The Guardian view on Hillsborough: unjust to the bitter end
It would appear that I was right. I never expected justice in 1989 and, thirty two years later, it is official that there will be no justice. Unless you want to keep fighting on until none of us are left. Which leaves me asking: if there is no justice here, then where is justice to be found? If God is indeed a human invention, then it can be no surprise. How else are we to retain our sanity in a plainly insane world populated by human reprobates?
From the horrific first to the bitter last, this has been a wretched tale, and on so many levels. But perhaps the saddest comment of all is that I, at the age of twenty four, looking forward to a life of possibility, never expected justice in a modern parliamentary democracy like the UK. Sadder still, I have been proven right in my abject pessimism.
The facts are bare and brutal – ninety six Liverpool football fans were found to have been ‘unlawfully killed’ and yet no-one has been deemed responsible for those deaths. How is that possible? The guilt in this tragedy was so deep, existing at so many levels, and, through a cover-up that started at the highest levels, spread so wide, that it became impossible to identify just a few as culpable. The authorities knew from the start that if any one person could be deemed responsible, then a whole lot more would surely have to follow. It was impossible to offer up a token sacrifice. This tragedy had a number of contributory factors, and that is before we even come to the cover-up. A whole lot of powerful people were implicated, and the authorities knew it. That’s why they had to fight so long and so hard to impose the narrative that Liverpool football supporters were responsible for the deaths of their own. It was a blatant and bare-faced lie, contradicted by clearly ascertainable facts. But it was made to stick for so long to avoid the alternative, which was the trial and imprisonment of an awful lot of important people (and their many minions).
All that campaigning for justice, all that effort and hard work, and the only result is that Liverpool football supporters have had the stain of responsibility lifted from their shoulders. That's it. That stain should never have been there in the first place.
There’s a big question to be put here. Leaving aside the specific issue, examine the facts of a cut and dried issue on the one side and the weight of institutional injustice on the other and ask yourselves what value your political and legal systems really have when it comes to democracy. We are given a screen and a game to entertain ourselves with. But as soon as we cut close to real power, there is a complete and total shutout. And the people who purport to represent us know this.
And so we reach the inevitable end, and find ourselves having to carry on with the lies, accept the the complacency, and ignore the complicity. Which means continuing to have to invest in the pretence that our institutions are democratic and representative and have the public good at their heart. The daily news is dominated by politics, political parties, campaigns for elections to come, calculations and strategies on how to win votes and build majorities. In light of a flagrant injustice like this, all of that activity seems neurotic and pointless to me. It gives people something to do, in the mistaken belief that it all matters. Such politics 'matters' will be the predictable response, in that it enables the winning of decision-making power and puts us in a position to make a difference. We have had that self-same response in that last thirty years. It made no difference. We had Blair and New Labour and all the promises they made to the Hillsborough families in opposition. In office, they gave us a rigged inquest and the arbitrary cut-off point, a ruse we all saw through immediately. It was a slap in the face, another official declaration that you will not have justice. Why did the public not see this? It was all done deliberately to produce an inconclusive result, a verdict of ‘accidental death’ that, conveniently got the authorities off the hook and made it appear to the public that justice had been done. That’s where the time was lost, that’s where the fix became entrenched in stone. Home Secretary Jack Straw raised the issue of Hillsborough and a new inquest with Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Blair responded with the words ‘what’s the point?’ I ask the same question of Labour and politics.
The term ‘justice’ seems unfamiliar to Blair and his ilk, its meaning incomprehensible. He doesn't see the point. This is the man who would later take the country into an illegal war, poisoning global relations. But at a much lower level than geopolitics, there is the simple matter of representing the needs and concerns of the people who elect you. That seems alien to such politicians. And still they are mystified as to why 'ordinary' people are drifting away.
It’s a sorry tale of untruth and injustice. That corruption from the top seeps downwards to empty out public life in body and spirit.
I don’t have much more to say on this. I wrote at length on the 25th anniversary, when it still seemed that the impossible fight for justice might well be realized.
The truth is simple, open, and clear. It was grasped by ‘ordinary’ folk immediately. It doesn’t require a great deal of intelligence. Just some honesty, decency, and humanity.
Whilst it doesn’t require of wealth of university education to love and to know the truth, some such thing does seem to be instrumental in its burial. The Liverpool families had to take on the experts in injustice and beat them at their own game. They nearly did it.
I didn't actually play much part in the fight for justice early on. I submitted my account of events on Leppings Lane that day, and left it at that. I gave a detailed account. I thought that some of the details – such as the failure to organize queues, the lack of proper direction, the fact that I saw people in the police tower looking down on the packed central pen, and yet doing nothing – were significant. The first thing that struck me – and took me aback – was the lack of queues. I arrived at the ground quite early, about 2-05pm, but still expected to see queuing. I distinctly remember even trying to form a queue with others who were walking up to the turnstiles, but there was nothing. I remember thinking that as soon as the fans started to turn up in any numbers, these areas would be quickly swamped. It was that obvious. That’s how you end up with a crush. Commentators continue to say that the police 'lost control.' That's false - they never had that control.
I was never questioned further, and never called. From that I concluded that the lack of organisation was something pretty much everyone identified and that it was a clear case of criminal negligence. It was that obvious a failing. No one responsible? How can that lack of planning and organisation be an accident? And that’s before we get into the other failures.
It seemed a conundrum to me at the time: to demand justice implies that we live in a just society presided over by a just system of law and authority. After the political events of the 1980s, I seriously doubted that such a thing existed. Working class organisations were systematically targeted and dismantled, public business privatised and handed over to corporate power. I had seen systematic lying all through the Miners' Strike of 1984-85. Hillsborough seemed a continuation. Lying in the service of political ends was endemic. You can only expect justice in a just system and society, and little of the 1980s told me that I was living in such a social and political order.
I was working, on and off, with my dad as a builder at the time. I had earned my degree the previous year and was now pondering the next step. I started to read voraciously, particularly philosophy, ethics, and politics. I was interested in truth and justice. I did this heavy reading for three years, which clearly struck those around me as a very long time indeed (it was the equivalent of another degree). I suspect they thought that the tragedy had badly impacted upon me psychologically and that I had withdrawn into myself. In 1992 I started to approach universities with a research proposal. It took me another three years before I was accepted, in 1995. To me, I had been busy in those six years. I seemed to have read everything. To those not seeing the reading, I must have seemed to have been in hiding ‘in my room.’ They were productive years, though, years of intensive reading to a purpose. I went back to university, first at masters level to test myself. I remember being worried as to whether I had spent six years in delusion, knowing that now I was submitting work for external examination I would found out if all that reading had amounted to anything. It had. I scored straight A’s. I moved on to research level and studied ‘rational freedom.’ At the heart of that research work was Truth and Justice. I didn't pay any attention to fashionable theories that put those terms in inverted commas and rendered them relative to power and power struggles in denial of objective reality. I didn’t need lessons on that kind of reductionism to power, still less did I need theories that confirmed that reduction of truth and justice to power. I had already seen this reductionism at work and knew it to be a dead-end. I knew it also to be a death-dealing lie harmful to society. I knew that any resistance to power couched in these terms would prove to be a dead-end. Society is slow in grasping this point. These theories have now come out of the academy and are pervading culture, society, and politics. They are divisive and destructive, thoroughly reactionary, and the demise of a progressive democratic politics They set up a particular standpoint ontology or epistemology as a foundation and thereby render justice arbitrary. But how to counter that degeneration when the system of justice demonstrably fails ordinary people? We seem caught between a rock and a hard place.
I knew the cycle of power/resistance to be a dead-end then, and so went in search of the standards that exist beyond power, which hold power to account, and which orient and inspire action. That meant cleaving to the idea of objective reality and objective truth. That was surely the best defence of the Hillsborough victims and their families. Without that standard all that there is is an endless cycle of power/resistance, with justice being the interests of the strongest. You don’t need truth to play this game. In this game, truth is, at best, a rationalisation of power. Coercion, prejudice, and propaganda could serve just as well. So I sought a standard of truth and justice that was more than convention, more than arbitrary projection and more than the shaping of perception. I’d seen the imposition of a narrative and the shaping of perceptions at first hand with Hillsborough, and was concerned to identify the standards of truth and justice independent of any narrativity.
Hillsborough was a wretched stitch up from the first, crude in the initial response, but very quickly more considered, coordinated, and concerted. I saw the fit-up being worked immediately. It was an obvious one, once incomprehension at the sheer inhumanity of it was put to one side. But it was extensive and drew wider circles of media and culture into its manipulation. The forces ranged against us seemed too powerful, the establishment too complicit, and the population too complacent. But the lie was nevertheless so crystal clear to those close to the event. There is truth and there is ‘truth,’ the one independent of power in time and place, the other a function of it. The former, surely, trumps the latter? That is precisely what was at stake here - the nature of truth and justice.
Who was listening? I felt the academy to be as deaf to ‘rational freedom’ as wider society was to the truth about Hillsborough. In all honesty, the truth was so unbelievable that no wonder the public struggled to accept it. Again, though, the stand we took was on objective facts, truth, and evidence, not the believability or otherwise of the story.
It was remarkable the Hillsborough campaign got as far as it did, with the entire establishment ranged against it, not to mention the complacency and inertia of a public grown tired of crisis and controversy as the years passed by. At every stage, Liverpool families and fans were told to ‘move on,’ since justice had been done. They were told more. They were told that they themselves were the ones trying to alter a truth that they didn’t like – that they were responsible for the tragic deaths of their own. They were also told that the only reason that they were persisting with the demand for justice was because they were motivated by greed for compensation. Now that the truth is known and the names and reputations of Liverpool supporters have been restored, it is worth remembering those responses and those times. Liverpool fans have been on trial every day for three decades. The establishment left Hillsborough families exposed and vulnerable, clearly hoping that the feeling of hopelessness under the weight of such accusation would wear them down in time.
The names of the fans were cleared eventually. At immense physical and psychological cost.
We get the usual platitudes from the politicians in Parliament, a continuation of Blair's 'what's the point?' to Straw, in contemptuous disregard of Truth and Justice. I pay no attention to them, they are worthless. If that’s what it takes to win in politics, then we are all lost. I was present at the Hillsborough Memorial when Andy Burnham reported that he had spoken to Prime Minister Gordon Brown that morning and that he had promised to do all he could. We knew that to mean carrying on doing the usual nothing. We knew it to be a meaningless platitude. Burnham was met by the crowd standing to demand Justice for the 96. Burnham knew the hollowness of Brown's promises. And still they are mystified as to why 'ordinary' people are walking away from Labour. I had long gone by then.
We have been living in an age of diminishing public authority and imagination. I write most of all about loss, the things that are absent in the world, the things that are broken, and the things we stand in need of. It is no wonder, then, that I have spent the past thirty years writing of the common weal, that old principle I learned at school. It seems very strange to learn all these things at a young age, and then enter a world that turns them on their head. You get the impression that all that society is is an organised lie that socializes its members into becoming liars. I am honoured to have never fitted in.
It is very disheartening. It took all that effort, all that pain and heartache, and all that struggle, simply to clear the names of the innocent victims. The fans were not just the victims that day, they were the heroes, the ones who initiated the rescue when all around them froze and failed. The reason that Liverpool fans were blamed is that it would allow some very powerful people and their minions off the hook. It took decades, and an enormous amount of pain, anguish, and self-sacrifice to lift the monstrous calumny that was heaped upon Liverpool supporters.
And even then, after all that, the establishment get precisely the result they had sought all along – 96 people unlawfully killed, and not a single soul will be held accountable. They got away with it, and that is all that mattered to them. The only difference now is that they don't need the lie about Liverpool fans to get away with it.
I felt there would be no justice in 1989 because I felt the system to be rotten and iniquitous. I’m not a vindictive person, and wasn’t possessed with an obsession to see jail sentences. I don’t think such sentences would have been inappropriate, either. But what would have changed? I would much prefer to see a transformation of that system, in the context of a widespread social transformation in a democratic and egalitarian direction, than the imprisonment of a handful of miscreants, or even a whole boatload of them – this ship is sinking. I knew it back in 1989. Misplaced hopes with respect to New Labour masked it, but it continues to sink.
I’ve not been following these trials to be perfectly honest. They have tailored away into the ether with a grim inevitability. The decision makers have known all along that the responsibility here runs wide and deep, and that it wouldn't be possible to identify just a few sacrificial victims. There are more than a few who are responsible: this problem is institutional and systemic and the whole rotten structure needs to be transformed.
I didn't join the fight for justice from the first. I thought the odds were hopeless. I didn't expect justice from this system - over three decades on, and we still haven't had justice. It seems that my pessimism was justified. The truth was known at the time. Hillsborough was the most covered tragedy in history. There were cameras and photographers all around the ground. There was nothing at all to back the claims made against the Liverpool fans when it came to violence, zero. And yet the lie stuck. Which begs the question as to why people are reluctant to believe the voice of 'ordinary' people? That question is of general significance. We who were there told it straight from the start. The lies of the authorities unravelled from the start, from the initial claim that the gates were stormed, which was withdrawn that night. The lies came thick and fast, only more clever and more systematic than the initial response. They were challenged immediately. But the fans were immediately put on the defensive by a concerted counter-attack alleging all manner of disgusting behaviour. In the war of words, it took far too long for many to see the truth. Maybe the truth - that the establishment is corrupt, deceitful, and murderous and doesn't give a damn for the people it is supposed to protect and serve - was too much to bear: it means that these people hold 'ordinary' people in complete contempt and you really are on your own. And maybe that truth remains too much to bear. It is easier to pretend all that political activity means something and is going somewhere. It keeps us occupied.
I don’t need to be involved in any other issue or any other politics. I learned all I needed to know about politics, philosophy, and practical reason here. I learned to trust the basic honesty, intelligence, and decency of so-called ‘ordinary’ folk, the people who were prepared to say 'no' to power and 'yes' to truth and take on the 'experts,' the lickspittles of the system, and their ongoing attempt to cover up for power. It is grounds for encouragement that they tore the establishment case to shreds and wouldn't let it go. It is going to take that kind of tenacity to turn this scale of corruption around. If the public let this blatant, bare-faced injustice go, then they are wide open to continuing injustice in other forms. The good news is: a lot of people know this.
I hear the usual platitudes from the politicians in parliament and they turn my stomach in their complete disregard for Truth and Justice. They know it’s a rigged game and they know that their job is to play that game and keep us entertained. They will make the right noises to no effect. That’s a depressing conclusion which seems to give us no hope. But what other conclusion is to be drawn?
There are people out there who actually think that Liverpool fans have already received justice. All that has been achieved after decades of struggle is that the fans have been exonerated of blame, taking that long, expending that much effort, to establish a truth so palpable that the real question is how a falsehood so monstrous could have been told in the first place, let alone have survived for so long. We know the answer – the entire establishment was involved in the cover up. No wonder many want to look away. This is one of those moments when we find out how much reality people can bear. The answer seems to be not much. The comforting illusion that politics actually stands for something is infinitely preferable. People seem to prefer endlessly struggling towards an unrealisable goal to the recognition that the master signifier is empty.
Another way of putting the question is to ask, who, really, gives a damn about ‘ordinary’ folk? That was how they thought they could get away with it. They got the shock of their lives when ‘ordinary’ folk turned out to be composed of a lot of extraordinary people, the likes of Dr John Ashton, trained doctor and public health specialist, Liverpool fan who witnessed the entire debacle and reported back instantly. He was an inconvenient witness.
I first knew John Ashton as a Liverpool supporter who was present at the Hillsborough Disaster. He told the truth about complicity, culpability, and cover-up then, and was blacklisted and sidelined for his troubles.
The biggest mistakes I have made, though, lie in overestimating the reason and courage possessed by most people and underestimating cowardice and complicity at all levels.
Like John Ashton, I saw it all on Hillsborough. In retrospect, it is amazing that the Hillsborough campaigners won the victory that they did. From government down to the people who masquerade as citizens of a public realm, the whole set-up is rotten and stinks to high heaven.
Let’s be honest, it looks like we are stuffed. There’s not enough of us with enough brain cells and backbone to contest injustice in the name of justice. And I mean justice, not some arbitrary perspective or standpoint. The people who are clued up are few and isolated. It’s not the predators and exploiters we are up against so much as the lumpen passive mass clinging to normality. They have found a comfort zone, within which they can participate in the political floor-show as if it meant anything. When politics does matter, power shows its true face, that of cold, inhuman force. That's when people need to stand up and be counted.
I read that John Ashton doesn’t care anymore when it comes to telling the truth. The authorities managed to keep him quiet after Hillsborough by threatening him, but he doesn't care anymore. And neither do I. This is all I have known my entire political life, government lies and cover-ups, and too many members of the public complacent and complicit and conformist. This is how it ends, a national scandal that costs lives, but the wrong people applauded and vilified.
I had missed the false claim that was put out about the gates being stormed, I was on the long journey home. It had to be withdrawn that night for the lie it was, but it was a first impression, the kind that sticks. As soon as I heard what was being said the next day, by the likes of Paul Middup and others, it was as plain as day that the fix was in. Instead of recovering from being in the middle of Hell we were immediately drawn into a war of words. One thing that was immediately plain was the stark contrast between the emotionalism of the Liverpool fans reporting back on events – and responding to the charges levelled against them - and the cold-hearted, callous, calculating words of those out to wound and destroy. The latter are entirely without conscience, without decency, without humanity, without morals. These are the last people to be in positions of power over the lives of people.
Power is best preserved by being concealed. This was the establishment exposed in all its cruelty in the naked light of day. Can you deal with the reality? Or prefer comforting illusions?
It is amazing to think we’ve spent three decades on this, all through the nineties, being told to draw a line under things and move on and, worse, being told that we couldn’t accept the truth and were only interested in compensation. People may have forgotten all this. We remember it. You remember every hurt suffered along the way. The wounds remain raw. That's three damned decades.
I am no longer angry. In fact, anger passed very early on as soon as I recognized the cold-hearted inhumanity of the system and its functionaries at work. You can cry all you like when faced with such a monster, but it will be to no avail.
There is an honour and a pride in having stood alongside men and women who, with nothing but truth and a burning sense of justice on their side, were willing to stand up and be counted against an establishment that is corrupt to its rotten heart. And withstand the ignorance and prejudice of people, too. I’m still standing, holding my head up, and all involved, survivors and campaigners and supporters, can do likewise. Let’s be honest, the past few decades has been a wretched one for politics, a long and slow decline, with the public good being progressively hollowed out. There’s something unhealthy at the heart of the political world. We showed what it takes to restore health; we set a good example. Let’s see if others can follow it.
The truth is known, and is always independent of power. Justice is only ever imperfectly realised, if at all, and is an ongoing struggle.
But if you want to know why I insist on transcendent standards of truth and justice, independent of power relations and struggles in time and place, then here it is. The alternative is to accept that these things are merely secondary to power, with coercion, propaganda, and falsehood serving just as well to secure political ends. I don't care for that view. I see it as unguarded and prone to corruption.
In the Paradiso (18: 91-93), Dante sees the souls in Jupiter spell out this Latin message:
“DILIGITE IUSTITIAM QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM.”
“LOVE JUSTICE, YOU WHO RULE THE EARTH.”
It is a quote from the Wisdom of Solomon 1: 1:
“Love righteousness, ye that be judges of the earth: think of the Lord with a good (heart,) and in simplicity of heart seek him” (Saint James Version).
In the meantime, it seems that it is for us 'ordinary' citizens to do all the loving of truth and justice we can, to ensure that the rulers are kept on the straight and narrow as best they can be. And to sacrifice neither of these things to power, in the struggle against power.
Frankly, looking at the future that is coming shortly, I really have no hope and, for my own sanity’s sake, I can no longer care. There is little evidence that this civilization has what it takes to turn things round. Too many don't learn by hard experience, too many fall for the lies and propaganda. I am not disillusioned, though. I have always known how deep the problem lies. I recall here Max Weber's argument that the modern nation-state in waging war does a better job at providing meaning and community for modern men and women than does religion. The horrible truth is that, in a modern meaningless world that has dissolved the good and fractured ethics and society into the subjective choices of discrete individuals, Weber is right. The individuals of this society lack what it takes to discern real meaning and establish genuine community. They are idiotes withdrawn into their own concerns in the private sphere. It is never time for politics for such people, they have long since disengaged from political activity in a meaningful public sphere. They are easy prey for ersatz meaning and surrogate community in politics.
The commitment of many to truth, justice, and decency is commendable and does them well. But too many still haven't grasped that their appeals in these directions will meet with little or no response. This is not the world we live in. We live in a sophist world in which truth and justice is whatever the strongest power says it is. To beat the strongest, you have to re-constitute the world. You can't beat sophists at their own game, he will trump you every time.
It is easy to draw the most pessimistic conclusions in light of this debacle. People don't think, don't reflect, don't know much, and don't want to know. And even if they did know, it wouldn't make a difference. Because the structures of a genuine politics and public life don't exist. In the book Consumed Ben Barber developed the concept of 'infantilism' to argue that too many individuals in the contemporary age are not citizens at all, informed and active in public life, but consumers passively receiving the world around them. They respond not to reason and evidence but to soundbites, the shaping of images, the manipulation of emotions. As Max Weber said with respect to the surrogate community of the nation-state at war - it does a good job in investing the meaningless lives of modern men and women with meaning, and the more sacrifice the greater the meaning.
We could establish the communities of character and practice cultivating the virtues but here's the punchline, many leftists are actually liberals who rule the creation of this social, moral, and institutional infrastructure out as 'repressive of difference and otherness.' Great. The political and cultural counterpart of the economic libertarians whose anti-government ideology now dominates government and renders it impotent for collective ends. Two cheeks of the same backside. This will not end well.
This is the deeply pessimistic conclusion. I could present a more optimistic reading of events, and write above the lessons to be learned from Hillsborough when it comes to fighting and righting future injustices. But none of it will alter the injustice here.
I've been fighting this cause my entire life and now I am tired. There are too many things going too wrong in too short a time; not enough, if anything, going right. And nothing to hold on to that contains even the seeds of a better future. Life has become a holding operation, with less and less to hold on to, hope for this world least of all.
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