So I finally plucked up the courage to watch the BBC
documentary about Hillsborough. It wasn’t a matter of being unprepared for what
to expect; quite the contrary. I’ve read a lot of accounts of the day, the
details unearthed by the Hillsborough Independent Panel and the outstanding
investigative work of the likes of Phil Scraton and David Conn. The details of
what happened remain harrowing beyond words; the descriptions of people crushed
to death whilst watching a football match. They remain horrifying beyond the
power of words to describe. The first hour of the documentary concentrates implacably
on this; the confluence of circumstances which led to the deaths of 96 people.
At each step in the process you can see where things happening slightly
differently would have meant the terror of the day wouldn’t have happened at
all; that it wasn’t inevitable. It’s a horror only real life could produce;
miles ahead of the effect any filmmaker might achieve. Because it actually
happened. Because a long chain of institutional incompetence and indifference
led to the point where people died.
It takes as its starting point a police prank; a prank on a
junior for which the officer normally in
charge of big matches in Sheffield carries the can and is exiled from Sheffield
to Barnsley. Instead, for a big match an inexperienced officer who has no
experience of policing big matches is brought in – disastrously, as officers on
duty that day recount, he’s overconfident of his own abilities. The ground
itself doesn’t carry a safety certificate; it had expired three years before
the game and never been renewed. Spurs fans at the 1981 semi-final had
experienced a similar crush but no notice was taken; nothing happened so things
could carry on. That’s one area the documentary soft pedals; the Football Association’s
responsibility. It selected the ground and gave Liverpool, the club with the
larger number of fans, the end with the poorest access. It didn’t even bother
to check the existence of non-existence of the safety certificate (as apparently
no-one in the organisation understood the concept). Liverpool’s chief executive Peter Robinson made
protests against the choice of ground but, as four years earlier at Heysel, his
concerns were ignored by authorities. If anything the conditions in the ground
had been made worse for fans; the Leppings Lane terrace was not divided into
three pens. That the word ‘pens’ is used tells you all you need to know about
how football fans were regarded; as basically subhuman cattle, fit only to be
fenced in. It’s a mercy that the suggestion of Chelsea’s reactionary chairman
Ken Bates, that the fences separating fans from pitch should be electrified,
was never taken up – what the casualties might have been if that had been the
case is too horrifying to contemplate.
The thing that should be stressed at this point is a point
made by the journalist Tony Evans (who was in the stands that day). That this
was essentially a normal matchday; fans may have had one or two drinks before
the game but there had been no serious traffic delays, nothing to cause a late
rush of fans to arrive at the stadium. Yet thanks to the inadequate
infrastructure of the ground a crush was beginning to develop outside the
ground; an officer on the scene advised of the crush in no uncertain terms and
that action needed to be taken. Sadly, with the inexperience of the officer in
charge the most disastrous action that could be made was taken and a gate to
the central pen of the Leppings Lane terrace was opened. At this point it
should be stressed that the terraces were divided into three pens and the ones
at either end were relatively underpopulated.
Under pressure an inexperienced officer made a very human mistake. And
because of that mistake a crush developed on the centre pen of the terrace as
fans rushed to get out of the crush outside the ground to try and catch a match
which had already started.
I remember playing football on the street that day, running
in at three o’clock so we could be updated on the first half and hear the
second half in full (the radio rights only covered second half commentary of
most games in those days). Instead we heard the game had been stopped after six
minutes and Peter Jones, one of the great radio sports commentators, became a disaster
reporter for the afternoon. It was horribly unclear at first; fans apparently spilling
onto the pitch but as the afternoon continued the horror slowly unfolded.
Pictures of the day now show that central pen; a seething mass of humanity full
beyond bursting and with people still trying to enter behind. It’s fairly calm and normal surrounding it; in
the stand above and in the pens to either side. But the middle seethes like a
bee hive that’s been attacked, a mass of humanity that looks impossibly tightly
packed. John Motson even remarks on it in off-air comments; there’s no unruly
mob rush, just a slow build of pressure. And what happened then remains
impossibly horrific as Peter Beardsley hits the bar, the crowd naturally surges…
people are packed so tight they can’t breather. Police officers recount how
they can’t untangle the masses of limbs when they have to deal with the dead.
All this time the initial mistake of opening the gate towards the central pen
is compounded by inaction, by a lack of direction to open the gates that would
allow exit. By total misunderstanding of what’s happening meaning that much of
the police were directed to wait on the halfway line to stop a potential charge
from the Forest fans. Some police help but it’s the other fans who help; the
ones sitting above dragging people out, passing others over the fences,
improvising stretchers… the human desire is to help. And the police at that
end, when they realise what’s happening, also help desperately, attempting to
save lives and get people out. Common humanity prevails, even if the official
response remains inadequate with ambulances unable to reach the ground. It’s then
a tale of coping with chaos and of relatives trying to discover what’s happened
to loved ones. The documentary managed to clearly portray the chaos and horror
of the day.
The conjuror’s trick lies in getting you to look where he
wants. You know ‘look into my eyes; don’t look around the eyes…’ Their art,
fundamentally, is misdirection and getting you to mistrust your own sensory
evidence. It’s also the art of the PR man and advertiser, to get you to believe
what they want you to, whatever you can see. The Hillsborough cover-up beings
excusably; with the officer in charge on the day wanting to cover his own
backside. It’s not pleasant, but it’s a human reaction. The fatal opening of
the gate became an issue where it was forced by fans, not by police order. In a
sane world this lie would soon have been uncovered and exposed by any remotely
competent investigation. Instead it became a point to begin an institutional
cover-up that wasn’t fully exposed for nearly three decades, blame dodging by
the organisations which failed in any conception of a duty of care to the fans;
the South Yorkshire Police, Sheffield Wednesday FC and the FA. The police, with
the connivance of the local MP, began by blaming ‘tanked-up yobs’ for arriving
late and causing the congestion which led to the crush. They compounded this
with details of bodies being robbed and the police being assaulted and urinated
on when they were bravely attempting to help. Liverpool fans, like any other
set, are no angels, as is acknowledged, but viewing any footage of the day
provides no evidence of such behaviour whatsoever. Quite the opposite; tragedy
begat natural nobility rather than venal or aggressive instincts. It was fed via the local press association to
national papers and widely reported. Most had the sense to frame them as unproven
accusations; the editor of The Sun infamously declared them ‘The Truth’. As
facts. That’s why the line from anyone asking why The Sun bore the brunt of
Merseyside fury when everyone else reported the accusations is worthless;
because only The Sun reported them as facts, a decision purely down to the
editor. Again, Tony Evans points out that the first question a journalist
should ask when considering whether these were truthful accusations is whether
you’d do such a thing yourself; it’s almost impossible to imagine that any sane
person would. It speaks volumes of the government of the day and the type of
figure within it that one of them declared it to be the fault of tanked-up
yobs; an accusation he’s never seen fit to retract despite it being challenged officially
several times and always found groundless.
It was Lord Justice Taylor’s inquiry that first found it
baseless. A subsequent coroner’s enquiry found the whole affair to be an
accident; but this was another part of the cover-up with the coroner unscientifically
declaring a cut off of 3.15 when considering time of death and causes of death.
It was another aspect of establishment
cover-up; a backroom deal that the South Yorkshire press officer tried to
declare the end of the matter. An
accident, of course, would mean that it was something that couldn’t ever have
been foreseen or prevented without great foresight. Again, this was a great
evasion of blame on the police’s part, but one apparently backed up by evidence
from officers on the day. The reality was quite different. When Phil Scraton
gained access to the statements from officers he found they’d been
significantly altered to remove any criticism of police conduct on the day. One
officer in the documentary recounted that the police officers of the time carried
a little blue book; something sacred in which you recorded what had happened on
the day, however minute. And yet… when they were being debriefed afterward they
were told not to worry about this (creditably, one experienced officer when told
this said to his colleagues to ignore that and record everything down to when
they’d last used the toilet). This wasn’t unprecedented; the government was
well aware that it needed the police support to survive pushing through
unpopular actions and policies and as such had ensured the police became
well-paid and backed-up in any investigations. South Yorkshire Police had form;
after the notorious incident at Orgreave during the miner’s strike of the
mid-1980s the government had backed them up and fed stories of rioting miners
rather than investigating stories of police brutality. All this, naturally, led
to a total lack of accountability which should be vital to any law-keeping
institution. But there was no
accountability. The deaths were declared an accident, the reputation of Liverpool
fans were tarnished; the vile element of opposition fans provoking them with
chants of ‘always the victims, it’s never your fault’ when Hillsborough was
piled on top of the earlier Heysel tragedy (and in the interests of balance,
certain elements of Liverpool fandom weren’t shy of replying with equally
distasteful chants relating to deaths for other clubs). That it was all so
easily believed; that the late 1990s would see it declared as useless to reopen
a file on the case with no new evidence compounded a sense that the
establishment had closed ranks and shifted the blame to what they seemed to
view as a subhuman mass of fans.
Subhuman isn’t too strong a word there; English clubs were
banned from European football for hooliganism; many city centres were damaged
by fights between fans in the 1980s. The Prime Minister didn’t understand
competitive sport or spectators; therefore she was all too ready to believe the
worst of their behaviour (as were many members of her Cabinet). I’ve mentioned the Chelsea chairman’s proposal
for electrified fences; measures taken only in terms of extreme security or
fencing in cattle. Equally when questioned on the matter the FA admitted that
no-one truly understood ground safety; no-one had even undertaken basic checks
on the ground before it had a semi-final allocated. No-one listened to Peter
Robinson’s warnings based on the semi-final of the previous year and the
Spurs-Wolves game of earlier in the decade. No-one at Sheffield Wednesday cared
enough about fans to ensure their ground was safe; if there was one positive
thing to come out of that day it was the Taylor reports recommendations on improving
ground safety. All this has one thing at the heart of it; a snobbish lack of
concern for those with less money or whose pleasures are considered less
highbrow. Hillsborough wasn’t inevitable; not until extremely close to the
tragedy happening. But with those prevailing attitudes something like it was
inevitable. Tony Evans point that it
wasn’t a particularly exceptional day, that very little happened to cause the
tragedy that didn’t normally happen on any matchday, is the key point. With
those attitudes it was inevitable that something like Hillsborough would happen
sooner or later. It may not have happened at Hillsborough; it may not have been
Liverpool fans but sooner or later the total lack of concern for fans, for
paying customers, meant that there would be crushes and that sooner or later
mistakes would be made that meant people would be seriously injured or die. It
was really a matter of time before some kind of tragedy occurred.
This, of course, is not thinking that would permeate
establishment minds. As with most humans we’re locked in our own worldviews and
don’t question them, instead fitting facts and events to them rather than
letting inconvenient facts amend our perceptions. If the insistence of a
terrible accident was made for long enough all this would eventually subside.
And it nearly did; a private prosecution against the officer in charge of the
day failed as it provided only a hung jury; funds raised by organisations
supporting the families of the bereaved in the quest to find out what had
happened to their loved ones seemed wasted on that failed case. But at a
memorial service at Liverpool’s home ground of Anfield Cabinet Minister Andy
Burnham was confronted with a wall of anger as he spoke and expressed official
sympathy; creditably he took that on board and insisted on the case being
reopened. Eventually that led to a two year long case which ended up utterly
exonerating the fans and finding that official institutions had failed them
dismally. Every death at Hillsborough was ruled an unlawful killing. The police and Sheffield Wednesday were at fault. The FA, which had
issued a non-specific apology a few years earlier, kept very quiet. Sheffield Wednesday
had failed in their neglect of their ground. It took more than twenty-seven
years for the dead to be exonerated and for actual facts to be established;
facts the police had even tried to deny in the courtroom. The Kop singing You’ll
Never Walk Alone at a match is a grand and joyous thing but it was as nothing compared
to the joy of the families being able to sing it on the steps of a nondescript
modern courtroom after the verdicts were announced. Because the details that
haunt you aren’t just the descriptions of the carnage on the Leppings Lane terraces;
nor the police officer (and ex-paratrooper) involved in rescue efforts on the
day suffering a nervous breakdown whilst on duty in his car. It’s the hair;
grey, white or gone. It’s the lines time has etched onto their faces; grief and
struggle against institutions which let them down. It’s the steel in the eyes;
that anger and grief has been forced to fester there whilst the names of their
family were dragged through the mud. That it took twenty-seven years to undo a
lie originally spread in minutes. That justice took so long to serve some of those
who got away with it lived out comfortable lives and died with their sins
unaccounted. Twenty-seven years; not far
short of ten thousand days. After watching the testimonies of the officers and
fans you suddenly realise the importance of proper accountability and that
there was no accountability whatsoever should make anyone deeply afraid.
Because if there is no accountability in a situation so obvious, where evidence
was clear… when can you trust any institution? How many people in power are
actually fitted to it? When can you ever trust an institution again? The
financial crash and subsequent actions of financial institutions certainly
suggest the answer remains: ‘you can’t’. Hillsborough didn’t only cost 96
lives, it cost decades of other people’s lives (and contributed to many early
deaths of those involved in the search for justice). And in the long term it
cost a community their faith in society. It’s never a bad thing to learn to
question how power is wielded but in the long run that lasting distrust is the
establishment’s price for the short term saving of a few reputations.
So yes, I’ve had my heart broken and been rendered furious
once more by it. It’s an astonishingly powerful film; almost as powerful as
Jimmy McGovern’s 1996 dramatisation of events. If you’re remotely squeamish of
strong emotions or descriptions then it may be unbearable but for those with a
strong enough constitution it’s vital. Not just if you’re a football fan, or
remember the game, but as an expose of a tragedy and how easy it was for the responsibility
to be pinned on the innocent. Ultimately it tells you that in times of crisis you
should put your faith in the quality of fellow human beings rather than in any
uniform they wear or any power they hold. And that if you fight long enough and
hard enough, eventually any lie can be undone.
There’s no triumph in the verdicts; it’s simply the treatment of a
festering wound that can finally be allowed to begin to heal. The tricks of the
magicians have been explained and exposed; the charlatans are undone and all
that’s left is the accounting. Maybe, just maybe, the institutions of society can
be made to work as they should eventually. And 96 victims can rest in peace.