Kelvin MacKenzie is back at The S*n as a columnist.
Hillsborough - Judgement Day
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I never got involved in any movements or the inquest. I never even went to any of the memorials. I'm a bit of a shithouse really, but I also don't like looking back generally. I just wanna thank everyone who did.
We were kids, got there early, yet were still told by some young cop that we couldn't go in the side pens as we had the year before. He was only a kid himself. I've often wondered how he's felt over the years... he obviously didn't have a clue what was going to happen next. So I'd like him to know, now that they've all been found guilty of murder, it wasn't him. It was his bosses, the arrogance of power, it was how things were. Sadly, it's how things still are. This judgement is a massive victory, but it's not a time to be complacent. We're still ruled by these kid fingering fifth cousins to the queen, aristocratic old-etonian scum. Don't think for a minute that this government wouldn't be bulldozing the entire working class into a mass grave if they thought they could get away it.
There's a direct link between that day out then and me going on about lizards all the time now. One thing I took from it all was a healthy distrust of authority and orthodoxy, and I pity those who take what the police or govt or any institution say at face value.
Looking at the fallout.... Football died, suddenly we were all getting off our heads in warehouses, cuddling our new friends, the mancs and cockneys we'd previously been conditioned to hate, and then watching our mates march off to The Gulf. The lizards said we'd be three months liberating Kuwait. We didn't realise back then that we were witnessing the birth of a multi trillion dollar industry. And in those few years, while our backs were turned, Murdoch, who had colluded with govt to blame the fans for their own deaths, was now conspiring to buy the whole game. Was now putting in place plans to save his crumbling empire and to become a billionaire using the debris of Hillsborough. It's hard to believe, but it's what happened.
All I've learned in the following 27 years is that anything that involves the govt or the police is rigged, corrupt and broken.
People still give these lizards the benefit of the doubt, even after watching the Blairs become the Ceausescus of Connaught Sq right in front of them in real time. The story of the last 3 decades has been one of how successive govts, supported by Murdoch, have hoovered all the wealth into a tiny power vacuum. The war on terror, the global financial crisis, the death of manufacturing, austerity, they're all mechanisms to steal the nation's wealth for a few greedy psychopaths at the top. It's at the point that they can now do it in plain sight. The media is entirely owned by lizards, and the BBC is run by the HSBC.
So this morning we see Darth Scrotum's rebuke to history. History is His Story if that's what you choose to poison your mind with. So don't. He blanked Hillsborough today as much from fear as from contempt. He's rattled, so put him to the sword. Stop moaning about him and declare jihad on News International. Cancel Sky, boycott Fox films. Blank everything he ever does. If everyone who was pissed off with today's Sun and Times front pages got on the phone now and cancelled Sky it would bring him down, in the UK at least. It worked for The Sun in Liverpool. It can work for his entire empire nationwide if people act.
Justice was served for many yesterday. Justice for me involves heads on sticks outside a parliament in flames.
We were kids, got there early, yet were still told by some young cop that we couldn't go in the side pens as we had the year before. He was only a kid himself. I've often wondered how he's felt over the years... he obviously didn't have a clue what was going to happen next. So I'd like him to know, now that they've all been found guilty of murder, it wasn't him. It was his bosses, the arrogance of power, it was how things were. Sadly, it's how things still are. This judgement is a massive victory, but it's not a time to be complacent. We're still ruled by these kid fingering fifth cousins to the queen, aristocratic old-etonian scum. Don't think for a minute that this government wouldn't be bulldozing the entire working class into a mass grave if they thought they could get away it.
There's a direct link between that day out then and me going on about lizards all the time now. One thing I took from it all was a healthy distrust of authority and orthodoxy, and I pity those who take what the police or govt or any institution say at face value.
Looking at the fallout.... Football died, suddenly we were all getting off our heads in warehouses, cuddling our new friends, the mancs and cockneys we'd previously been conditioned to hate, and then watching our mates march off to The Gulf. The lizards said we'd be three months liberating Kuwait. We didn't realise back then that we were witnessing the birth of a multi trillion dollar industry. And in those few years, while our backs were turned, Murdoch, who had colluded with govt to blame the fans for their own deaths, was now conspiring to buy the whole game. Was now putting in place plans to save his crumbling empire and to become a billionaire using the debris of Hillsborough. It's hard to believe, but it's what happened.
All I've learned in the following 27 years is that anything that involves the govt or the police is rigged, corrupt and broken.
People still give these lizards the benefit of the doubt, even after watching the Blairs become the Ceausescus of Connaught Sq right in front of them in real time. The story of the last 3 decades has been one of how successive govts, supported by Murdoch, have hoovered all the wealth into a tiny power vacuum. The war on terror, the global financial crisis, the death of manufacturing, austerity, they're all mechanisms to steal the nation's wealth for a few greedy psychopaths at the top. It's at the point that they can now do it in plain sight. The media is entirely owned by lizards, and the BBC is run by the HSBC.
So this morning we see Darth Scrotum's rebuke to history. History is His Story if that's what you choose to poison your mind with. So don't. He blanked Hillsborough today as much from fear as from contempt. He's rattled, so put him to the sword. Stop moaning about him and declare jihad on News International. Cancel Sky, boycott Fox films. Blank everything he ever does. If everyone who was pissed off with today's Sun and Times front pages got on the phone now and cancelled Sky it would bring him down, in the UK at least. It worked for The Sun in Liverpool. It can work for his entire empire nationwide if people act.
Justice was served for many yesterday. Justice for me involves heads on sticks outside a parliament in flames.
With respect John I don't think it would have made one iota bit of difference. The damage has been done. The fact the cunts didn't even put anything on their front page today about what is surely the biggest miscarriage of justice says it all. They're cunts and always will be cunts.
Maybe, but saying no comment would have been very easy. If her husband came to feel guilty she could have said that too. Her comments were pretty nasty in my opinion.
Luis Suarez @LuisSuarez9 21m21 minutes ago
Justice at last for the 96!! You'll never walk alone!!
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Justice at last for the 96!! You'll never walk alone!!
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So far I've had tweets fro BBC Merseyside, emails and tweets for BBC Midlands Today, phonecalls from the Mail on Sunday, and emails from the Mirror and BBC 5Live, all asking for interviews. Fuck them all. If David Conn from the Guardian calls I might think about it.
Tremendous stuff from O'Brien there. Genuinely angry but dignified with it, just as the HJC has been all along.
Burnham's speech was indeed great.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/live/bbcparliament?rewindTo=current
at 12:41 statement from Home Secretary Theresa May
at 12:56 statement from Andy Burnham
luxuriating in this.
Just had a mate call me to say I'm in today's 'i 'newspaper. Page 8. Someone's spoke to the son of the old boy who saw my dad out of his window and called him in and looked after him and helped him search for me. So sad that both my old man and his are no longer with us and didn't live to see yesterday's events.
Not sure why I'm telling you all this but seems like the right thing to do today.
Not sure why I'm telling you all this but seems like the right thing to do today.
I was talking to my wife about this tonight - she's not a football fan, didn't know about this until she married me and while I'm not really 'connected' to this like many here really are, I felt this tragedy was as much about good/truth persisting and eventually beating out evil/lies ... I don't know - like you - if I could have fought on for so long ...
The JFT96 campaign deserve so much credit for never giving up the fight.
Amazing people, the fight, courage, conviction the families and victims showed, same for the people of Liverpool red or blue, rich or poor they all stood behind the truth.
Forget football it's what makes Liverpool the greatest city in the world, there all one, if you mess with one you mess with us all and why they got the truth,
It's why all us OOT'rs keep coming back.
Amazing people, the fight, courage, conviction the families and victims showed, same for the people of Liverpool red or blue, rich or poor they all stood behind the truth.
Forget football it's what makes Liverpool the greatest city in the world, there all one, if you mess with one you mess with us all and why they got the truth,
It's why all us OOT'rs keep coming back.
Yes, this was excellent.
I remember when JFT96 rang out in Anfield for the Memorial seven years ago when he was giving his speech.
He had this look on his face.
As if he would make good on his promise that he would try to get justice after decades of failure, from his party.
From the other lot.
From everyone.
I willed him to succeed.
I willed him to one day stand and deliver.
Good job, Andy.
(Pity he's a Bitter)
Shared that on my FB too
It may be seen as stepping on toes, if so I apologise. This particular paper is a constant, it may have had a change in editors and staff but it hasn't evolved it's not changed the toxic nature of headlines continue (the fact Kelvin Mckenzie is still there shows it hasn't changed much at all). They might not be targeted the fans, families of Hillsborough or people of Liverpool but if it's not lies about them printed as absolute truth its lies about others printed as absolute truth.
I'm not emotionally invested, I wasn't there, I don't know anyone who was (apart from a few faceless people on a football forum) but for me the incredible togetherness of people across the city to boycott a toxic brand is imo amazing. I love that at any opportunity its stuck to the s*n the UKIP rep for the area was on QT a while back and mentioned it, the blue supporting mayor of the city mentioned it last night (sorry about the plane flying, its the s*n journos thats the closest we let them into the city).
Background to The Times' volte-face:
http://www.theguardian.com/media/20...+v2&utm_term=169369&subid=1255961&CMP=ema_546
http://www.theguardian.com/media/20...+v2&utm_term=169369&subid=1255961&CMP=ema_546
The Guardian can really pat itself on the back for some sustained excellent coverage of Hillsborough and its wider context and ramifications. Another interesting piece today.
Think Hillsborough couldn’t happen today? Think again
Thursday 28 April 2016 07.00 BSTLast modified on Thursday 28 April 2016 08.27
That the Hillsborough families and survivors finally have some truth and justice is historic; that it took 27 years is a damning indictment of how British society is run. The love, courage and resilience of the relatives – with the help of influential allies such as the Guardian’s David Conn and the criminologist Phil Scraton – eventually overcame powerful elites determined to smear, deflect, disbelieve or ignore them. The South Yorkshire chief constable, David Crompton, has finally been suspended.
But here’s my fear. Yes, there will be a noisy consensus that the unlawful deaths of 96 Liverpool fans was a terrible tragedy, but it will be treated as a throwback to a bygone era: we’ve moved on; lessons have been learned; the families have truth and justice; let prosecutions follow; let no more be said.
That is dangerous. Hillsborough was a story of two things: unaccountable power colliding with “othering”: the stripping away of humanity from a group of people. Both continue to scar our society, and both cause injustice.
A Hillsborough-style tragedy certainly does seem a lot less likely. Health and safety at football stadiums has been dramatically improved, and football has been upgraded to a “respectable” sport (alongside ticket price rises that leave the game unaffordable for too many).
At Orgreave, during the miners’ strike, in what the human rights organisation Liberty described as a “police riot”, there were mass wrongful arrests, for which South Yorkshire police (the same force responsible for the Hillsborough deaths) would later be forced to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation.
FacebookTwitterPinterest
A confrontation between South Yorkshire riot police and a mass picket in Orgreave Photograph: Photofusion/Rex Features
Police statements were allegedly written under direction and altered, the victims were turned into aggressors, and the media echoed the police’s smear campaign. Sound familiar? The striking miners were, said Thatcher, the “enemy within”; Liverpool fans were thugs and scoundrels from a hated city. Hillsborough was the next stop from Orgreave.
Today, with the trade union movement no longer deemed a threat by government, the police are not as indispensable as they once were. The Tories have reduced their number, frozen their pay, and undermined their terms and conditions: basically, what they have done to other workers, but once did not dare when it came to the police. That’s why we’ve ended up with the astonishing sight of Theresa May condemning officers’ behaviour in terms that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
And yet. Take the “othering”. If officers at Hillsborough had seen their families – or even well-to-do football fans from the home counties – pressed against those fences, their response would undoubtedly have been different. As humans, we have a huge potential capacity for empathy; but when we dehumanise a group of people, we can accept (or indeed inflict) cruelty.
For example, I wonder how different the treatment would have been for Sean Rigg – a black Londoner who died in a Brixton police station in 2008 – if he had been a white Oxbridge graduate like me. His family, including his sister Marcia Rigg, have been forced into a long fight for justice. An initial police version of events was contradicted by CCTV footage. An inquest found that the police had used unsuitable force, contradicting the findings of an earlier investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Officers were eventually suspended, and five could face charges. But all this took years of struggle.
Similarly, when Ian Tomlinson, a homeless newspaper vendor, died in 2009 after being batoned by a police officer and shoved to the ground at a protest he had nothing to do with, his death could easily have been ignored. Homeless people have a low ranking in the hierarchy of death. Would a well-dressed banker wandering through the protest have suffered the same fate?
The original police version of events – loyally repeated by the London Evening Standard – omitted any mention of police contact, wrongly blaming protestors for obstructing police attempts to help him. Had the Guardian not been passed a video showing what really happened, this version of events would have remained unchallenged.
FacebookTwitterPinterest
A CCTV still of Ian Tomlinson on the the day that he died at a protest in central London. Photograph: CPS/PA
Protestors themselves are demonised en masse, allowing certain police officers to rationalise inflicting brutality against them. Take William Horner, who had a tooth knocked out during student protests in December 2010. Andrew Ott, the police officer responsible, was convicted of assault four and a half years later only because he didn’t know his comments were being recorded.
“I wanna kill this little lot here,” and “I’ve clouted a few as well, just to get a bit of justice,” he boasted. There is little evidence Ott saw the protestors as fellow human beings. How many other officers thought the same thing, but were savvy enough not to say so on tape?
Hillsborough disaster: deadly mistakes and lies that lasted decades
Sadly, not all injustices have what Horner called “fluke” evidence to overturn them. And that combination of unaccountable power and othering persists, contributing to unavoidable suffering. Miners were violent, militant subversives, Liverpool fans scummy hooligans. Today, whenever I write about refugees I am bombarded with messages describing them all as rapists, criminals, bigots who hurl gay men from rooftops. Such attitudes make it easier for the Conservatives to refuse to take in 3,000 refugee children, even as child abusers and traffickers circle.
“Muslim” has become a synonym for “extremist” and “terrorist sympathiser”. Benefit claimants are widely seen as lazy fraudsters stealing from hard-working Brits. All of these groups lack meaningful power in modern Britain. All, to varying degrees, are robbed of their humanity. They are, quite frankly, seen as having less worth than other human beings. And that, all too often, is a necessary precondition for injustice.
A proper response to the Hillsborough inquest isn’t a complacent sigh of relief, a sense of putting injustice behind us. Instead it must surely mean a renewed determination to challenge unaccountable power and dehumanisation. If we fail to do so, many more families will be forced to spend years of their lives fighting for truth and justice.
Think Hillsborough couldn’t happen today? Think again
Thursday 28 April 2016 07.00 BSTLast modified on Thursday 28 April 2016 08.27
That the Hillsborough families and survivors finally have some truth and justice is historic; that it took 27 years is a damning indictment of how British society is run. The love, courage and resilience of the relatives – with the help of influential allies such as the Guardian’s David Conn and the criminologist Phil Scraton – eventually overcame powerful elites determined to smear, deflect, disbelieve or ignore them. The South Yorkshire chief constable, David Crompton, has finally been suspended.
But here’s my fear. Yes, there will be a noisy consensus that the unlawful deaths of 96 Liverpool fans was a terrible tragedy, but it will be treated as a throwback to a bygone era: we’ve moved on; lessons have been learned; the families have truth and justice; let prosecutions follow; let no more be said.
That is dangerous. Hillsborough was a story of two things: unaccountable power colliding with “othering”: the stripping away of humanity from a group of people. Both continue to scar our society, and both cause injustice.
A Hillsborough-style tragedy certainly does seem a lot less likely. Health and safety at football stadiums has been dramatically improved, and football has been upgraded to a “respectable” sport (alongside ticket price rises that leave the game unaffordable for too many).
The miners were the 'enemy within'; Liverpool fans were thugs. Hillsborough was the next stop from Orgreave
The relationship between government and police has also changed. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher was confronted with tumultuous industrial unrest, and was determined to permanently break trade union power. One of her first acts as prime minister had been to raise police pay by up to 45%, ensuring their loyalty in the battles ahead.At Orgreave, during the miners’ strike, in what the human rights organisation Liberty described as a “police riot”, there were mass wrongful arrests, for which South Yorkshire police (the same force responsible for the Hillsborough deaths) would later be forced to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation.
FacebookTwitterPinterest
A confrontation between South Yorkshire riot police and a mass picket in Orgreave Photograph: Photofusion/Rex Features
Police statements were allegedly written under direction and altered, the victims were turned into aggressors, and the media echoed the police’s smear campaign. Sound familiar? The striking miners were, said Thatcher, the “enemy within”; Liverpool fans were thugs and scoundrels from a hated city. Hillsborough was the next stop from Orgreave.
Today, with the trade union movement no longer deemed a threat by government, the police are not as indispensable as they once were. The Tories have reduced their number, frozen their pay, and undermined their terms and conditions: basically, what they have done to other workers, but once did not dare when it came to the police. That’s why we’ve ended up with the astonishing sight of Theresa May condemning officers’ behaviour in terms that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
And yet. Take the “othering”. If officers at Hillsborough had seen their families – or even well-to-do football fans from the home counties – pressed against those fences, their response would undoubtedly have been different. As humans, we have a huge potential capacity for empathy; but when we dehumanise a group of people, we can accept (or indeed inflict) cruelty.
For example, I wonder how different the treatment would have been for Sean Rigg – a black Londoner who died in a Brixton police station in 2008 – if he had been a white Oxbridge graduate like me. His family, including his sister Marcia Rigg, have been forced into a long fight for justice. An initial police version of events was contradicted by CCTV footage. An inquest found that the police had used unsuitable force, contradicting the findings of an earlier investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Officers were eventually suspended, and five could face charges. But all this took years of struggle.
Similarly, when Ian Tomlinson, a homeless newspaper vendor, died in 2009 after being batoned by a police officer and shoved to the ground at a protest he had nothing to do with, his death could easily have been ignored. Homeless people have a low ranking in the hierarchy of death. Would a well-dressed banker wandering through the protest have suffered the same fate?
The original police version of events – loyally repeated by the London Evening Standard – omitted any mention of police contact, wrongly blaming protestors for obstructing police attempts to help him. Had the Guardian not been passed a video showing what really happened, this version of events would have remained unchallenged.
FacebookTwitterPinterest
A CCTV still of Ian Tomlinson on the the day that he died at a protest in central London. Photograph: CPS/PA
Protestors themselves are demonised en masse, allowing certain police officers to rationalise inflicting brutality against them. Take William Horner, who had a tooth knocked out during student protests in December 2010. Andrew Ott, the police officer responsible, was convicted of assault four and a half years later only because he didn’t know his comments were being recorded.
“I wanna kill this little lot here,” and “I’ve clouted a few as well, just to get a bit of justice,” he boasted. There is little evidence Ott saw the protestors as fellow human beings. How many other officers thought the same thing, but were savvy enough not to say so on tape?
Hillsborough disaster: deadly mistakes and lies that lasted decades
Sadly, not all injustices have what Horner called “fluke” evidence to overturn them. And that combination of unaccountable power and othering persists, contributing to unavoidable suffering. Miners were violent, militant subversives, Liverpool fans scummy hooligans. Today, whenever I write about refugees I am bombarded with messages describing them all as rapists, criminals, bigots who hurl gay men from rooftops. Such attitudes make it easier for the Conservatives to refuse to take in 3,000 refugee children, even as child abusers and traffickers circle.
“Muslim” has become a synonym for “extremist” and “terrorist sympathiser”. Benefit claimants are widely seen as lazy fraudsters stealing from hard-working Brits. All of these groups lack meaningful power in modern Britain. All, to varying degrees, are robbed of their humanity. They are, quite frankly, seen as having less worth than other human beings. And that, all too often, is a necessary precondition for injustice.
A proper response to the Hillsborough inquest isn’t a complacent sigh of relief, a sense of putting injustice behind us. Instead it must surely mean a renewed determination to challenge unaccountable power and dehumanisation. If we fail to do so, many more families will be forced to spend years of their lives fighting for truth and justice.
The Guardian can really pat itself on the back for some sustained excellent coverage of Hillsborough and its wider context and ramifications. Another interesting piece today.
Think Hillsborough couldn’t happen today? Think again
Thursday 28 April 2016 07.00 BSTLast modified on Thursday 28 April 2016 08.27
That the Hillsborough families and survivors finally have some truth and justice is historic; that it took 27 years is a damning indictment of how British society is run. The love, courage and resilience of the relatives – with the help of influential allies such as the Guardian’s David Conn and the criminologist Phil Scraton – eventually overcame powerful elites determined to smear, deflect, disbelieve or ignore them. The South Yorkshire chief constable, David Crompton, has finally been suspended.
But here’s my fear. Yes, there will be a noisy consensus that the unlawful deaths of 96 Liverpool fans was a terrible tragedy, but it will be treated as a throwback to a bygone era: we’ve moved on; lessons have been learned; the families have truth and justice; let prosecutions follow; let no more be said.
That is dangerous. Hillsborough was a story of two things: unaccountable power colliding with “othering”: the stripping away of humanity from a group of people. Both continue to scar our society, and both cause injustice.
A Hillsborough-style tragedy certainly does seem a lot less likely. Health and safety at football stadiums has been dramatically improved, and football has been upgraded to a “respectable” sport (alongside ticket price rises that leave the game unaffordable for too many).
The miners were the 'enemy within'; Liverpool fans were thugs. Hillsborough was the next stop from OrgreaveThe relationship between government and police has also changed. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher was confronted with tumultuous industrial unrest, and was determined to permanently break trade union power. One of her first acts as prime minister had been to raise police pay by up to 45%, ensuring their loyalty in the battles ahead.
At Orgreave, during the miners’ strike, in what the human rights organisation Liberty described as a “police riot”, there were mass wrongful arrests, for which South Yorkshire police (the same force responsible for the Hillsborough deaths) would later be forced to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation.
FacebookTwitterPinterest
A confrontation between South Yorkshire riot police and a mass picket in Orgreave Photograph: Photofusion/Rex Features
Police statements were allegedly written under direction and altered, the victims were turned into aggressors, and the media echoed the police’s smear campaign. Sound familiar? The striking miners were, said Thatcher, the “enemy within”; Liverpool fans were thugs and scoundrels from a hated city. Hillsborough was the next stop from Orgreave.
Today, with the trade union movement no longer deemed a threat by government, the police are not as indispensable as they once were. The Tories have reduced their number, frozen their pay, and undermined their terms and conditions: basically, what they have done to other workers, but once did not dare when it came to the police. That’s why we’ve ended up with the astonishing sight of Theresa May condemning officers’ behaviour in terms that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
And yet. Take the “othering”. If officers at Hillsborough had seen their families – or even well-to-do football fans from the home counties – pressed against those fences, their response would undoubtedly have been different. As humans, we have a huge potential capacity for empathy; but when we dehumanise a group of people, we can accept (or indeed inflict) cruelty.
For example, I wonder how different the treatment would have been for Sean Rigg – a black Londoner who died in a Brixton police station in 2008 – if he had been a white Oxbridge graduate like me. His family, including his sister Marcia Rigg, have been forced into a long fight for justice. An initial police version of events was contradicted by CCTV footage. An inquest found that the police had used unsuitable force, contradicting the findings of an earlier investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Officers were eventually suspended, and five could face charges. But all this took years of struggle.
Similarly, when Ian Tomlinson, a homeless newspaper vendor, died in 2009 after being batoned by a police officer and shoved to the ground at a protest he had nothing to do with, his death could easily have been ignored. Homeless people have a low ranking in the hierarchy of death. Would a well-dressed banker wandering through the protest have suffered the same fate?
The original police version of events – loyally repeated by the London Evening Standard – omitted any mention of police contact, wrongly blaming protestors for obstructing police attempts to help him. Had the Guardian not been passed a video showing what really happened, this version of events would have remained unchallenged.
FacebookTwitterPinterest
A CCTV still of Ian Tomlinson on the the day that he died at a protest in central London. Photograph: CPS/PA
Protestors themselves are demonised en masse, allowing certain police officers to rationalise inflicting brutality against them. Take William Horner, who had a tooth knocked out during student protests in December 2010. Andrew Ott, the police officer responsible, was convicted of assault four and a half years later only because he didn’t know his comments were being recorded.
“I wanna kill this little lot here,” and “I’ve clouted a few as well, just to get a bit of justice,” he boasted. There is little evidence Ott saw the protestors as fellow human beings. How many other officers thought the same thing, but were savvy enough not to say so on tape?
Hillsborough disaster: deadly mistakes and lies that lasted decades
Sadly, not all injustices have what Horner called “fluke” evidence to overturn them. And that combination of unaccountable power and othering persists, contributing to unavoidable suffering. Miners were violent, militant subversives, Liverpool fans scummy hooligans. Today, whenever I write about refugees I am bombarded with messages describing them all as rapists, criminals, bigots who hurl gay men from rooftops. Such attitudes make it easier for the Conservatives to refuse to take in 3,000 refugee children, even as child abusers and traffickers circle.
“Muslim” has become a synonym for “extremist” and “terrorist sympathiser”. Benefit claimants are widely seen as lazy fraudsters stealing from hard-working Brits. All of these groups lack meaningful power in modern Britain. All, to varying degrees, are robbed of their humanity. They are, quite frankly, seen as having less worth than other human beings. And that, all too often, is a necessary precondition for injustice.
A proper response to the Hillsborough inquest isn’t a complacent sigh of relief, a sense of putting injustice behind us. Instead it must surely mean a renewed determination to challenge unaccountable power and dehumanisation. If we fail to do so, many more families will be forced to spend years of their lives fighting for truth and justice.
The last two paragraphs of that are particularly poignant and unsettling, because I see those attitudes every day.
Yes, they're widespread, and UKIP and the far right of the conservatives in particular have been trading on those attitudes with increasing fervour.
Some of the references to Orgreave go too far in that article. There are certainly comparisons to be drawn between the actions of the police then and a few years later at Hillsborough, but the rights and wrongs of the Orgreave situation itself were a lot less clear-cut than those which led to the deaths of the 96 and I get uneasy at the extent of some of the comparisons being drawn between the two.
Orgreave was (as the article concedes) a "mass" picket and the intention of those, in a period when union power had got out of control in certain cases, was to intimidate those who disagreed with them and the stance they represented. They were pretty threatening in themselves and I, as a trade union member and supporter for literally my whole career, would not have been able to defend their use. In respect of the miners' strike, there was the further point that the NUM was led by a man in Arthur Scargill who self-confessedly had bigger political fish to fry, who was known to have had contacts with the Soviet Union (remember also that the disarmament debate was its height in the 80s) and who himself had a Communist deputy. I hold absolutely no brief for most of Margaret Thatcher's domestic policies but the fact is that it was outside contacts such as Scargill's which led to references to "the enemy within", not the miners themselves.
We're all breathing a sigh of relief at the righting of an ancient wrong which was followed by a rewriting of history. Let's not make the latter mistake ourselves.
Orgreave was (as the article concedes) a "mass" picket and the intention of those, in a period when union power had got out of control in certain cases, was to intimidate those who disagreed with them and the stance they represented. They were pretty threatening in themselves and I, as a trade union member and supporter for literally my whole career, would not have been able to defend their use. In respect of the miners' strike, there was the further point that the NUM was led by a man in Arthur Scargill who self-confessedly had bigger political fish to fry, who was known to have had contacts with the Soviet Union (remember also that the disarmament debate was its height in the 80s) and who himself had a Communist deputy. I hold absolutely no brief for most of Margaret Thatcher's domestic policies but the fact is that it was outside contacts such as Scargill's which led to references to "the enemy within", not the miners themselves.
We're all breathing a sigh of relief at the righting of an ancient wrong which was followed by a rewriting of history. Let's not make the latter mistake ourselves.
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