In case there's ever any doubt where I stand.
It's the 34th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster which left ninety seven Liverpool fans dead and seven hundred and sixty six injured. I've been immersed in reflections on the F.A. Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest of April 15th 1989, which I attended with fellow Liverpool supporters.
For many years after the event, amounting to decades, I hardly spoke a word about the tragic events of that day. I started to say more around 2010. I've told the story enough times since then.
I went down the tunnel of death around 2-10pm or so, found the central pens so packed that I was unable to enter them, decided to turn around at 2-22pm and seek another way into the pens on Leppings Lane. That little time and space I found to make that decision quite possibly saved my life, and more than likely saved me from injury. I found a way of entering the pen to the right of pen 3, where most of the deaths occurred, took part in the recovery, ripping hoardings off the wall to stretcher the dead, dying, and injured. And then I went home.
I lived in Sheffield once. I never want to see the place again.
Possibly the saddest comment of all is that at a very young age I never expected justice, and that time has proven that bleakest and most hopeless of views to have been correct. That's an issue not just for Liverpool fans and families but for everyone. Because it indicates a fundamental hopelessness at the heart of our political life.
People ought to know the truth by now, because Liverpool campaigners have fought long and hard to have it known. That includes the ugly truth of the lies which held Liverpool fans to have been the perpetrators of the tragic events that day. This is complete tommyrot. Some of us knew it at the time. We saw the truth with our own eyes. I witnessed organisational incompetence on a grand scale, with even the basic measures of crowd control lacking. But before we could even state the truth we were confronted with the classic organisational defence/attack response of denial, deflection, and offloading of blame. The problem was that too many people were prepared to believe the lies, or simply kept quiet in the confusion, refusing to take a positon or exercise judgement. That cowardice was complicity in a coverup. In my critical comments on the Hillsborough disaster I always go beyond the establishment and its servants to ask questions of the citizens of the body politic: where were you when Liverpool fans and families were hung out to dry? Did you really believe this was a case of six-of-one-half-a-dozen-of-the-other? Adopting a neutral position is the plainest cowardice that ensures the triumph of the strongest.
I can write plenty on this management of public opinion, the way the authorities portrayed Liverpool football fans in the worst possible light, persuading enough people that there was enough truth in that portrayal for the cause of justice to be undone. I can write about the sociological aspects of this calumny, examining the images of class at the time with respect to the portrayal of 'ordinary' working class people as 'animalistic.' This could be easily applied to football fans at the time given the very real problems of football hooliganism at the time. That's why the fences were up: the fans were caged in because they couldn't be trusted to behave themselves. Liverpool fans actually had a good reputation, with a largely trouble-free history with one appalling exception: Heysel, which led to the deaths of thirty-nine Juventus supporters. That was too large a target for the Yorkshire police to miss, and they went to town portraying the Liverpool fans at Hillsborough as drunken, ticketless hooligans. That was errant nonsense. Worse, at a time when Liverpool people were grieving their dead, it was evil, a lie that was calculated to inflict maximum damage. The Hillsborough disaster has a claim to have been the most filmed and photographed disaster in history, with camera crews and photographers from all over the country and all over the world present. Where are the images of violence? Where is the film of hooliganism? Most suspiciously, the police claimed that cameras failed, most suspiciously, film went missing. I'll leave you to draw the obvious conclusions. The lies could stick not only because of the poor reputation of football fans in general but also on account of the political climate.
David Conn's article from 2016 is well worth reading.
The article was written at the conclusion of the longest inquest in British legal history, resulting in the quashing of the 1991 verdict of 'accidental death' and its supplanting by the verdict of 'unlawful killing.'
David sets the political, social, and cultural context of the callously – and criminally – negligent police operation at Hillsborough, and the establishment coverup that followed very well indeed. It was a time in which the working class, its culture and its instututions, was being subjected to concerted political assault, breaking up solidarities and loyalties that had been built up over generations. The working class had been portrayed as brutish and animalistic since the industrial struggles of the 1970s, taking Shakesperean form with the portrayal of 'the Winter of Discontent' in 1979, with lurid images of unburied dead and streets strewn with rubbish, and carrying on through the Miners' Strike of 1984-1985, with the miners portrayed as violent brutes using force to get their way.
The images of Hillsborough had been coloured by a context which had seen a concerted ideological assault on the working class. I see the same images at work today. It's one reason why I treat the emphasis on peaceful and non-violent protests on the part of largely middle class people with complete contempt – the disruption of the activities of 'ordinary' people on their way to work is violence of a very particular kind. That mentality comes with the implication that violence is simply physical violence, something associated with, well, the working class in struggle. That's the kind of mentality that might well be inclined to pass over the violence inflicted on Liverpool fans that day, based on some subconscious belief that, being working class, they more than likely brought it all on themselves. It's a class issue, and it is still with us. I shall note in passing the people who are now professing an admiration for football, now that it is gentrified and has multi-millionaire footballers advancing progressive causes at a safe distance from the costs and consequences, costs and consequences that working class people facing straitened circumstances have to bear and face.
There was indeed a brutishness here, and it came not from working class people defending their jobs, communities, and their futures, but from the establishment. This was a class war that was being waged from above. And the police had been turned into enforcers of state repression. The South Yorkshire police had 'brutally policed the miners’ strike, and was described by some of its own former officers as “regimented”, with morning parade and saluting of officers, ruled by “an iron fist” institutionally unable to admit mistakes.' David Conn continues:
'Even as the terrible failures of Hillsborough were being laid bare at the inquests, the South Yorkshire police culture of the 1980s, and its other infamous scandal, Orgreave, were being further exposed. In July, the Independent Police Complaints Commission decided not to formally investigate the force for its alleged assaults on striking miners picketing the Orgreave coking plant in June 1984, and alleged perjury and perverting the course of justice in prosecutions of 95 miners which collapsed a year later.
However, the IPCC’s review found “support for the allegation” that three senior South Yorkshire officers had “made up an untrue account exaggerating the degree of violence” from miners, to justify the police’s own actions that day. It revealed that senior officers and the force’s own solicitor privately recognised there had been some excessive police violence, and perjury in the 1985 trial, but never acknowledged it publicly, and settled 39 miners’ civil claims, paying £425,000 without admitting liability. The IPCC said the evidence “raises ... doubts about the ethical standards and complicity of officers high up in [South Yorkshire police]”.
Wright never doubted the rightness of the violent defeat meted out to the miners, and when the prosecutions collapsed adamantly denied any malpractice. No police officer was ever disciplined or held accountable, and there was no reform.
Four years later, on 15 April 1989, 24,000 Liverpool supporters set off in high spirits for the semi-final in Sheffield, their safety dependent on the same police force. Wright’s high-handed rule was at the root of the disaster, the inquests heard.'
The families of those who had met their deaths in the “pens” of the Leppings Lane terrace have recalled the cruel and callous way in which they were treated by the South Yorkshire police when learning of the deaths of their loved ones, the cold, inhuman indifference, the hostility, the sense in which victims were made to feel guilty of the crime that was perpetrated on them by a negligent police operation. They tell of the brutal and inhuman identification process in the makeshift morgue of the shabby football club gymnasium, and of being immediately grilled by police officers about how much alcoholic drink they and their dead loved ones had consumed on the day. (If you have a stomach for bitter irony, read David Conn's article for the evidence of a hard drinking culture among the South Yorkshire police, the people accusing Liverpool fans of being drunken hooligans. And prepare to have your stomach turned - the adage 'they are what they accuse others of being' was never so true as it was here).
Already, the police narrative had been written, with the police's first concern being to gather evidence to fit that narrative – the disaster had been caused by drunken Liverpool fans.
The police narrative was a pack of lies, with nothing whatsoever in its favour so long as we stick to truth and evidence. The only plausibility that narrative had lay in the way it corresponded with dominant cultural tropes with respect to working class people, trade unionists in struggle, and football fans – lawless 'brutes' and 'animals' all, with a propensity to engage in physical violence to get their ends. It is this class-ridden, ideologically charged, image of 'ordinary' people that made the inversion of truth and perversion of justice possible in the first instance, and so hard to shift in the decades that followed. What made the lies so hard to refute was that the Liverpool families were charged with fighting the apparatus of ruling-class ideology and all its cultural supports armed only with fact in relation to reality. All the facts in the world are insufficient to dislodge a narrative that has the weight of embedded and institutionalised class power behind it. The lesson that 'telling the truth' to power is not enough to shift that power, even when wedded to death-dealing lies, is one that some people still find hard to learn. The facts with respect to Hillsborough were plain, and were out. The police set about distorting them, inventing facts of their own, muddying the clear waters, rendering the simple very complex indeed, imposing their own crude simplicities in the form of drunken, ticketless, hooligan fans. The problem with the suppression and perversion of the truth is that too many people are inclined to mistake an engineered normality for reality. Mere facts alone are puny and feeble weapons in such a political fight. The portrayal of the working class as brutish was endemic to the 1980s. And I haven't seen it change much since. Paraphrasing George Orwell, that makes for a culture in which lies seem truthful, and murder permissible. I have never ever 'despised' the voice of 'ordinary' people, being proudly 'ordinary' myself. On the contrary, I affirm the extraordinary capacities of supposedly 'ordinary' people, having seen those capacities amply on display that afternoon at Hillsborough. The Hillsborough disaster may well have been the most filmed and photographed disaster in history, with camera crews and photographers from all over the country, indeed all over the world, present. The evidence is overwhelming – the film shot and the photographs taken, along with eye-witness accounts, tell a tale which is the complete antithesis of the police narrative. As David Conn writes: 'The horror the victims suffered and the generally abject response of the police and South Yorkshire metropolitan ambulance service (SYMAS) were exposed in greater detail than ever before, in months of film and photographic evidence, from cameras that had been at Hillsborough to cover a football match.' The true story is one of Liverpool supporters heroically initiating the recovery, as police stood inert waiting for orders, helping fellow fans to escape the crush, fighting to save lives. Whenever I have the opportunity to discuss Hillsborough with people I make these points forcefully, not to boast, but to turn the wretched police narrative, pumped out repeatedly by the media, on its head – the Liverpool fans were not just the victims that day, they were the heroes, digging deep into reserves of strength and courage we are unaware of having in normal circumstances, going head-to-head with adversity. I didn't just see it, I was part of it. And, yes, I will call myself a hero. I will call myself a hero, for the reason it is true, and true of all the other Liverpool fans who aided in whatever way they could, and for the reason that it nails the cynical and tawdry lies of the police flat in an instant. I have no interest in being on the defensive, clearing one's name in face of false accusation – I am concerned to set the record straight. Liverpool supporters were victims and heroes both.
I can write on Liverpool fans as victims on that day and in the years that followed. I'm not enamoured of victimhood, however. Liverpool has had to face the accusation that it is self-pity city over the years, all because it is prepared to stand up and protest any injuries its people suffer. The response of Liverpool families to Hillsborough was an example of anything but self-pity – rather than wallow passively in the injustice of it all, the response of the fans and families was proactive as they sought to master the law, forensic science, you name it, in order to turn this injury around.
I tend not to write of victims, but of heroes. The Liverpool fans were not just victims that day but heroes, the people who initated the recovery whilst the police stood inert waiting for orders, giving the police an example to follow. I try to avoid the fans vs police narrative, because it clouds the real issue. I saw individual police joining fans in performing heroics in the confrontation with death that day. Those police will have been as traumatised as the fans. I do, however, damn the leadership and their organisational failures, as well as the refusal of too many to believe what their senses must have been plainly telling them and for not having the simple courage to disobey orders from above that were manifestly stupid. They must have known this, how could they not? My view is that the preparation for the match had been obsessively fixated on crowd control, and that that message was dinned into the heads of all police present. I've never heard anyone else mention this detail, but I distinctly remember the repeated police messages that were carried over local radion about drink being carried to the game, with the warning that cars, coaches, and buses would be searched on the way. I don't drive and I drink little, so these repeated warnings grated with me. I commented to my parents that the police seem obsessed with drink. They were obsessed with crowd control. They thought nothing of crowd safety. Even as the disaster unfolded, they continued to act as if we were facing a crowd control issue – the call for dog handlers went out long before the call for ambulances.
I'm not sure I have anything hopeful to say about politics and law. I didn't expect justice in 1989 and have found that bleakest and most hopeless of views to have been confirmed with the passage of time. I never joined the campaign for justice at the time, nor for long after. I thought it hopeless, a waste of time and energy. I told all who had the guts to hear it the horrible truth – your politics is empty, pointless, and hopeless, based on nothing but brute power; your most cherished values, your ideals, your hopes for the future are of nothing in the interface with a power-infused reality. It's a bleak view, but I have yet to be proven wrong. My philosophical view on rational freedom advances a more hopeful view, but has yet to be proven right.
I have little faith in the judiciary. Having seen the way it mobilized against the Hillsborough families, I see no reason to place any faith in it. I have just as little faith in the press and politics. Contempt, more like. You can blame The Sun all you like, and I loathe the paper, but other sections of the press were in on the calumny; you blame the Conservatives all you like, but Labour threw the families under the bus in the late 1990s, too. 'What's the point?' Blair asked Home Secretary Jack Straw with respect to a new enquiry. I ask the same question with respect to politics. That callous dismissal meant that Liverpool families had to waste another 14 years of their lives seeking to get the nonsensical verdict of accidental death quashed, replaced with the right one of unlawful killing. Truth out, there's still no justice. So you tell me where hope is to be found and faith is to be placed.
All I have ever known in politics is a view of reality that is often the precise converse of the truth. It seems the longer you spend and further you go in politics, the further you depart from truth. That certainly seems to apply with regard to closeness to power. All concentrations of power are baneful. I've been fending off claims at the weekend that Liverpool fans “rushed the gates” and thus brought this disaster on themselves. This was the initial lie that the police told during the day and were forced to withdraw the very night of the tragedy. It was patently untrue (and there were other lies to be fabricated, which the police calculated they could make stick). But people repeat it. There was barely room to breathe there and none at all to move forwards, backwards, sideways, let alone to “rush” anything. We have the film, just open your eyes.
The Same with respect to the accusations of 'thousands of ticketless fans' and other such claims which were central to the police narrative. Fans without tickets turn up at every major footballing occasion. This is all factored into crowd control. The previous year, when the same two teams met in a semi-final at the same venue, the police placed a cordon around the ground, filtering the ticketless out, directing fans to the right turnstales. They organised queues, too, which they didn't do in 1989.
All of this was poured over in detail at in the longest inquests in British legal history. Truth established in clear and incontrovertible terms, the lies carry on. It is easy to identify the standard process of protection which is endemic to organisations here: deny, deflect, and offload blame. It applies to politics, too. As for why people join in with it, you may have to seek a psychiatrist (or just accept it as politics-as-usual – that's one for humanists who think that once human beings take politics and ethics and everything else in their own hands, peace, freedom, and happiness will break out. I have zero time for such trite optimism.
Seeing truth and justice denied in time and place, I sought its source in the transcendent. Although I didn't reason this consciously at the time, it now seems clear that these were my motivations in studying philosophy and ethics at PhD level. Whilst my first degree had been in history, the character of my reading matter changed dramatically in 1990 as I went in search of a world beyond the politics of time and place. If you think that such a politics is all that there is and can ever be, then be prepared to fight, fight, and fight again, but not to any great end, merely to survive and be able to carry on fighting. The ideals you give yourself here are no more than projections and rationalisations, however much you may believe them and invest them with a substance they patently do not have. It's nihilism, and sooner or later its emptiness will out: 'where there is nothing, both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights' (Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation, 1918). That view is unsustainable, with people coming to fill the moral and metaphysical void with all manner of surrogate and fetishistic communities and collectivities in search of meaning and belonging.
The view that everything reduces to power and politics is child's play. I didn't need to return to university for any lessons on this. We didn't need any lessons here; we cut our teeth on that view and were looking for something more substantial. The view seems radical but is anything but. To be radical is to go to the roots; you cannot go to the roots if there are none, only power and its endless circulation. The view is regressive, with truth and justice becoming mere functions and tools of power. If there is nothing, then it's game over – there's no point to the game of life other than staying in the game until you die – life is hard and then you die, some sooner than others, and none of it matters, beyond ensuring that others get to die first and you last. Build a viable social order on that view if you can. I've been there, seen it, and done it, and am reporting back from the wasteland: it's a nihilism that exhausts itself in time. That time might well be now.
It remains my view that either there are transcendent standards or there are not, and if there are not, all that there and all that there can be is an endless and ultimately pointless cycle of power/resistance. Good luck if you choose the latter view. You may win, you may not; but one thing is for certain, it is a world of endless and unwinnable wars, constant battles, empty and meaningless existential choice. I've already seen where that view ends. If that's all there is, then truly we may ask 'what's the point?'
I have spoken to Liverpool fans who were at Hillsborough over the years. More than a few have said that that was the day they abandoned a God that seemed to have abandoned them. They lost faith in religion; I lost faith in politics and the law. We established the truth, the truth is known, but where is the justice?
We live under the shadow of Nietzsche and Weber, fighting blindly in a moral and metaphysical void. And there is no salvation in making politics your god, you are merely plunged into the endless wars of rival gods.
It's better to fight in the face of injustice than not to fight – and we fought as hard as anyone could. But, surely to goodness, there has to be a reason to fight other than group/tribal loyalty. There has to be a victory that is more than power, interest, and survival. Because in a zero-sum world of winners and losers, all lose, all cancel one another out.
There must be a measure of truth and justice so that people are able to live at peace with themselves and with others. When the demands for truth and justice are denied, we lose the sense of wholeness and wholesomeness required for a meaningful and happy life. All that remains is a cold, inhuman power underscoring daily the sheer brute pointlessness of it all.
“And will not God grant justice to His chosen ones,
who cry out to Him day and night?
Will He delay long in helping them?”
Luke 18:7
If that's a question for religion, then it's also a question for politics. Who or what will feed those who hunger for justice? Because the all-too-human worlds of politics and law have failed, and failed abjectly at that.
And neither power nor nature could care either way – beware a politics that speaks through the reified voice of either.
We did keep telling the simple truth. The system thought it could wear us down; we wore the system down to establish the truth. That we didn't get justice is a comment on the political world. And that's a problem for everyone, not just the Liverpool family.
And by now, even I'm 'written out.' There's only so much of the ordeal of that day I can bear before feeling the need to look elsewhere. So I shall conclude with David Conn's words from his 2016 article on the inquest verdict of unlawful killing, and leave it there:
'Finally, after 27 years of horror, heartbreak and struggle, the families have seen a jury deliver the verdict they, their loved ones, and those who suffered and survived but found themselves targets of South Yorkshire police’s ferocious campaign required. The families were people mostly trusting of the police, who after their horrific loss found themselves in a nightmare, fighting the police’s false case and repeated letdowns by the legal system. Derided and denigrated as “animalistic”, they were ultimately driven on by the power of human love and loyalty, and the bonds of family.
The lessons for British policing from this needless devastation of so many lives stretch far beyond the failings of one out-of-his-depth officer who took 26 years to fully confess. The police have a difficult, vital job, to keep society safe. However here, where they failed, their use of the word “animals” documented an inability to see a group of citizens even as people.'
https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/2019/06/03/memories-of-hillsborough-thirty-years-on Truth, Justice, and Love
https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/truth-justice-and-love And if there is a way beyond the bleak Weberian view of politics …
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