Memories of Hillsborough, Thirty Years On
Thirty years ago today I was one of the few thousand Liverpool fans who went to a football match. Ninety six fellow fans were never to come home. [Addition - the death toll is now counted at ninety seven; ninety four lost their lives that afternoon, three more later as a result of injuries and harms suffered).
The people who died as a result of the crush at Hillsborough stadium, 15th April 1989, have never been forgotten and will never be forgotten. Today, I am thinking of fellow survivors and their families and friends today, all those who were and who continue to be affected by this tragedy. If you understand what is involved in supporting Liverpool football club, then you will know what I mean when I say that that's all of us: we share our sorrows as well as our joys. Liverpool is the place where no-one walks alone. And it is a place which embraces all who embrace 'Liverpool' as an ethos, a way of living.
Very many people were affected by this disaster, not just the people who were there. Over the years, people, formerly strangers, came to together as they developed strong bonds of mutual encouragement, reassurance and support. They became friends, they became family. "You'll Never Walk Alone" is the Liverpool anthem; the Liverpool supporters who suffered death and injury that day, and lies and calumny in the years that followed, never walked alone.
The point should also be made that this mutuality and solidarity came also from outside the physical place of Liverpool. I’m not interested in asserting any parochial chauvinism. I know for a fact that the spirit of Liverpool is magnificent and have written at length that the example set by the Liverpool family of friends here is one for others to follow. I make that point not to exalt Liverpool and Liverpudlians above all other people, but out of recognition that this spirit, this courage, and this tenacity, is something universal and innate in all people, available to each and all rather than being an exclusive possession. That lesson gives us hope that a better world is possible, one that can be achieved by own efforts. That said, the people who fought for Truth and Justice with respect to the Hillsborough disaster are a shining example to all, and I am proud to have been one of their number. And, if I may, as a survivor of the Hell on the terraces of Leppings Lane, who played some small part in initiating the recovery, and who fought for truth and justice in the decades that followed, I hope I may be able to count myself among the ranks of those setting that example. After suffering decades of being on the receiving end of establishment and media lies and abuse, too often repeated by too many people, I feel justified in standing up tall and proud to make that claim. This has been an abysmal few decades for politics, with politicians and parties mired in mediocrity, deceit, corruption, and death-dealing lies. Some of us saw the wretchedness of the political and media classes from the start - if they could tell the most blatant, bare-faced lies about the most filmed and photographed tragedy in history and still get away with it, they could get away with anything, and on a much larger scale. They did. Thirty years, the truth is out but there is still no justice.
The football match to be played that day was the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. The date was 15th April 1989. Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest were a fine footballing side back then. Clough’s Forest had been the scourge of Liverpool in the late 1970s, beating Liverpool to the League title in 1978, beating Liverpool in the League Cup Final of that year, and then dethroning Liverpool as European Champions in 1979, defeating Liverpool along the way. That didn’t make Clough popular in Liverpool, I can tell you. But he and his team were feared, and that should tell you how good they were. In 1989 this wasn’t quite the same formidable Forest outfit, but they were still one of the best teams in the country, and a fine footballing side. They were one of only two teams to beat Liverpool in the league the season before, so this was a game to relish.
Thirty years ago today, it was a fine sunny day, as it is today. I remember the day as if it were yesterday. Being something of a pessimist who tends to expect the worst rather than the best, I wore a black coat with a shirt and jumper. With a T-shirt underneath. I would have been incredibly hot that day, even without a crush.
It’s often not the big things that you remember most so much as the little details. The things you remember can often be very strange, personal things which possess no significance beyond your own memories. There may be plenty that I have forgotten, and maybe even suppressed immediately. As the tragedy unfolded I decided to take to memory every detail I could, the timing of different activities, the entry of the ambulances, the role of the police at different parts of the ground. I had graduated in history the year before and had a great grasp of detail. I knew that detail would be important in the aftermath. The day after I wrote as much as I could remember down, put it in an envelope, then buried it away, by the back side of a table for some unfathomable reason. Out of sight, out of mind. I never saw that envelope ever again. Every time there was an enquiry or investigation, I was asked to produce it in interview, but could never ever find it. I have always speculated that my mother found it seemingly discarded and put it away somewhere for safekeeping, taking its location to her grave. It was as though I just externalised the memories of that day, emptied my mind of them, sealed them up and put them out of mind.
Flashes come back - like the seemingly sudden explosion of desperate life-saving activities all around. And then I flash them away just as quickly. I've written of my memories of that day elsewhere. I have no wish to revisit that day in depth. I’ll just say that it's the strange little details that stay with you. I can remember wearing my old and beautiful but, by then, very battered soft white shoes. I loved those shoes. They were very comfortable and had once looked very stylish. But now, their glory days were long behind them. They also had splits here and there. Frankly, they were falling apart. My mother kept telling me to throw them away and to get a new pair of shoes, suggesting that people would think me either a tramp, and give me some money, or an eccentric millionaire, and ask me for money. But I'm very loyal and don't like parting with the things I love. They'd been through so many high points with me. One of the highest points was a very good 1-0 win over Everton at Goodison Park in the League Cup in 1987. I remember them turning a very dark shade of grey having been trampled all over as we jumped up and down in the Gwladys Street in all the fevered excitement of Liverpool’s heroic cup victory. So, superstitious soul that I am, I felt them a talisman. The real reason is that I couldn't bear to discard them. I'm quite frugal with money, too. I don't like change and I don't like buying new things.
So off I went in them to Sheffield. After my mother's death in 2006 I came to discover that she had kept them hidden at the bottom of a cupboard. Reflecting on this, it became obvious to me that, in the hours of my uncertain whereabouts in the aftermath of the tragedy, these battered and bruised old white shoes were playing on her mind as the means by which I would come to be identified in some miserable makeshift morgue in Sheffield. I’d be the one with the battered white shoes with holes and rips. (Not being funny, I wouldn't have blamed her had she not bothered to claim me, wearing shoes that had seen much better days!)
But I was still standing. A little stunned, perhaps, but in good physical shape and remarkably robust mentally. I only remember suffering one potentially overwhelming moment, when I suddenly became aware of what seemed like an explosion of cardiopulmonary rescitation activities everywhere I looked. Disbelief at the events that were unfolding suddenly gave way to the starkest - and deadliest - of realities. But I quickly adjusted and took my bearings.
It was traumatic enough being in the middle of events, but at least I could see and know what was going on. Those not seeing the events as they unfolded and not knowing what was happening would have been suffering a different kind of trauma, a mental trauma, waiting on scraps of news and information from many miles away. I only know the awfulness from the inside the belly of the beast. But I had information to be working on. Those starved of information would have had a hard time resisting the temptation to think the worst. No news is often Hell.
With respect to the tragedy itself, a few things stood out for me immediately at the time: the lack of a police presence at the Leppings Lane end (two or three officers), the failure to organize queues (fans just walking to the turnstiles, meaning that when numbers increased there would just be a disorganized mass), the fact that that damned tunnel the fans swarmed down en masse was the obvious thing for fans to head down (there were no signs directing fans to the side pens, which were relatively empty - if you are going to take the decision to open the gates outside to relieve the pressure of numbers, close the gates to the tunnel and have officers directing fans to the sides on the left and the right).
I went down that tunnel, only to find that I couldn't make my way even partially into the pens, let alone fully. I stood there for a while, popping my head forwards to see how much of the pitch I could see. It was a ridiculously restricted view, so I decided to see if there was another way in. That decision may well have saved my life. A few minutes earlier, and I would have been able to enter further in the pen, with no escape out; a few minutes later, I would have been unable to turn around given the numbers that would have have then been coming in. A few minutes either way, and I would have been in the middle of the crush.
I ended up in the next pen to the right of the two central pens of 3 and 4. Pens 3 and 4 were already packed. At 2-22pm, when I decided to seek another route onto the terraces, I would judge pens 3 and 4 to be overcrowded. In the pen to the right, I had enough room to sit down and read my programme for a while. I vividly recall the police tower to my right, seeing the faces in there looking down on us and thinking they must be taking note of the distribution of numbers. I was expecting the pen I was now in to start filling up rapidly following appropriate police action. It didn't happen. Instead, the central pens just got fuller and fuller. How on earth they couldn't see the crush the rest of us could see will forever be a mystery to me. I saw them looking. I have no idea what they thought they were seeing. Were they just checking there was no trouble and could care less about anything else, including safety? I came to learn that the attitude of the police was to let the fans regulate the numbers themselves, taking the view that when fans saw crowding they would move elsewhere. Which is to abandon responsibility for crowd management to spontaneity and self-organisation. A crowd has a momentum of its own, which is precisely why it needs to be directed and channelled and controlled. Entering through the turnstiles, the fans would go immediately to the first, most obvious, and in fact the only thing they would see - the tunnel. Once fans do that in great numbers, notions of self-regulation collapse - the possibility of both internal and external control has been lost.
The fans were packed like sardines in the central pens. I not only saw it with my own eyes, I tested it out by trying to nudge my way through using my shoulders. There was no way through. There was no room. The outside pens full of spaces. I try to avoid recriminations. Things went wrong here, and these need to be analysed and identified. There are court proceedings, too. So I shall remain silent. (For now. Let us see if justice is done. I have my doubts, even though the truth is out and clear as day). And I try to avoid inflaming an already incendiary event. I did see police officers in the thick of the mayhem helping out as best they could, joining with the fans. Witnessing the most horrible of scenes, they would have been as traumatised as the rest of us and my heart goes out to them. But they were taking their lead from the fans, not from their superiors upstairs who, it is now clear, were inert. The police were badly organized and badly led that day. My critical comments are directed towards the organizers and leaders. Long after it was abundantly clear that a disaster was occurring, a line of police was ranged across the halfway line, as if preventing a pitch invasion. Even as Liverpool fans were stretchering bodies across the pitch, police seemed to think they were trying to get to the Nottingham Forest fans in order to attack them. The police on the ground suppressed their senses in order to obey commands they must have known to be stupid in the extreme.
It was screamingly obvious early on in the day that we were dealing with a crowd in stress. I have concluded that those in charge could see this but simply didn't care, for the reason that they were obsessed with crowd control, and cared nothing for crowd safety. They left it to the fans to 'find their own levels,' and it went bad from there. Whilst the two central pens were packed, the two side pens showed empty spaces were available. Why didn't the people in the middle move to the sides? Because there were fences separating the fans in each of the pens. So much for the police theory that fans would find their own level. Once you entered the pens, you stayed there.
The tunnel was the first thing you saw when you went through the turnstiles. With the sign “Standing” over it, the tunnel was not merely the most obvious entrance point to the terraces, it seemed to be the only one. I got lucky by way of timing. I went down the tunnel just after 2pm but couldn't find a way into the central pens. I waited a while, seeing if it was possible to have some kind of view, looked at my watch, and decided that I had time to investigate whether there were other access points. I went back down the tunnel, turned left, kept walking to the end, and found a way to enter the side pen. Five minutes or so later, the pressure of numbers entering through the turnstiles would have severely restricted and more than likely prevented my movement. That's what others were to find.
In the inquests that followed over the years, the claim is frequently heard that the 'police lost control' - that's wrong: the police never had control. And long after it was apparent to one and all that we were in a disaster situation, the police still thought they were dealing with a control issue, standing in inert waiting for a change of orders from above. Those orders did not come until it was far too late. The match commander clearly froze, and all those blindly following orders followed suit.
Fans leaving the stadium looked shell-shocked. My most abiding memory was walking past what seemed like an endless row of ambulances. I remember, too, making the conscious decision not to make a phone call home. This caused some friction back home. People who simply don't understand the situation are inclined to be critical. In a documentary, Neil Fitzmaurice, a Liverpool fan who was there that day, calls this right: “The queues for phone boxes were just ridiculous. People were in shock. If you've got your wits about you and you stand in a queue that's over a thousand foot long or whatever, you know there's no point in you going to that phone box. People were just standing there.” The same point applies with respect to the queues of people using the private phones of Sheffield residents. People were in shock, they saw queues of others and joined them as the thing to do. Many would have travelled by car or private coach or whatever, and could spend time queueing safe in the knowledge that their transport home was secure and certain. They had the time to be “just standing there.” I didn't. I didn't want to be standing around in this infernal landscape, and I didn't need to be standing around – I needed to get home. I wasn't in shock and didn't need time out. I was thinking, calculating, and weighing options. I needed to find the station, which was quite a distance away, and I needed to make sure I was on a train. It was around 5pm or so. I reckoned I could have been queueing for an hour, all the time worrying about locating the station and finding a train. My nerves would have been shattered. The enormity of what I had just witnessed would have hit me during an endless waiting. I suffer from sensory overload and anxiety the best of times. I didn't need to be inviting introspection at this moment. I considered that the trains would take the mass of fans on a first come, first served basis, and then end. Getting out and getting home was my priority. I was in problem-solving moment, thinking rationally, and keeping encroaching demons at bay. For all of the trauma waiting for news caused my parents and family, I know that I made the right decision. Every minute I spent at Hillsborough threatened to drag me into an inescapable Hell. I got out. My thoughts were for survival, mental as well as physical. I got out of Hillsborough in one piece. And that was no mean achievement.
The people of Sheffield were incredibly helpful, opening their doors to one and all. I weighed up the options, in the middle of lots of ambulances on the outside. The queues were very, very long indeed, stretching for what seemed like miles. It looked as though I could be queuing for hours. It had been a traumatic day, and I just wanted to get out and go home. I had witnessed the sheer incompetence of the various authorities and emergency services all afternoon, and so had every reason to expect some similar failure with respect to the trains. I didn't want to lose contact with the fans and risk missing the trains home. Although I had lived in Sheffield in 1984, I didn’t know this end of Sheffield. And I didn't know the way to the station. It was quite a long walk, which was easy enough to do when following all the other fans to the ground, but less easy when it is the journey home and fans are going in all directions. I had only a rough idea as to where the station was and was, understandably, thinking the worst, that I may get lost and end up stuck in Sheffield all night. Unlikely, maybe, but I could be forgiven for thinking that the worst might continue to happen. At this time, all I was thinking of was escape. There was no reason for me to be hanging around. There was every reason to put as much distance as I possibly could between myself and the harrowing scenes I had just witnessed. So I made the decision to leave the seemingly endless queues behind and make my way to the train without phoning home. To those who say I should have phoned home all I would say is: you have no idea of the bleak black horror hanging over this place. Every minute here was like an eternity in Dante's Inferno. And I wanted away.
We had seen the disaster unfolding. Your senses told you that it was as bad as bad could be. But somehow you still couldn’t actually believe it. The clash between the senses and what the conscious mind could comprehend in terms of reality and expectations was something that struck me inside the ground, and in the days after. I distinctly remember fans still standing in the manner of a football crowd, still looking down at the pitch as if, somehow, a football match may yet transpire. We were looking at a warzone. There were people, debris, clothes, litter, bodies strewn all over the pitch. Yet I remember people standing, waiting, and watching in anticipation of a football match, even as so many were injured and worse, and many more were involved in the rescue effort. It was like the conscious mind and the senses were in completely different worlds. Journalist David Conn refers to 'the still barely believable piles of dead bodies at the front of the pens.' (Hillsborough disaster: deadly mistakes and lies that lasted decades, Guardian, 26 Apr 2016). That sentence captures the unreality of the scene, and of one's presence, even participation, in the events that were unfolding all around. Seeing wasn't quite believing. Hence, whilst still being critical of the tardy, even inert, response of police waiting for order, I try to be understanding - the scene had an unbelievability about it that is well-nigh impossible to convey with words. For all of the death and destruction, this was in many respects a 'slow disaster.' Yes, the barrier collapsed, causing people to go down and go under. But my most abiding memory is of death in slow motion, a long and winding suffocation in which it was impossible to be quite sure people were actually dead. Many of those who died were propped up in the crush. Many who were laid out on the pitch could be taken to be resting. Most of all, you didn't want to believe the horrible truth, that so many people were actually dead. In addition to the unbelievability of the scene itself was the psychic reluctance to believe what your senses were telling you.
It was as if people were denying a reality too horrible to accept and clinging to the hope that normality could be restored. When it was announced that the match was abandoned, people turned and moved away. I found that most odd. It was as if many people need official confirmation of the screamingly obvious before they could come to believe what their senses were telling them and act accordingly. If there was one lesson I had learned that day, it was never to trust an all-too-obviously fallible authority.
It was when we listened to the numbers of fatalities on the radio on the train that the enormity of what we had just witnessed came to be confirmed with a blood chilling finality. The number of fatalities just seemed to keep on rising as the time went by. As I sat reflecting I heard someone say that anyone who has not rung home must be a right so-and-so. It struck me then that, maybe, I really should have rung home. It was too late by then. And at least I had found the train to take me home. Had I queued and rang, I would have been much later than I was. But I can only guess the traumatic time my parents had in the hours it took me to ring, about 10-30pm at Lime Street Station. My brother, of course, said 'he'll be OK,' and went out for his regular night at the pub with friends. He has a touching faith in my abilities to rise above the trials and tribulations of life and defeat adversity (I keep doing it).
We got back to Lime Street station, Liverpool. I saw fans breaking down, angry and crying, as we faced a barrage of cameras and flashing lights as we exited the trains. It wasn’t what we needed. Most fans just walked on quietly and slowly. I finally made the phone call home. My mother answered. Her first words were "Thank God." I wondered, silently, where God had been for the other poor souls that day. I gave the question some thought over the years. I saw people dig deep into themselves that day, finding capacities they never thought they had.
I have spoken about Hillsborough with Liverpool fans who were there that day. Many of them say that was the day that they abandoned God and religion for good, seeing no point and purpose in a world where so many good and innocent peole suffer at the hands of the wicked and evil. I ask them why, if there is no inherent goodness, do they continue to seek justice? To whom or to what do they appeal when challenging an establishment that has dispensed all the justice it can spare for 'ordinary' people? That idea of justice they continue to affirm, that thirst for justice they continue to express, transcends the institutions and authorities of time and place. Those who are prepared to carry on such line of questioning in genuine search of answers may well come to find that what began as a lamentation on the meaninglessness and pointlessness of life leads inexorably to the contemplation and perhaps even the recognition of the divine transcendent. What else is there? A law and morality that is in our own hands? The humanist argument in favour of a humanity taking morality into its own hands is appealing, noble even. The problem is that there is no singular 'humanity,' only myriad human beings and their various groupings. You soon find that truth and justice come to be fragmented and parcelled out between diverse and often rival human communities, advancing incompatible claims. Without any objective standard to evaluate and decide between competing platforms, power decides. I have seen that humanism in action. I offer Hillsborough as exhibit A of a humanism in which human beings take moral standards into their own hands – the rich predate on the poor, the strong on the weak, the winners impose their truth and justice and the losers find the transcendent their only source of appeal. Some people came away from Hillsborough rejecting God and religion; I came away painfully aware of the limitations of a purely human justice that had lost touch with the transcendent. One of the precious few institutions that stood by the Liverpool fans and families in their trouble and need was religion. I don't know where God was that day. I do know where the authorities were; they were the ones whose failures led to the death and injury of so many.
God is always present, in some way, and absent in others. There are people who can be proud of their activities on that day; there are people who need to search their consciences and ask for forgiveness. I'll not demand contrition, it is for them to give freely, in hope of a mercy and forgiveness which also ought to be given.
Truth and Justice are what I stand on and stand by. I don't put those essential qualities in inverted commas, as I was advised to do in my academic writing. I may be sceptical of the particular ways and means by which human beings find truth and justice in this world, but the practices of time and place need to be distinguished from truth and justice as ideal forms. It’s a political world, and human beings often err: things are subject to fetishization and ossification, with the result that the highest ideals come to be turned into their very opposites. It is wise to be sceptical and critical of the incarnations of time and place. But I am not sceptical of Truth and Justice as standards to cleave to and by which to hold ourselves and other to account, only their particular incarnations in time and place. Truth and Justice exist: they are the transcendent standards we aspire to and approximate in our temporal actions, to which we conform our actions, and by which we judge the laws, institutions, and practices of time and place. I think, deep down, most people believe this. They may not put it the way I put it with respect to transcendent truths, norms, and values, but people believe these things to exist in precisely the same way. Why else would they seek truth and demand justice when their societies and institutions seem flagrantly to deny them? If truth and justice are mere social constructions based on power relations, then you already had all the truth and justice you can expect. Truth and Justice are essential needs which nourish the soul.
I came in time to learn that one of the most fundamental human needs is the need for individual recognition. Plato referred to thymos as that part of the human soul that demanded justice. Human beings are essentially social beings. We need others in order to be ourselves, gaining a sense of self-worth only through recognition by others. Thymos refers to that part of the soul that thirsts for justice. There is something deeply ingrained in human beings which impels them to not just thirst for truth and justice, but actively seek these things out in the teeth of a false and unjust world. We need Truth and Justice and we seek Truth and Justice. Our humanity is impaired or devalued without them. That view is expressed in The Beatitudes: "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled."
With Hillsborough, the truth which Liverpool fans told from the start, which the world now know, calls out for justice. There must be a measure of truth and justice in order for people to live and be at peace with themselves. When truth and justice are denied, that does undermine that sense of security and wholeness.
There is wisdom in caution. The things that human beings see as true and just may well not be neither, merely surrogates or fetishes in a world without both. But to be critical with respect to these incarnations in time and place presupposes a standard of truth and justice that lies outside of time and place. Truth and justice exist, and their pursuit is a lifelong endeavour. Truth and justice exist, as part of the everlasting realm.
“And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will He delay long in helping them?”
Luke 18:7
That's one for God and religion, as it is one for people and politics. I have laid my case out on these things over the years. I have laid myself open to the charge of idealism here. That's fine. I have seen the world reduced to power and politics and it is a complete, sterile, pointless, nullity of endless fighting to no end.
There is something else in addition to the Truth and Justice we fought for as Hillsborough survivors and campaigners. We fought not only to set the record straight, as important as that was. The peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri described how he was "turned by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars." That Love and that "turning" is key. We fought to establish the Truth and bring about Justice out of Love for those who never came home and for those who came home physically and mentally scarred, and for those who suffered at home, too. That fight was motivated by love: each and every person was known and loved by somebody and, together in this struggle, by one and all. The Hillsborough disaster always seems to be presented first and foremost by the number of victims it claimed. Those numbers were people with names, people who loved and were loved by others, and who will be remembered as persons.
It is hard to believe that a coverup of such a scale would have been possible to engineer, let alone be sustained over time. The lies were clear and manifest at the very start. But the establishment and its minions intervened to render simple truths more complicated than they were. Hillsborough shows in the starkest way possible the evil that occurs when people think it is more important to protect their organisations, institutions, interests, and power than to care for the common weal. It's an old lesson. And, as ever, the embeddedness of power stands in the way of its learning. The fact that the abomination that is the Hillsborough coverup has survived for three decades is shocking and shameful, and casts ethics and politics in a very dark and damning light. From whence does hope come? Where does redemptive possibility lie?
We told the truth from the first. We stood by the truth all along. We thirsted for justice, and we continue to thirst for justice. As do all human beings. On top of the original trauma, we suffered all manner of lies and calumnies from the media and coverups from the establishment. We suffered the frustration and the desperation of the years passing without any sign of justice. We heard people tell us constantly that it was time to ‘move on’. It was always time to 'move on.' We were told this from the very first. We were told worse, too. Many people grew tired and stated that Liverpool fans had had justice, they simply couldn't handle the truth that they had killed their own. Said people also said that Liverpool families were simply motivated by the possibility of compensation. The lies and abuse which Liverpool fans and families suffered didn't just come from The Sun.
We carried on. We knew the establishment narrative was wrong; we knew it was cruel and vindictive; and we knew the people who parroted it were wrong. You cannot move on leaving a wrong unchecked. The system tried to wear us down; we wore the system down. That we have still to receive justice reveals everything we need to know about the establishment and its very low politics.
The Liverpool fans were the victims of the Hillsborough Disaster. I've addressed the drivel of the 'self-pity city' charge elsewhere and I waste no time on it now. The campaign for truth and justice was not conducted out of self-pity, but was a proactive response. Self-pity is passive and changes nothing. This was the very antithesis of self-pity, as people informed themselves, educated themselves on the law, engaged in politics, organised themselves, and determined to right a wrong through sheer force of activism.
I know the Liverpool fans of that day to also have been heroes. They were the ones who, in the middle of Hell, initiated the recovery, with individual police following our lead that day (and fair play to them, there were police officers in the thick of hellish scenes, I saw them and I give full recognition). And I say ‘our’ for a reason. Because I was involved in ripping the advertisement hoardings off the walls to be used as stretchers for the dead, dying, and injured, with fans running the full length of the pitch, back and forth. I have no idea how we pulled those hoardings off the wall, mind. All I and as far as I could tell others had to wrench these things off brick walls was our bare hands. I didn't see anything else. But we did it. With the shouts of people demanding that we hurry. I didn't remember one very distressed man pressing his face close to my left ear and screaming at me to get a move on: “there are people dying down there!” For years after I took it as criticism that we were being tardy in our efforts, and may have been responsible for people dying. So I kept quiet, thinking I had failed in my efforts. I now see clearly that the man was suffering a breakdown. We went as quickly as anyone could. I treat those people and political movements employ fear as a strategy, sound an alarm, and demand that we 'panic' with complete contempt. No matter how bad a situation, in no wise does fear and panic make that situation better than worse. We kept out heads and made ourselves useful. Whether the actions taken were the right ones is another question. Bodies need to be positioned in certain ways and not others. Expert help from the emergency services would have been welcome. Where was it? And why did it fail?
I make a point of this for a reason other than personal biography. In the aftermath of the disaster, Liverpool fans such as myself were portrayed as drunken hooligans who stormed the gates, caused the crush, pick-pocketed the bodies of the dead, and urinated on police trying to save lives. Complete lies from first to last, but the lies came out first and too many believed them. It emerged at the 2016 inquests that the claim that fans had picked the pockets of the dead was not just untrue, but that the police knew it to be untrue, having made routine logs of all the cash and other property found on each person. 'No man sins wittingly,' said Socrates, and those who believe in the power of enlightenment and education repeat that optimistic thesis. Such people are blind to the reality of evil and the quite witting committing of sin. The clear waters of truth were muddied, and it was a deliberate strategy. There is a stark contrast between the efforts made by fans to save lives that day and the way in which they were then vilified in the press and by the establishment. And it wasn't just The Sun, either. I'm ambivalent about the campaign against The Sun. In taking the hit, The Sun draws fire away from police, politicians, the establishment, the lot. And The Sun was not alone in spreading vicious lies. I always make a point of quoting Guardian and Observer journalist Ed Pearce, a man with impeccable liberal credentials, a 'clever man with strong opinions' as his obituary in The Guardian puts it. The obituary fails to mention the bigoted tripe he wrote on Hillsborough the week that Liverpool families were burying their dead. Pearce wrote this in The Sunday Times (23 April 1989): “the shrine in the Anfield goalmouth, the cursing of the police, all the theatricals, come sweetly to a city which is already the world capital of self-pity. There are soapy politicians to make a pet of Liverpool, and Liverpool itself is always standing by to make a pet of itself. 'Why us? Why are we treated like animals?' To which the plain answer is that a good and sufficient minority of you behave like animals.” Pearce went on to state that if South Yorkshire Police bore any responsibility, it was “for not realising what brutes they had to handle.” It is now accepted what those there at the time have been saying all along – it was the obsession with hooliganism and the myopic concern with crowd control over crowd safety that prejudiced the police in their inaction and reaction all that day. The football fans had been treated as ‘brutes’ from first to last. If you don’t believe it, read of the events when it came to identifying the dead. As for the likes of Ed Pearce. I don’t lose sleep over him or his ilk. I know these types, the 'truth trumps feelings' crowd, the people who insist on imposing their view of the truth regardless of the upset it causes. Such people seldom know the truth.
Had football supporters not been treated as ‘brutes’, then many lives could have been saved. With the first reports of an incident, the police sent out not for ambulances but for dog handlers.
Those are the kind of cultural prejudices that created the environment which led to the dehumanisation of Liverpool football supporters and the physical and mental destruction of life.
The problem, of course, is that the police had seen football supporters as brutes from the first to the last. That is why, when Liverpool supporters were trying to take the injured and dying to the other side of the ground for treatment, the police were still forming a line across the halfway line, as if Liverpool fans were intent on attacking the Nottingham Forest fans. That is why, as the bodies were laid out in makeshift mortuaries, the order came out for the victims to be tested for their blood alcohol levels, included a ten-year old boy. The police were determined to lay this tragedy at the door of drunken Liverpool fans. Wholly false allegations of drunkenness on the part of Liverpool fans were made time and again. It was a message that could stick on account of the poor reputation of football crowds, but also on account of the systematic demonization of the working class that had been taking place since 'the Winter of Discontent' and the Miners' Strike. That's one for the cultural prejudices of the middle class and all 'right thinking people.' They have this wrong. That was another horse that didn't run, but it served to confuse a clear picture of police incompetence and culpability.
The police knew that they were in the firing line and so did what every institution under attack does – they denied in the first instance and shifted blame in the second. The easiest people to blame were the Liverpudlians: football fans, working-class, strike-prone, militant troublemakers from a riot-torn city. Genteel right thinking people on the outside knew the reputation – Liverpool had form, and police and press went to town on it.
The horrendous things that police and press said about Liverpool fans in the aftermath of Hillsborough bore no relation to the events of that day. The official narrative was completely at variance with the facts. I had seen the failure of the police, I had seen organisational incompetence of the highest order, and I had seen fans taking the initiative to begin the recovery. I had seen fans trying to rescue those in distress. Others could see it, too – Hillsborough must have been the most filmed and photographed tragedy in history, with photographers and film crews from all over the nation and the rest of the world. The press was full of accounts from the police which portrayed Liverpool fans as drunken, out of control hooligans. Post-truth society? It's been with us a while, and the rot started at the top. The fans behaviour that day was not just impeccable, it was heroic. We were on the receiving end of a cold and calculated attempt to shift blame. The official narrative was the exact converse of the truth. It's only hope for success lay in a culture which routinely denigrated the working class voice. The fact that they got away with it for as long as they did, all evidence to the contrary, shows not only the power of the establishment, including all the main parties, but also the pernicious influence of a cultural condescension which treated the working class voice with contempt. These corrupting parameters of a rotten society remain firmly in place.
The vilification continued even after the Taylor Report had concluded that the main reason for the disaster was police mismanagement. And continued almost up to the present day. A few months before the 2016 jury overturned the verdict of accidental death to rule that the 96 Liverpool fans who died at the disaster were unlawfully killed I had the misfortune to hear a 'debate' on Jeremy Vine's radio 2 show concerning the causes of the Hillsborough disaster. Again we heard the lies that fans were to blame. Only three callers were taken, each expressing the most ignorant views, unchecked. There was no balance. I put a complaint into the BBC and received the response that the BBC doesn't select its callers etc. Hogwash. I don't have a TV licence and advise people to get rid of theirs. Let the blinkered bigots who like to have their prejudices massaged pay for the BBC, an institution that takes public money to abuse the public it despises.
That whole process of vilifying the Liverpool suppertors, portraying them as drunken, ticketless hooligans has been a cloud hanging over Hillsborough from the first. The police and press bear a heavy responsibility for that. But I also paid attention to cultural attitudes, with far too many middle-class people of liberal persuasions being all too keen to find their bigoted views of 'ordinary' working class people confirmed. Their loathing of football as a sport is in large part a loathing of its largely working class audience. Attitudes are changing somewhat now that football has been gentrified and corporatised, with multi-millionaire footballers and pundits with the right causes being lionised. This, the bourgeois, declare, is a great improvement on the days when people just went to football to enjoy a game, and there was no politics... Spare me.
So I make a point of stating clearly that the Liverpoool supporters were not just victims that day, they were heroes. They told the truth. And their instincts were right.
Every piece of objective evidence yielded by painstaking research reveals the establishment story to be just that, a story designed to protect the establishment. It's a pack of lies. Truth trumps feelings? The feelings of the Liverpool supporters were bang on the mark from the first, and correlated precisely with the truth. There is nothing too difficult to understand here. The reality of that day was actually obvious to all with eyes to see and ears to hear. The truth was buried, the facts perverted, police accounts altered and so on and so forth. Police statements were altered, with things taken out and things added. Some protested, most went along with it - most people will seek to save their skins. In The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov identified cowardice as the greatest vice, the source of all the other vices.
Many on the Left point the finger at Thatcher and the Conservatives. I remember Straw and Blair and their 'what's the point?' question at the demand for a new inquiry. It's a question I ask of the Labour Party. I don't vote Labour. I have never been disappointed by Labour, for the reason I've never expected anything from them other than a complicit mediocrity. And that's the one thing on which they have never disappointed.
A Labour government led by Blair decided in the late 1990s to throw the Liverpool families under the bus and draw a line under the Hillsborough disaster. Why? To curry favour with the Murdoch press, to protect the establishment, to solidify its position within the establishment. I could care less. The action has Labour's trademark cowardice and complicity all over it. I never ever voted for Blair, or for Brown. In fact, I never voted for Labour at any level after 1992. I am fond of quoting Labour chancellor Hugh Dalton in the 1940s: 'the purpose of the Labour Party in the British constitution is to subject the Left to continuous defeat.' In fulfilling that purpose, Labour continually drive nails into the coffins of freedom, democracy, socialism, truth, justice, decency, honour, the lot. I don't go anywhere near them. I had their mark long before their duplicity on Hillsborough. The actions of Straw and Blair were exactly what I expected of men of their ilk. They promised to reopen Hillsborough, raised people's hopes, then cynically dropped it all. That decision meant that Liverpool families were left wasting more years of their lives in pursuit of justice. It beggars belief anyone goes anywhere near Labour. Their craven cowardice, covering up lies and calumnies, caused real pain and suffering for real people, allowing the police, press and all those members of the public too stupid or bigoted to seek truth repeating lies and abuse. Pathetic, all of them, not worth a blow on a rag man's trumpet. So many family members have passed away, tormented through not seeing the truth come out. People who were mere youths back then have spent their adult lives fighting for justice. That's time you don't get back. To the deaths of that day, add the wasted years of the survivors and their families.
To be fair to Labour, I don't hold any of the other parties in any higher regard. I was once a Green, until I saw the extent to which Greens are prepared to push eco-austerity in furtherance of their goals, regardless of the impact on 'ordinary' people. We need a real people's party, not a party of stooges and lackeys working hand-in-hand with the corporare form. I don't trust any of them.
Justice? What makes establishing responsibility harder than it seems is the fact that the Hillsborough disaster was the result of a multiplicity of factors: poor and inadequate policing, a structurally unsafe ground, haphazard procedures around safety, safety certificate that was 10 years out of date, a wretched FA that ignored Liverpool FC's advice two years running concerning ticket allocation etc. You can't single one man out, I have been told. Fine. I'd throw the book at the lot of them.
We knew the truth, and stood by it. That truth, from the mouths of mere working class fans like myself, may well have sounded unbelievable. Few of the right sort of people gave a damn for the working class voice back then, and truth be told, still don't. They show more interest in football now it has been gentrified, but they failed to listen to the voices of 'ordinary' folk then as they do now. And they miss the most obvious truths for that reason.
There is also another point that is well worth making here, in light of the emergence of credentialed and certified elites or experts determining the parameters of legitimate public 'debate.' The denial of the voice of 'ordinary' people is endemic in modern culture. At Hillsborough, this denial took the form of demonization, given the extent to which Liverpool supporters were telling a truth that the establishment found very inconvenient. The Liverpool fans were portrayed as animalistic working class louts, a view that could stick given the association of football with low culture. The problem is that the Liverpool fans at Hillsborough came in all shapes and sizes. There was a High Court judge among them, for one. And Dr. John Ashton for another, a man who witnessed the carnage and police cluelessness first hand. He was a very inconvenient witness who went on television the next day to blow the police narrative apart. “The whole thing from beginning to end,” he declared, “had incompetence running right through it, the organisational arrangements. And I think it is time we started to ask questions about accountability.”
Ashton has been described as an inconvenient witness, a doctor whose testimony would be taken seriously. Note the implication of that statement – that the voice of 'ordinary' working class people can be dismissed and devalued, denigrated, even, to the extent that 'ordinary' folk continue to voice their demands and complaints. In any event, Ashton's reputation came under attack as attempts were made to shut him up. In other words, this has nothing to do with credentials and certificates – it's politics, power, and vested interests. I learned the extent to which liberals and the Labour Party are all complicit in defending a system they purport to fight – they are part of it.
We stood by what we knew to be true, and repeated it decade after decade, and through sheer force and sincerity of expression we finally made it believable, no matter what the authorities said. Politicians, judges, press, media, police – they were simply wrong. We, the 'ordinary' people, were right. And we were not going to go away. Never ever. Never give up, never give in, never bow down to wrong, never turn away from injustice, and never grovel to power. We went from being a minority to be ignored and discarded to being a majority. And I will continue as long as I live to affirm the extraordinary capacities of supposedly ‘ordinary’ folk. When I hear people with political axes to grind complain about the greed, stupidity, and indifference of 'the people,' I turn away, after asking them to address what it is about their own politics that is so lifeless and uninspiring as to fail to attract support. People are not the problem, they are the solution, and if you think otherwise, then no wonder that you are politically feeble.
So, yes, truth and justice matter – but it was out of love for our fellow fans, their families and friends, and beyond that, of each and all, aiming at a world without division, that we sought to set the record straight.
The police and the media ran a smear campaign and helped spread disinformation. We should remember that this was just ten years after the lurid headlines of 'the Winter of Discontent' in 1979. The 1980s was a decade in which the working class came under concerted political, economic, and cultural assault, its communities and organisational forms taken apart, its histories abused, people portrayed as animals. The lies told about Liverpool fans at Hillsborough seem scandalous now. Stories of fans pickpocketing the dead and urinating on police officers seeking to save lives seem insane now. We need to understand the context which made those perpetrating such stories think they were believable and that enough people would believe them. There were people in the UK who were all too willing to think the worst of working class people – those people still exist, and often in the unlikeliest of circles. (Think all those left-leaning liberals who so much prefer the gentrified football of today, now that multi-millionaire footballers advance political views and causes from within their gated communities, advocating policies for which others bear the costs and suffer the consequences. Isn't football so much better now that the right kind of people with the right kind of views predominate? No, actually. The working class who just want to watch a decent game of football, without implication, are excluded, as they are from wider culture and political society. That democratic deficit is going to blow the whole rotten edifice apart one day, if we are lucky).
The establishment systematically tried to cover up the facts behind the disaster. The judiciary and government were all culpable.
Hillsborough campaigners fought tirelessly to have the truth known and accepted and let the world know that Liverpool fans were unlawfully killed. Despite a truth as clear and simple as any truth could be, it took until 2016 for them to succeed and thus begin the fight for justice in earnest. That it took nearly thirty years, thirty years of wasted time and energy, thirty years of pain and anguish, indicates the strength of the establishment, institutionally, psychologically, and culturally. I refer to the inertia of oppression, the dull routine of domination and subordination. Many campaigners single out The Sun for criticism. I loathe The Sun. But I make the point that The Sun was very far from being alone. I caution against targeting fire against The Sun. The press campaign in general was unsympathetic. And the press was the front for some very sinisters forces within the establishment. We can look at the way the Conservative government took their briefing straight from the police and threw Liverpool fans and families under the bus. We can look at how the Labour government did the same in the late 1990s. The issue could have finally been addressed and brought to closure there and then. Having made promises and raised expectations in opposition, the Labour government simply refused to look the truth in the face, deliberately hobbled the parameters of enquiry (and refused to listen when told this at the time), and cast the victims and their families onto the rubbish heap as being of no count. That meant more years of struggle and suffering for Liverpool fans and families. It also meant that the struggle for justice would become increasingly more difficult given the lapse of time. This became a real issue in 2016, when the verdict of accidental death was quashed and replaced with a verdict of unlawful killing.
If the Hillsborough fans and families’ struggle for justice has ended, then it has ended as it began - in insult and abuse. Despite the verdict of unlawful killing and despite a list of police and organisational failures as long as your arm, no one has been held accountable. There has been no justice. That is an insult to us all. It should shame the establishment and the political class. It should also shame the citizens of the country, that they still take a politics seriously that has been complicit in such an inhuman travesty. The families of 96 [97] victims of the disaster have campaigned three decades for redress, waiting for the people charged with governing for the common weal to grant justice, but for all that has been achieved their struggles and suffering have been in vain. Those of us who were there at Hillsborough and who were involved in the campaign for justice can lament the wasted time, time that can never be brought back. I would go beyond lamentation and instead direct the charge of futility and pointlessness against the political world and all absorbed in its power plays. That world is empty. In strict political terms, the Hillsborough families' 30 year ordeal of seeking justice through the legal system has yielded nothing so far beyond further insult and injury. Despite a well-documented litany of failures, no-one has been held accountable for what the 2016 inquest ruled as unlawful killing; no-one has been held responsible for the deaths, injuries and enduring trauma that resulted from neglect.
The first inquest, dominated by the relentless repetition of the false police narrative, delivered a verdict of accidental death. The Hillsborough families had to fight 21 years against that palpable miscarriage of justice. They resigned themselves to doing it all again in 2014-16, with the longest-running inquests heard by a jury in British legal history. Some people objected to the time and expense of the inquests. The response from the Liverpool campaigners was blunt and to the point – things had taken this long and were having to go to these lengths to establish the simple truth precisely on account of the police lies, buttressed by the establishment. The wasted time and expense was on the establishment and no one else. The extraordinary courage, conviction, dedication, and determination of the Hillsborough campaigners established the truth in clear and incontrovertible terms, achieving the verdicts of unlawful killing and the exoneration of Liverpool supporters from any blame. I celebrated the victory with fellow fans and campaigners in Liverpool as the verdict was announced live on TV. There was relief and mutual congratulations – but we knew, too, that justice was still to be done. Justice has still to be done. It's very hard to take politics and elections seriously when this simple open-and-shut case remains without just conclusion. I take this as official confirmation that politics as it exists is bereft of point and purpose and that it has citizens wasting their time and energy, as it wasted ours, exchanging shadows on the wall.
It has all taken a terrible toll. Justice denied means a continued struggle for justice. The people who say that it is now time to move on were also the people who said it was time to move on in 1989. Such people don't understand the implications of the 'moving on' they advocate. They neglect the profoundly human point concerning the thirst and hunger for truth and justice as essential to one's human being. And they fail to appreciate that 'moving on' entails a resignation to an existence without justice. When Home Secretary Jack Straw put the issue of a new enquiry to prime minister Tony Blair in 1997, Blair responded by asking 'what's the point?' Without justice, we may ask ourselves the same question of politics and of the very society we live in. The result of that foreclosing on justice means that those who continue to thirst and hunger, those who continue to have the root of the matter in them, have repeatedly to revisit the infernal events of Hillsborough that April day in 1989. And all it has brought is repeated and renewed feelings of a profound injustice. It is little reassurance to know that the emptiness within merely mirrors the emptiness of the political world 'out there.'
There's an enduring lesson in solidarity in all of this. We stood shoulder to shoulder, side by side, year after year, supporting one another, each of us a part of all others. We were never going to go away. We knew that not one of us would let the others down.
The photos show me laying flowers with fellow survivors, and wearing the scarf I wore all those years ago on that fateful sunny afternoon at Hillsborough. I shall be getting my old scarf out later today. I’ve had it out a few times over the years. It’s seen the highest highs and the lowest lows. It's been with me a long time now, and I think it’ll be with me to the end.
That’s thirty years, then. That’s a long time to have been putting the case for truth and justice. And we would do it for a thousand years and more if that is what it took. I told everyone that in the process that we have come to write a proud chapter in the history of this big-old big-hearted city of Liverpool, this most spirited of all cities. The truth isn't cold and clinical, and it's more than facts and figures. It's existential and it’s emotional. It touches people. It moves people. And when truth becomes existentially meaningful and motivational, it can conquer the greatest of odds. The 96 [97] were more than names and numbers, facts and figures. They were flesh and blood, people with histories, connections, bound with others, futures to be made, lives to unfold.
I have written at greater length on the events of that day here.
https://www.academia.edu/24758167/THE_HILLSBOROUGH_FOOTBALL_DISASTER_25_YEARS_ON_A_personal_reflection
Life goes on, and so does football. It was a big win for Liverpool yesterday. And there were good scenes all round. I quote this from John Morton on the game yesterday between Liverpool and Chelsea:
“I am a fire steward at Anfield and I would like to thank the Chelsea fans for their impeccable minute of remembrance prior to today's game....respect...also to the club themselves who laid a wreath at the memorial at Anfield....I went there after the game and I was blown away by a family of Chelsea supporters who were there with there young children, the mum explained to them that there was a 10 year old that died that day.....then the children pointed to other names a remarked about how young everyone was.....heard one young lad say to him mum that he felt sad........well done to that Chelsea family total respect.....”
It was great to hear Elvis' version of You'll Never Walk Alone (and Kentucky Rain and If I Can Dream) being played in California when I was there. A big thanks to Eric Kueckels for taking my requests and playing those songs on Radio Free Mt. Baldy.
I love this line from If I Can Dream:
"as long as a man has the strength to dream, he can redeem his soul and fly."
I live by it. Through the wind and rain. I never missed a home game for years and years and years. And every game we sing the anthem, You'll Never Walk Alone. And I'll keep on singing it:
“At the end of a storm
There's a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of a lark
Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Though your dreams be tossed and blown
Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you'll never walk alone.”
The youngest person killed in the crush was 10-year-old Jon-Paul Gilhooley, whose mother Jackie described him at the inquests as “very loving and affectionate”. His first cousin Steven Gerrard grew up to become Liverpool’s and England’s captain, lifting the European Cup aloft in 2005.
The oldest victim was 67-year-old Gerard Baron, an RAF veteran who worked for the Royal Mail and had seven children. He was described as a “Christian, sportsman, serviceman, family man and worthy citizen” by his son Gerard Jr, who went with him to the match. “Never in this world did we envisage anything would happen to us, as you expect to be safe attending high-profile sporting occasions,” Gerard Jr said. “Neither of us envisaged witnessing hell, nor did we expect to be fighting so desperately for our lives, as were so many others.”
Of the 96 [97] people who died, 37 were teenagers, most still at school.
It’s interesting to reflect on those ages. I remember the aftermath of the disaster well. A week later, I joined the very final queue of people paying their respects to see and add to the floral tribute at Anfield. I made a point of wearing my battered old white shoes, survivors like me. It was a typically sentimental decision on my part, but possibly unwise. In the long and slow queue, I suddenly became aware that those once beautiful soft shoes really were, well, shabby and falling apart. I suddenly became rather self-conscious at the thought that people would see them.
I was accompanied for the hours it took to gain entry to the ground by a Liverpool fan and his two teenage sisters. I would guess that they were aged 15 and 17, but they seemed to me to be much younger than they were, as I seemed to have become much older overnight. As I listened to them talking, I suddenly realized that my youth had gone. I remember being shocked at the sexually explicit jokes the girls were telling, not because they were sexual but because they were so incredibly innocent. (They must have been, seeing as even I understood them). I was just twenty-three but suddenly I felt ancient. It was as if I had aged twenty years that afternoon at Hillsborough. I felt very old in the weeks that followed. There was a loss of innocence that day, and a massive gaining of experience. But I never succumbed to cynicism and bitterness, despite all the reasons the authorities offered in their favour. And I never succumbed to the fashionable academic trait of the time to put truth and justice in inverted commas, considered mere functions of power. I needed no theoretical lessons on this, having gone through the toughest of practicals. If truth and justice really are no more than social creations, functions of power, then I had just had a demonstration of the world that entails - and it's an ugly one. If there is no more to your view than power, and if politics is your god, then prepare to enter an ugly world of endless, unwinnable wars to no end or purpose whatsoever. These are the things which certain facts can cause us to foreclose on life and its possibilities. My youthful hopes and ideals strengthened my resolve, and I still cleave to them.
The truth about what happened at Hillsborough was obvious. The incompetence and culpability of the authorities is clear and visible. The truth about the cover-up which followed is also obvious. The key institutions of society revealed themselves to be more concerned with protecting their own interests, the interests of the powerful, than with the public good– the police, the judiciary, government, the press. The unpallatable truth about Hillsborough is that your institutions and the society they protect are rotten, and that your politics, for all the excitemenent it generates, is empty. Where there is nothing, all have lost their rights. Hillsborough is a dark truth that has been buried for generations. But behind it is the darkest truth of all - the age is adrift in a moral and metaphysical void, with people turning to politics in a desperate search for surrogate gods and communities, all of which will demand continual human sacrifice. 'I've seen the future,' sang Leonard Cohen, 'it is murder.' I saw it coming. The conditions for doing politics well do not exist.
It is difficult to go through Hillsborough and retain any hope with regard to politics, law, religion, and even people in general. We are talking about a deep wound that is scarred deep into the psyche. This is a wound that seems destined never to heal, for the reason that it is infected with the lies of a world that seems irredeemably corrupted by power and vested interests. Is there another world? I didn't expect justice after Hillsborough and, rather than join the campaign, started to read in depth and at length, going off to university to study reason, truth, and justice at PhD level. I cleaved to what I called 'the philosophical ideal' and its potential incarnation in time and place through communities of character and practice. I came later to sharpen that view in terms of transcendent standards of truth and justice as against social constructivism and conventionalism. People who reject the former as an illusion, claiming that the latter is all that there is cannot avoid absorbing the world in an endless and pointless cycle of power/resistance. All that remains is a choosing of your sides, knowing that it doesn't matter in any case, since the choices are ultimately empty – 'where there is nothing, both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights' (Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation).
The lies were told by the police and the press, and the establishment, including the judiciary and the politicians of all parties, covered it up. That these lies were told in flagrant denial of a truth so obvious delivered the lesson: 'ordinary' people were worthless. The life, liberty, and happiness of the common people was of no account, to be discarded whenever they come into collision with power. Hillsborough is a festering sore which revealed a larger corruption. I had little faith in politics from that moment on. Those who make a god of politics, claiming that 'politics is everything,' reducing everything to power, need to see where that view leads – Hillsborough, the discarding of truth and justice and the brute inhuman assertion of power. People who argue this way tend to assume that they are the powerful. Not so. They are merely one side in a ubiquitous power struggle. If there are no standards of truth and justice, why pick one side rather than another?
I didn't repudiate truth and justice. I had seen the reduction of those standards to power and the projections and creations of power, and rejected it as a dead-end. Radicals who hold transcendent standards to be no more than the social constructions of groups and interests within power relations are playing a dangerous game. Whilst existing and established power may be unmasked in the short-run, the view which reduces everything to power leaves us trapped within an endless and ultimately pointless cycle of power/resistence. In such a world, truth and justice are merely functions of the most powerful. I've seen that world, I have looked the Gorgon in the face – it's an ugly world that serves no-one well. Power prevailed over truth and justice that day. It still does. Power is its own end, its own justification, its own reward. I went to study philosophy at PhD level not to search for the purifying fires of deconstruction. I had seen power unmasked and deconstructed. I was interested in the work of reconstruction. That work is premised on the view that truth and justice exist as standards of evaluation that transcend the institutions, laws, and practices of time and place. That view may express an idealism on my part, an illusion. If so, it is a saving illusion. Because I have seen the alternative and know it to be empty, meaningless, and dead, locking us into a zero-sum game in which everybody loses. Sadly, I frequently had the distinct impression that I was swimming against the moral and intellectual tides roaring through the academy, as well as through wider society. With bitterness and contempt I say that it was not from academics, still less liberal opinion, that I learned about truth and justice, what they are, and how to achieve and defend them. I learned these things from experience, and sought to know whether and how they could transcend the vagaries and vicissitudes of their expression or denial in time and polace. I learned that the instinct for truth and justice was something innate and universal when I saw the life being slowly squeezed out of people, when I saw bodies being laid out on the ground in frenetic attempts at rescuscitation, when I saw people being stretchered across a football field, and I learned how truth could be distorted and justice perverted and denied when I saw the extent of police, press, political, and judicial culpability. I didn't need critical theorists and deconstructionists to tell me this, and nor do I need them now. I learned these lessons by hard experience. In entering the academy I sought the way out of this dead-end of power and resistance. I learned, too, the extent to which too many people are complacent about the moral and metaphysical foundations on which their ostensibly free society is based. Too many lack a knowledge of the most cherished ideals and values of their society, fewer still lack a commitment to keeping those ideals and values alive. Too many within polite society, liberal or otherwise, remained silent then, prepared to give the authorities the benefit of the doubt against working class football supporters with a 'reputation'; too few protested their outrage, not least because many, I suspect, secretly agreed. I was prepared to go it alone politically and intellectually if I had to, knowing I had the Liverpool people, people with the root of matter in them, with me. I knew that they were right; I knew that I was right. I never much needed the insights of Foucault on power/knowledge, I had had the practical. I was concerned to know the way out. In the years that have passed since, this has become society's concern.
In 1989, I remember thinking that my youth was now behind me, wondering what now, what next, and where to. Thirty years on, I still feel the same way. I've done a fair bit in the thirty years in between. But nothing like I thought I would have done. There's time yet. The best is yet to come.
The photo shows me laying flowers with fellow survivors, and wearing the scarf I wore all those years ago on that fateful sunny afternoon at Hillsborough.
