People did not die because a running mob barged recklessly into the back of them. They did not die because drunken people trampled them. They did not die because they turned up late and drunk to a match and then forced their way in. I’ve come across so many people, including well-disposed people who are not inclined to believe the Sun, who think some or all of these things.

People died at Hillsborough because they were sent into a small, confined and grotesquely over-occupied space and when they were they they could not get out. And because nobody did anything about it until it was too late for 96 of them.

It shouldn’t be so hard for people to understand or accept it, but because of the sort of people who died and because of what was (and is) said about them, they still do not.

Really?

Why does Hillsborough get remembered in this way, when other disasters generally don’t? Well possibly because in those other disasters there was not a concerted and continuing attempt to smear the people who died as not only the authors of their own misfortune, but as thieving, drunken hooligans. Not the victims of King’s Cross, not the victims of Piper Alpha. Not even, as it happens, the victims of Valley Parade or other football stadium disasters (Ibrox, the recent Ivory Coast diaster, and so on). Any number of nightclub fires, where, almost inevitably, doors turn out to have been locked and chained: similarly fires in hostels. Not far from where I live, the Biescas disaster some years ago. The deaths of the Chinese cockle pickers off the Lancashire coast not long ago. So many African would-be immigrants, drowned trying to reach Italy or Spain. Many dreadful incidents of many different types.

Everybody understands, however difficult it may be to accept it, that sometimes there are disasters and large numbers of people die, in anguished and anguishing circumstances. Very often the authorities are culpable to some degree or another and people’s distress at the deaths is likely to be exacerbated by the failure to prosecute those responsible and quite often to cover up for them. (This is true of nearly all the specific instances I mention above.) This happened with Hillsborough in a very big way, but as I say, in itself that’s not so unusual. But the smear campaign against the dead, the deliberate unleashing of prejudice and dissemination of lies, the mobilisation of all sorts of prejudice against the victims – I can recall nothing that’s been even close to this. Nothing. A huge mountain of lies, insinuations and sheer outright prejudiced hatred, which is still being added to.

If this weren’t the case, It’s quite likely that the grieving and the marking of anniversaries would not have quite the same prominence as it has. It would still be large and significant, because we mark in particular those tragedies which seem to touch us, and this one touched two large and particular groups: people who are from Liverpool and people who are football supporters. If I were not in the latter group in might well not have the same impact on me, but as it happens, I am, and as it happens I was at a football match that day in Shrewsbury and I can still recall listening to the radio on the way home and the death toll going up and up. It doesn’t affect me more because I thought the people who died were any more human or important than the people who died on Piper Alpha or the people who were killed in the July bombings in London (as it happens, of those two events I’m more affected by the latter, as I was travelling to work in London that day). It’s just that they were closer to me. And there’s an awful lot of people in the same situation.

But mostly, you know, it was the lies, and the acceptability of the lies, the way it’s considered all right to repeat these lies and the way it’s considered acceptable to attack people for grieving. That’s what gives this one event its particular magnitude. That’s why if you talk to many people from Liverpool, or many people who were involved in football supporters’ organisations at the time, you’ll notice how angry they still are. Because from too many people, there was no respect for them and no respect for the dead.

After twice as many people have died and others rendered homeless or bereaved in the recent bushfires in Victoria (Australia), there are already murmurs of just get over it already! Really, what is it with the anglo culture!?

and yes, of course northerners died on piper alpha, just as southerners died at hillsborough. this was an illustration of the fatuousness of the ‘nobody cares if a northerner dies’ argument in the context of 1980s british tragedies.

Do what, precisely?

‘sfunny, though, because Radio 3 and Radio 4 both had Piper Alpha programmes last year for the 20th anniversary, and the papers certainly didn’t ignore it. (Including ones in the north of England: for what it’s bloody worth, offshore work wasn’t and isn’t restricted to Scotsmen.)

I was suggesting that that was an extremely offensive, and utterly unfounded accusation to levy against someone based on bugger all.

(the fact that Hillsborough is the only disaster from the UK in the 1980s caused by incompetence that still gets any coverage at all, even though others killed far more, were due to far worse errors in the first place, and led to absolutely bugger all punishment – Herald of Free Enterprise being an obvious example I missed last time – is a good indication that the wider north-v-south point is nonsense too. Or are you suggesting that if it’d happened to Spurs fans we’d have media-led lamentations for a month every year?)

Erm, you do realise that I was being sarcastic, yes? That I was charicaturing an attitude that I, a Northerner, see living in the South very frequently?

Glasgow. But, to be fair, that was propagated by actual Glaswegians.

Would the answer be Glasgow?