"Tanked up yobs"

Authentic front page, but for one minor amendment

When I began this blog in March 2009, one of the first links I installed was to the Hillsborough Justice Campaign: as someone born in Liverpool, I have always felt strongly about this terrible disaster, and the terrible injustice that followed. How the Establishment seriously thought that Liverpool would eventually just shut up and go away, I do not know. I can only guess that, not only do they not understand Liverpool, but they also don't understand ordinary human nature. A sense of injustice does not fade away in time: if anything, the opposite is true.

To remain true to the themes of this blog, I will concentrate on one specific aspect of the matter; alcohol. All other aspects are - at last - being covered thoroughly elsewhere.

In the immediate aftermath of the disaster when the dead were in the improvised morgue, the injured were in hospital and the traumatised supporters were making their way home, the first priority of senior police officials was to find a scapegoat. They knew they had badly mishandled the situation, but this was only four years after the miners' strike when most of the the media had stood shoulder to shoulder with the government in demonising a workforce that only wanted to save its jobs and protect its communities. They must have felt confident they could cover this one up too, and what better to blame than booze?

95 of the 96 dead were tested for alcohol, including children: the 96th victim didn't die until four years later. Police photographers were sent out to photograph litter bins, rubbish in the road, and even motorway verges, to find 'evidence' in the form of discarded beer bottles and cans that Liverpool supporters were drunk. Stories were leaked to the press which uncritically followed the party line of blaming drunken hordes for causing the crush and behaving disgracefully; in particular, the claim that "Some fans urinated on the brave cops" immediately - and quite deliberately - suggests people who have had a skinful.

The Establishment went into overdrive to protect its own:

• Papers released by the Hillsborough Independent Panel show that Thatcher ordered the Government’s response to the Taylor Report in August 1989 to be toned down to avoid criticising South Yorkshire Police.
• In 1996 Bernard Ingham wrote to Liverpool fan Graham Skinner: "Who if not the tanked up yobs who turned up late determined to get into the ground caused the disaster? To blame the police, even though they may have made mistakes, is contemptible."
• Boris Johnson wrote in 2004 that, while Hillsborough was a tragedy, "that is no excuse for Liverpool's failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon."

Thus it can be seen that the myth of the drunken fans turning up late, demanding to get in without tickets, creating a dangerous crush and, ultimately, causing the disaster itself was firmly established. Johnson's and Ingham's comments were made even though though the Taylor Report had previously exonerated the fans of blame in 1990. As recently as the last couple of years, lawyers for South Yorkshire Police at the Warrington inquest deliberately repeated the myth that fans' drunken bad behaviour was in some way a contributory factor: fortunately the truth had by then become undeniable, the fans were exonerated again, and the deaths ruled unlawful.

The 70s and 80s were full of stories about drunken football hooliganism, and there was undoubtedly plenty of it at the time. The fact that hooligans were only ever a tiny percentage of fans as a whole didn't deter the media from blaming the many for the actions of the few. Against that background, it is easy to see how the Establishment's Hillsborough myth, based on the fiction of a drunken mob, took root so firmly. 

Conclusion: I have often read in the press a shocked 'explanation' for violence or other criminal behaviour that some offender had been on a 10 or 12 hour drinking spree. Anti-alcohol campaigners regularly make assertions, often with extremely dodgy 'evidence', about the level of antisocial behaviour caused by alcohol. Back in 1989, people were then, as they still are now, attuned to associate drinking with violence and disorder. The Hillsborough myth both tapped into that prejudice and propagated it further, and in doing so condemned the bereaved to suffer for 27 years. That prolonged agony must be the greatest injustice of them all.

A personal note: I went to the Blood Tub beer festival last week, and later went on to my local. After the equivalent of a 10 hour session, I walked home safely, locked my front door after me, took out my contact lenses, hung my clothes on the chair and went to bed. If the media were right about alcohol, I should have been an out-of-control, violent yob. For the record, I don't follow football, but I do care about injustice.

Hillsborough - drunken lies

It's my view that most people in Liverpool, if they didn't know anyone who was killed or injured in the Hillsborough disaster, knew somebody who was at the match; I certainly did. All who were there, even if uninjured, were deeply shocked by the fatal disaster they saw unfolding before their eyes. The lies and cover-up that took place have at long last been placed on record today, and it is a disgrace that the Hillsborough families had to use their own money to try to get to the truth, while those who were lying had ready access to taxpayers' money to conceal their wrong-doings; such expenditure must now be investigated as misappropriation of public funds.

Today's extraordinary developments have been covered elsewhere in more detail than I can in a post here, so I intend to concentrate on one aspect: the lies about drunken, out of control Liverpool fans. Liverpool fans were, and are, ordinary people, not saints, but they did have a reputation for being well-behaved at a time when the word 'football' had often been linked in the media with the word 'hooligan'. Police incompetence caused a disaster of unprecedented proportions, and their response was to begin their cover-up and lies on the actual day of the tragedy by blaming the fans. Senior police officers and the local Tory MP, Irvine Patnick, claimed drunken louts had caused the crowd problems and, when it was clear that hundreds were injured and dozens dead, accused the fans of attacking police who were trying to help injured fans, of stealing from the dead and of urinating on bodies and on the emergency services - all fuelled (they claimed) by alcohol. They tried to find 'evidence' of drunkenness by asking relatives of the dead how much their loved ones had had to drink - this while they were trying to absorb the news of their losses - and by testing the blood of all the dead, including the children, for evidence of drink. And as for the police accessing the records of the dead to see whether they had criminal records ... unbelievable.

We now know (although some of us consider we have known this all along) that this was a lie, and that the fans had behaved extremely well, warned the police that some people were likely to be injured or killed, and when those warnings were ignored and thus came horribly true, tore down advertising placards - condemned as hooliganism at the time - to use as makeshift stretchers. We also know that, while some fans had had a drink, there was no evidence either of mass drunkenness or of misbehaviour. So how did the lies of the police and The Sun strike a chord with so many people for so long?

People usually tend to believe what the police tell them, probably less so now than 23 years ago, so their stories of drunkenness did a lot to give the cover-up credibility at a time when the popular perception of football fans among the general public - gleaned from the press - was that they were habitually drunk and violent; the lies of the police, repeated by The Sun, fitted into such prejudices perfectly. People tend to believe stories that match what they already know or, rather, what they think they already know.

There are many things that went wrong in relation to Hillsborough, covered more extensively elsewhere, but I can't help feeling that police lies were given credibility by tapping into a moral panic concerning alcohol and drunken football fans, with the resulting misconceptions being a significant factor in causing this injustice to fester for 23 years. As the fight for justice continues, I look forward to seeing heads roll.

I've had a link to the Hillsborough Justice Campaign since the first day of this blog.