them. That this was reinforced by state propaganda (what else do you call a front page whose source was the police and a Tory MP), and a government which despised the working class is a fact. Suggestions that none of that had anything to do with politics is frankly so ridiculous it's not even worth debating. 

I have resisted commenting on this thread as I don't know enough about it. All I know is what I have heard on television and radio or read on the internet or in newspapers. We all know that one must always be guarded as to what to believe when our source is the media.

I can though put your mind at rest Dave and assure you that the whole of the police force is not corrupt.

My memories of the video footage over 20 years ago was that it looked like absolute chaos. A clip shown in the recent news bulletins of the scenes outside the ground clearly show a surging crowd and also clearly show fans climbing over the walls to enter the ground. To me it seemed reasonable to assess that the situation outside of the ground was getting out of control and dangerous and that serious injury or death outside of the ground could result.

There has been a lot made of blame being put on those who tragically died. I am not sure if that is actually the case. Certainly the finger was pointed at Liverpool fans, but I think that related to those arriving late outside of the ground at the Leppings Lane end. It was a 3pm kick off on a fine sunny day and was an FA Cup semi-final not a Church Parade so the chances that a good proportion of the crowd had not been drinking alcohol is minimal. The video footage outside of the ground does show a chaotic scene (a crowd surge is a very frightening experience and I remember my feet leaving the ground and feeling completely out of control in such an incident outside of Kennington Oval).

It is clear that when the gate was opened to ease the surge of people outside of the ground there was no stewarding or policing inside of the ground to direct the crowd, resulting in everybody pushing in to the central two pens when there was plenty of room in the side pens. As an observer I think that lack of stewarding or policing inside the ground was more contributory to the tragic events than the opening of the gate (a decision I would assume was made in good faith to prevent a tragedy happening outside of the ground).

The issue of police statements being altered is an interesting one. What I wanted to know was to what extent? Was what was stated in the final statements untruthful? If so that is extremely serious. However although the media reports have been sketchy in respect of details (it is far more attention grabbing to headline that over 100 police statements have been altered rather than to detail exactly how) it would appear that the 'alterations' were not actually 'alterations' but omissions. Examples I have seen are comments relating to poor communication with the control room and a lack of leadership being removed from the initial draft.

It is not unusual to have an initial draft of a statement and is perfectly legal as long as the draft is retained and disclosed. It would seem that the drafts were retained as that is how the most recent enquiry would have been able to discover the differences between the original draft and the final statement.

The important thing is were the final statements the truth? If not then that is extremely serious and responsibility lies with the individual police officer who signed it. Every police officer should have the honesty and integrity to resist unlawful orders, and clearly an instruction to tell lies in a statement would be unlawful. Omissions though do not make the statement itself untruthful.

I am in no doubt that the South Yorkshire Police would clearly have seen the spectre of corporate manslaughter hanging over them and have sought to justify their actions (or probably more realistically lack of action). Completely wrong and it should not have taken over 20 years to get to this stage.

Media reporting at the time was sensationalist and I am very guarded as to what I believe about the recent enquiry and the findings. It is so easy to manipulate a story in the reporting to fit the in vogue political agenda.

A tragic event with closure for the families of the innocent deceased being impossible for so many years.

But if blame is being shared out, let's not forget the politicians who at that time became too involved in football and resulted in those disgusting fences where football fans were all treated as potential hooligans and herded in to those areas like cattle.