At last some justice for the 96

We were living in England at the time and I will never forget the pictures of the people pressed against the fences. We left England shortly after so I didn’t know the victims were publicly blamed—on the very day it happened there was already speculation about official mistakes. Very glad to see the truth come out.

I remember well as a teenager (big Liverpool fan) watching uncomprehendingly at what was happening on TV – it didn’t quite seem real. It wasn’t immediately apparent (at least to me) that people were dying, just that something terrible was taking place. But it was also very obvious that it was peaceful, people were walking around stunned, there were no objects flying, nobody running, no confrontations. This was of course a time when football violence was still a problem, but this was obviously something very different.

The manner in which the media (and not just the Sun) chose to believe the worst of the fans was a very educational moment for me. It was only years later, when I moved to England, that I realised just how deep the hatred there was in some quarters for working class communities, specifically those in places like Liverpool where the sense of community and the refusal to buckle under economic assault was strong. I’m not sure there is even a word for it, but it seemed to me that it bore all the hallmarks of a deep form of racism, it was much more than just snobbery or regional rivalry. ‘Classism’ just seems too weak to describe it.

I later had experience of the UK police. I was arrested at a non-violent environmental protest. I had a very pleasant conversation with the wpc who led me away. So it was with absolute horror that I had to sit in a magistrates court and listen while she read out an obviously pre-written statement that was a complete set of lies. Every one of the officers read out the same statement. When a lawyer pointed out, not unreasonably, to the magistrate that the police were presenting what was quite clearly a pre-arranged statement rather than presenting evidence, he was directly informed by the Magistrate that if the Police said someone was guilty, that person was guilty. So all of us had little option but to accept a bind-over, despite having been clearly arrested illegally.

The establishment (not just in the UK itself) will always put its priorities first. The law has little to do with it. The UK establishment saw those decent Liverpool fans as little more than scum and animals, despite all the evidence that they were innocent victims of gross incompetence. It chose to defend its own against ordinary people. But thankfully, they didn’t know what they were fighting against. The Hillsborough campaigners are an inspiration, I’m glad that they have finally been vindicated.

#3 thanks for the reminder of the Ken Bigley hatefest and how it got rolled up into the Hillsborough scorn. In general it’s difficult now to comprehend the scale of Hillsborough (and Bradford and Heysel) but that’s not a reason for the government to attempt another side-step of accountability.

On a mostly off-point note, Creed provides an unusual (and mostly favourable) supporting role for the city of Liverpool in the Rocky saga, so maybe attitudes to the city are in for another upswing,

If Mexican justice works anything like the British, we will have to wait until 2042 to get justice for the 43 students massacred in Ayotzinapa. Idiots.

Its worth putting Hillsborough into a broader context of the Police in the north of England.

In March 1998 a Manchester Doctor approached the coroner with concerns about another GP. The concerns were passed on to the police who could not find any evidence and did nothing. Later in the year they finally put in train the inquiry that resulted in the conviction of Harold Shipman. It is believed that he was responsible for 218 murders (Wikipedia).

In 2014 the Alexis Jay report into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham found that 1400 girls had been systematically sexually exploited in that town. The police had been fully aware and assigned it low priority. Convictions and imprisonments have just happened.

So that’s the largest serial murder of the 21st century, the largest peacetime accidental death, and the largest (known) mass rape, all happened within plain sight of the police, and in all cases they did nothing at the time.

Bigley was from Liverpool and He was comparing the response in Liverpool to his death (public , collective mourning) with the response to Hillsborough, saying they were symptoms of a local “victim culture”‘ , and by extension this explained the city’s current economic malaise.

Trader Joe (@3) is absolutely right to recommend the ESPN documentary. I’ve been using it in class since it came out, and it sometimes evokes tears from American students who’ve never heard of either Liverpool or Hillsborough.

For background on the north it is worth watching the excellent Red Riding http://www.channel4.com/programmes/red-riding. At the time of broadcast it was a drama, but with the benefit of the revelations of the last ten years it looks more like a documentary.

Engels has a hopeful comment on another thread. Maybe there’s still some justice to be squeezed out of the powers that be.

@17: Yes, but in much the same way, no.

Industrialisation actually reversed the domination of London and the South east. Through Manchester’s meteoric rise it became the “second city” of England and both the Anti-Corn Law League and the Peterloo massacre in turn and Liverpool and Leeds boomed over the Atlantic trade, both shipping cotton and manufacturing textiles. Liberalism in England was once called the Manchester School.

And then Thatcher. People voting for her probably imagined that once the unions were sorted out places like Birmingham would recover their industrial greatness and giants like British Leyland would become giants again. When the ’80s riots came in ‘Wets’ like Peter Hestletine was pushing the view that with just a little investment they could be again. But the drys had their way.

Scotland’s population collapsed so badly its population in 1979 was not recovered again until 2011. As late as 1976 the West Midlands region still had the highest GDP of any in the UK outside the South East, but within five years it was lowest in England… relative earnings in the West Midlands went from being the highest in Britain in 1970 to the lowest in 1983.

The violent division between the property-and-banker wealth in the south East and urban decay in the north is as fierce as it is recent. Birmingham was once the home of the Tory Chamberlain dynasty; in 1997 Scotland didn’t have one Tory MP.

@Ronan(rf) #17

The differences between North and South predate the industrial revolution. Lancashire, in the Northwest, for instance, remained strongly Catholic through the reign of Elizabeth I and despite her police-state suppression of religions other than the Church of England. But industrialisation reinforced the differences. Here is Ian Jack quoting Donald Horne on the differences:

“In the Northern Metaphor, Britain is “pragmatic, empirical, calculating, Puritan, bourgeois, enterprising, adventurous, scientific, serious, and believes in struggle”. In the Southern Metaphor, Britain is “romantic, illogical, muddled, divinely lucky, Anglican, aristocratic, traditional, frivolous, and believes in order and tradition”. The winner in this contest was decided at least a century ago when, in Horne’s words, Britons decided it wasn’t “for what they did but for what they were that destiny had rewarded them so lavishly”.

Excellent post Chris. There has indeed long been a toxic triad in the UK between the police and elements of the political and journalistic establishment. More to the point, the tendency of reactionaries to demand unthinking deference to the police has enabled all sorts of horrors, in the UK and beyond. Hopefully this will encourage more rational approaches to police accountability, though the response to Black Lives Matter (in short – hysterical declarations that there is now a ‘War on the Police!’) doesn’t fill me with hope.

I wonder if part of the Hillsborough problem might be not so much the north/south divide, but the Lancashire/Yorkshire divide? Two populous counties separated by the Pennine hills, with a history of conflict going back to the fifteenth century, and traditions of reciprocal incompatibility and contempt.

Example I heard about: official signs on the county boundary reading “Welcome to Lancashire, the caring county”. Matched by unofficial signs on the other side, “Th’art in Yorkshire now, lad, and nobody gives a damn”.

Some Lancastrians I have met regard Yorkshire folk as taciturn, hard-hearted, selfish, avaricious: their alleged mottos “Think all and say nowt, drink all and pay nowt, and if ever tha does owt for nowt do it for thyself”. Also, “Yorkshiremen traditionally wear trousers with very deep pockets, and they all have very short arms”. Some Yorkshiremen regard Lancastrians with distrust, and Liverpudlians in particular are seen as violent, work-shy layabouts.

I’m not saying these stereotypes are at all justified, but they are sometimes believed. They may be more likely to account for the disgraceful behaviour of the Yorkshire police than any north/south division. After all, the Yorkshire police are themselves northerners, unless you suppose they have all been recruited from southern England.

@ 26

Don’t be daft. There are certainly stereotypes about Scousers, but these are more likely to be mouthed by Mancunians than Yorkshiremen, and are held by people all over the country, including Liverpool itself! In addition, Liverpool itself has for a long time had its own identity or as part of ‘Merseyside’ set aside from the rest of Lancashire. Lancashire-Yorkshire rivalry now is essentially a bit of a joke, and has been so for some time, and the Yorkshire stereotype is basically something reserved for comedy sketches and Geoff Boycott.

The police in South Yorkshire were not hostile to the fans at Hillsborough because they were from Lancashire. They would have behaved in the same way towards Sheffield Wednesday supporters. The police acted throughout the land in a way that approached certain groups as second-class citizens deserving of rough treatment. These could be football supporters, trade unionists, left-wing demonstrators, blacks, Irish or even the mentally ill. For further reading, see ‘West Midlands Crime Squad’ and ‘Special Patrol Group’.

Lancaster versus Yorkshire is something that has impeccable historical pedigree and virtually no contemporary relevance. North versus South is the opposite.

For example, in the TV series Game of Thrones, the historical Lancaster versus York War of the Roses turns into the King in the North speaking with a Sean Bean accent versus effete solitudes rich types based in not-London.

Game of Thrones does borrow fairly heavily from the genuine North-South divide, but I’m not sure it does so with more than superficial relevance.

For a more accurate treatment of the specifics, I can recommend Our Friends in the North (it’s worth it just for Daniel Craig’s performance, though all of the actors are excellent and you can even see several of the GoT cast in there). It’s the closest thing to The Wire that British TV has ever made, I think.

As for what it was like to grow up in Liverpool in the 80s, I can confirm that the attitudes Chris alludes to were most certainly felt. In fact, it felt less like negligence than active persecution – the heavy-handed policing and its attendant coverups, the riots, the drugs, slum landlords, low-level political corruption, engineered economic and industrial crises, the stereotyping (to the extent that a scouser on TV could be a musician, a footballer or a drug dealer but not much else) and, of course, the ready rebuttal to any attempt to complain about this that one was ‘wallowing in victimhood’ can only really be compared – in kind, if not quite in degree – to contemporaneous instances of racism. This, of course, is the raw truth of classism that can never quite be captured by dry economic analysis – it has much more in common with other forms of oppression than it has differences.

The terrible shame is that the left has never really figured out what to do with this. Perhaps rightly, most liberals are a bit afraid of regional identities, and whilst they might understand that an economic injustice was done, it’s all too easy to believe that there might have been more than a little truth to the stereotypes. The Labour party seems to have bought into the idea that the north is full of people who really can’t be trusted with their own opinions, and is terrified to promote the cause of the ‘working class’ after the working class identity was so thoroughly tarnished in the 80s and 90s. (In the case of Liverpool, we’re not even talking exclusively about the problematic ‘white working class’ category, which can lead one into awkward racist territory). One of my favourite examples of this is this truly remarkable Guardian video from 2010. Token northerner John Harris is sent to Liverpool to express southern liberal bafflement at the whole thing, but there’s something deeply, deeply weird about the whole thing. The segment from 1:07-1:22 is just about the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen, and the look on the lad’s face when Harris insists on demanding his gratitude for the improved state of the job centre is priceless.

chris y

Rotherham is an interesting case. There is a point in the Alexis Jay report where the penny drops and you realise what is going on, and it is beyond the kind of casual incompetence on display elsewhere. If you read Jayne Senior’s “Broken and Betrayed” she is repeatedly faced with the fact that Sheffield Police were very sympathetic to her and the cases she was bringing to their attention in stark contrast to Rotherham Police but were constrained to act because of the division of police accountability along geographic lines.

@Dipper

Rotherham (like Savile perhaps) appears to have involved a toxic mix of corruption and lack of respect for individual victims. To some degree I’d link this with the Shipman case as well and throw in “inappropriate deference to pillars of the community” as another factor.

Hillsborough feels like a direct descendant of Orgreave and a consequence of the politicisation of “crowd control” – perhaps to be related to the Met’s approach to the poll tax riots and even present day applications of “kettling.”

Thus, to some degree, I feel like the first kind of cases can turn up in most places in Britain, because they are about cultural attitudes, the way the police are recruited and the (cliche alert) the bad apples. The second feels politically driven – particular forces have been recruited (esp. at the top) into an “anti-internal dissent” role.

Football ID cards have to be seen in the context of the Heysel disaster, which was heavily linked by the press of the day to hooliganism.