The Hillsborough Football Tragedy.

Clearly Britain is not going to shut up about this all day so I should explain;

On April 15th 1989 Liverpool football club played Nottingham Forest football club in the semi-final of the FA Cup. As FA semi-finals have always been played on neutral territory this match was played Sheffield Wednesday football club's Hillsborough stadium. For reasons that have always been hotly disputed to many Liverpool fans were allowed into a to small an area in the Leppings Lane end of the ground leading to a crowd crush that killed 96 Liverpool fans. As this tragedy came at a time of massive political turmoil in the UK with things like the Miners Strike, the Battle of the Beanfield, IRA bombing campaigns on the British mainland and mass brawls/riots in and around every major football stadium every weekend there has always been a suspicion that the Hillsbrough tragedy was done on purpose by the British government in order justify a clamp down on football hooligans/ultras in order to prevent them taking part in things like the Poll Tax riots that came the following year and to punish the predominately Irish Catholic city of Liverpool for their support (fundraising etc for the IRA). For example the seat of the British government in Northern Ireland at the time was Hillsborough Castle.

Unfortunately I can't comment on those conspiracy theories with any degree of credibility because I was eight years old at the time and my only memory of the day was listening to the build up to the match on a car radio while gradually the entire country fell silent as the realisation spread that something had gone horrifically wrong. However because the Hillsborough tragedy now dominates any major football match, concert, or sporting event like the Olympics it is something I've been taught a lot about through my work doing things like football security, crowd management and something that involved lots of public order policing. What I think happened is that in the twenty or years building up to Hillsbrough England's football hooligans had been behaving so violently and so badly that they'd already been banned from European competitions and people had simply stopped thinking of them as members of the human race. So the police caused the Hillsborough because they simply didn't think it was worth the effort of preventing the accident. To make matters worse as soon as the tragedy happened rather they trying to find out what had happened in order to preventing it happening again the police and the government embarked on a massive cover-up changing public records and destroying CCTV tapes etc in order to make sure they didn't get the blame. The worst part of this was that they immediately started looking for ways to blame the Liverpool fans for their deaths. One example of this that has come out today is that rather then trying to find out why the 96 had died the main focus of the autopsies including those on the children was to prove that all the dead had been drinking so heavily they were responsible for their own deaths. This included a massive smear campaign in which the police and government knowingly made up and told lies to the media about how a group of drunken Liverpool fans had fought their way into the stadium causing the crush and then fought with brave police officers who were trying to help the injured while other Liverpool fans urinated on and stole from the bodies of the dead. These stories were everywhere at the time but it was the Sun newspaper that particularly drew the ire of most of the city of Liverpool by publishing all of these lies under the headline "The Truth!" However it must be said that most of the anger at the Sun comes from the fact that the way Liverpool fans were behaving at the time made it all to easy for the public to believe the lies.

All that's happened today is that an independent panel that was allowed to review some documents (such as police notebooks) that had previously been kept as state secrets has published it's report. This in no way sheds any light on the practical ways in which the Hillborough tragedy happened and instead focuses on the cover-up and doesn't really tell us anything that everybody didn't already know but couldn't prove. What it does though do though is allow Britain to shout long, complicated and highly technical details about things like blood alcohol levels and the physical processes of suffocating to death to a world that Britain hopes is desperately hanging on every word looking for evidence on some sort of post-Olympic code relating to any number of things including my grandmother's case. It also allows Britain to put pressure on the Egyptian government who despite not having a constitution, not having a Parliament and an economy in such deep trouble they may well need an IMF bailout are also coming pressure from the countries Ultras to allow the domestic football league season to start again despite Egypt recently suffering something that in practical terms was very similar to the Hillsborough tragedy.

So at the risk of inflaming an already combustible situation I would say that Britain's actions today have not shown even the faintest flicker of remorse over Hillsborough.

15:05 on 12/9/12.