Hillsborough Disaster

[TANGODANCER]

I think we should be focussing on how many other massive cover ups our establishment has presided over. Truly shocking.

So should we blight every police force in the country because of the culpability of one county?

not sure BWFCi came even close to suggesting that...
but surely those responsible for a systematic campaign of cover-up (or to give it its proper name - lying) in order to blame fans for their own mistakes - should be held to account... no?

Those responsible should and are being. I replied to the bold bit which indeed does come close to suggesting that. A police witch hunt is just what we need isn't it.

[jaffka]

Think Coffey and Harry have you spot on.....can't be arsed.

Feckin hell eh, someone has a view opposite of yours...the audacity of it.

I don't think the objection is to your having an opposite view - I suspect the problem is that you press your view and when asked why you hold it, you quite proudly say you haven't really looked into any of the evidence presented over many years and you are not going to - you prefer to rely on some kind of opinion you have formed on days other than the one in question and you have decided that this will (for you) outweigh a huge mountain of facts that quite clearly states the opposite...

it's not that you have weighed the evidence and come to a view - it's that you have chosen deliberately not to look at the evidence and just make up your own view based on some kind of fairly non-specific anecdotal evidence of scousers being some kind of trouble....

Now this is the point that someone else has made about you sticking your snecker in.

My point is, that I refuse to accept that the drunken lout Liverpool fans who clearly have a responsibility of this incident which was horrendous cannot be absolved. Which in my view some are saying.

No matter that the evidence clears the Liverpool fans?

I think that we are going round in circles here, you have played this game before?

[Annoyed Grunt]

Several times.

[thebish]

Now this is the point that someone else has made about you sticking your snecker in.

My point is, that I refuse to accept that the drunken lout Liverpool fans who clearly have a responsibility of this incident which was horrendous cannot be absolved. Which in my view some are saying.

dunno why you seem to think you have any more right to post on a thread than I have?? what is that all about?? This is a forum - if you want a private conversation with someone - then that's what the PM facility is for.. otherwise - I'm afraid it's open for us all to join in - that's kind-of what a forum is about!!

which drunken lout Liverpool fans are you thinking of?

[jaffka]

Now this is the point that someone else has made about you sticking your snecker in.

My point is, that I refuse to accept that the drunken lout Liverpool fans who clearly have a responsibility of this incident which was horrendous cannot be absolved. Which in my view some are saying.

dunno why you seem to think you have any more right to post on a thread than I have?? what is that all about?? This is a forum - if you want a private conversation with someone - then that's what the PM facility is for.. otherwise - I'm afraid it's open for us all to join in - that's kind-of what a forum is about!!

which drunken lout Liverpool fans are you thinking of?

obviously the ones that your not

[BWFC_Insane]

I think we should be focussing on how many other massive cover ups our establishment has presided over. Truly shocking.

So should we blight every police force in the country because of the culpability of one county?

not sure BWFCi came even close to suggesting that...
but surely those responsible for a systematic campaign of cover-up (or to give it its proper name - lying) in order to blame fans for their own mistakes - should be held to account... no?

Those responsible should and are being. I replied to the bold bit which indeed does come close to suggesting that. A police witch hunt is just what we need isn't it.

The point being TD that if the establishment can lie over a disaster such as this, what else are they telling porkies about?

This is not a case of certain 'indivduals' covering their tracks but about lies on a grand scale.

Not something that can or should be brushed under the carpet.

[blurred]

A couple of good articles from behind the paywall

Oliver Kay

It should not have taken the world almost a quarter of a century to be shocked, disgusted and appalled by what happened at Hillsborough on April 15, 1989. A large part of the truth — the real truth, that is, about an unsafe stadium, about police making “a blunder of the first magnitude”, about malicious and misguided attempts to blame football supporters rather than the authorities — has been out there for a long, long time.

But by the time Lord Justice Taylor submitted his interim report to the Home Office on August 1, 1989 — only 108 days after the disaster, when the death toll still stood at 95, rather than 96 — most of the world had made up its mind. Too few were interested in a report that laid the blame for the disaster not on the supporters gathered outside the gates of hell at Leppings Lane but on inadequate safety provisions and “the failure of police control” — a conclusion reached in spite of what we now know as a despicable cover-up attempt by South Yorkshire Police.

The reality, of fans herded into a crumbling stadium like lambs to the slaughter, did not suit the narrative of the time. That narrative had already been established in appallingly crass fashion by, among others, The Sun, which lapped up the smear campaign orchestrated from South Yorkshire HQ and published its infamous front-page: “The Truth: Some fans picked pockets of victims, some fans urinated on the brave cops, some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life.” That was the “truth” that Britain — the Government, the authorities, the media and, it is safe to say, large sections of the public — wanted to embrace in 1989.

Mark Twain famously said that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”. This is particularly true when the lie suits the perception of the time, which was that football supporters belonged in a sub-stratum of society and were a stain on Thatcher’s Britain, rather than, as When Saturday Comes put it, “the scapegoat for a society brutalised over the last decade.”

To be introduced to the joys of watching football in the early 1980s was, with hindsight, a little odd. I can remember seeing fights and charges and concluding that, while this was bad behaviour, it was, regrettably, quite normal. The hooligan culture registered in the same way that Wayne Rooney’s swearing into a television camera or some of John Terry’s antics might register with a six-year-old today.

What sticks in the mind from the 1980s is the assault on the senses. And the memories fall into two categories. The idealistic is the verdant green of what were almost certainly quagmire-like pitches, the roar from the terraces, the ebb and flow of the crowd, the smell of tobacco and, weirdly, the taste of Wagon Wheels. The realistic is the squalor, the shouts of “Get stuck into the black bastard”, the feeling of being squeezed like sardines a tin, the smell of urine and, again, the taste of Wagon Wheels.

Some look back on those as the good old days. They were, in fact, the bad old days when football supporters were treated like animals and, at times, responded in kind. We were the lowest of the low and so we embraced the kind of depraved conditions to which livestock would not be subjected these days.

As for which came first, the barbaric treatment or the hooliganism, Taylor had no doubt. “The ordinary provisions to be expected at a place of entertainment are sometimes not merely basic but squalid,” he wrote after Hillsborough. “This not only denies the spectator an essential facility . . . but] ... directly lowers standards of conduct. Thus crowd conduct becomes degenerated and other misbehaviour seems less out of place.”

A less than holistic approach was one issue. Safety was another. The problem was not terracing per se but an accepted disregard and complacency. After 33 Bolton Wanderers fans were crushed to death due to overcrowding at Burnden Park in 1946, the Moelwyn Hughes Report recommended a licencing system for the safety of football grounds. The Wheatley Report, after 66 Rangers supporters were crushed to death at Ibrox in 1971, made similar recommendations but noted that “there is nothing new in this proposal ... it has been mooted for almost 50 years”.

And yet it took another 18 years, including the deaths of 56 Bradford City supporters in a fire at Valley Parade and the stampede that killed 39 fans at the 1985 European Cup final at a decrepit Heysel Stadium, finally culminating at Hillsborough, until it was decided that football and its followers had suffered enough.

If only the authorities had shown the slightest willingness to learn the lessons from 1981, when Tottenham Hotspur supporters were caught up in a non-fatal crush at Leppings Lane at an FA Cup semi-final, Hillsborough might not have become synonymous with a tragedy and — now — a travesty. But the authorities shrugged. Sheffield Wednesday and South Yorkshire Council did not, between them, look for a new safety certificate for Hillsborough after alterations to the ground in 1981 and 1985. The FA and South Yorkshire Police stuck blithely in 1989 to the same inadequate arrangements that had led to a crush when the same two teams, Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, came to town 12 months earlier.

Sorry, did I mention Liverpool? Yes, it was Liverpool supporters, 96 of them, that were killed at Hillsborough. Too often this blurs the issue, as if it was a Liverpool tragedy rather than a football tragedy or indeed, “one of the great peacetime tragedies”, as David Cameron said yesterday.

They were football supporters. And so, supposedly, are some of those who, forgetting what they were subjected to in the 1980s, have, in the interests of point-scoring, accused their fellow fans of causing the slaughter of the innocents on that terrible day.

You still hear the chants — in fact we have heard them increasingly in recent years, as the distance grown and yet the justice campaign has intensified: “You killed your own fans”, “If it wasn’t for the Scousers we could stand”.

It is sickening, it is pathetic, it is the type of behaviour that reminds people why football supporters were once regarded as subhuman by certain sections of society.

Nasty chants are as bad as it gets at football grounds in England these days — as many MPs will eagerly tell you. Supporters are more likely to complain that the atmosphere is too sanitised, that the shiny new stadiums all look the same.

But the bile has to stop — and maybe, hopefully, after the Hillsborough Independent Panel’s findings yesterday, the morons who use that and other disasters for point-scoring will have pause for reflection.

For 23 years those who have campaigned for the truth about Hillsborough have been an oppressed minority. Now, finally, the minority are those left clinging, pathetically, to the futility of the lies that the anti-football culture of the 1980s, combined with the type of tribalism that only ever manifests itself at a safe distance behind police cordons or usernames, has been so keen to propagate.

But their time is up. The truth, finally, has got its shoes on and caught up with the lies once and for all.

And Tony Evans

It was the day Liverpool got its reputation back. For so long, the place had been sniggered at and derided, tagged “self-pity city” and supposedly populated by whingeing, conspiracy theorists.

Yesterday it turned out that Liverpool was right all along.

Attitudes had set hard in the 23 years since the Hillsborough disaster. For many people first impressions lasted longest. The smears by the South Yorkshire Police defined the event for many.

Numerous times I have been informed by people that they “know” what happened in Sheffield on April 15, 1989. On every occasion, they had been told by someone else. They repeated the slurs that were placed in the public domain with brutal, nasty insensitivity by Kelvin MacKenzie in The Sun.

My eye-witness version — with its broken and twisted limbs and young people dying in the sunshine — was discounted as Scouse revisionism. After these conversations I would often wake from gruesome nightmares and howl with rage.

I have been told repeatedly to “get over it” and “move on”. British justice can today thank the families of the 96 who died and all those who fought for the truth for not moving on. Liverpool’s trust in the Government was minimal, which made David Cameron’s unequivocal endorsement of the Hillsborough Independent Panel’s findings gratifying.

Those of us who knew what really happened could not comprehend the enormity of the emergency services’ failure or that the British public were blasé that this breakdown had been covered up with the crudest propaganda.

The panel’s report does not make easy reading. We had feared — deep down we knew — that many of the dead could have been saved. Yet it is still incredibly painful to see that as many as 41 could have been kept alive with prompt medical care.

There will be difficult days ahead, too. The 3.15pm cut-off for the time of death renders the original inquest meaningless. The Attorney-General must order a new one.

The actions of the police must come under severe scrutiny. It is one thing to make mistakes but quite another to go to such lengths to deflect blame. Those responsible for the errors in the stadium should be held to account but the men who organised the smear campaign against the victims are more insidious. Senior public servants served only themselves and inflicted pain on the bereaved and ignominy on the survivors.

A lot has changed since that spring day in 1989. The death toll continues to climb but away from the spotlight. Last year Stephen Whittle jumped in front of a train after telling a doctor he had sold a ticket to a friend who died in the Leppings Lane end.

Thousands of people witnessed unspeakable sights. Even now, suicides, breakdowns and alcoholism abound as people still struggle to cope with their experiences.

Liverpool got its reputation back and a host of apologies yesterday. But the price has been high. Nothing can bring back the 96. All we can do is restore honour to their memory. The Hillsborough Independent Panel did this yesterday. Now a public inquiry must ensure nothing like the disaster ever happens again.

[William the White]

Thanks, blurred for the informative stuff you've posted.

Many Bolton supporters share in your joy that the truth has at last emerged.

What total dissembling bastards the South Yorkshire police were...

May they pay for the pain and hurt they inflicted on the victims and their families...

[Hoboh]

Those who lied and covered up should pay a hefty penalty, justice is not one sided.

[thebish]

Now this is the point that someone else has made about you sticking your snecker in.

My point is, that I refuse to accept that the drunken lout Liverpool fans who clearly have a responsibility of this incident which was horrendous cannot be absolved. Which in my view some are saying.

dunno why you seem to think you have any more right to post on a thread than I have?? what is that all about?? This is a forum - if you want a private conversation with someone - then that's what the PM facility is for.. otherwise - I'm afraid it's open for us all to join in - that's kind-of what a forum is about!!

which drunken lout Liverpool fans are you thinking of?

obviously the ones that your not

ahh - you mean some made up ones who were not there... I see!

[Hoboh]

Now this is the point that someone else has made about you sticking your snecker in.

My point is, that I refuse to accept that the drunken lout Liverpool fans who clearly have a responsibility of this incident which was horrendous cannot be absolved. Which in my view some are saying.

dunno why you seem to think you have any more right to post on a thread than I have?? what is that all about?? This is a forum - if you want a private conversation with someone - then that's what the PM facility is for.. otherwise - I'm afraid it's open for us all to join in - that's kind-of what a forum is about!!

which drunken lout Liverpool fans are you thinking of?

obviously the ones that your not

ahh - you mean some made up ones who were not there... I see!

There were proberbly a few there but to blame all Liverpool fans and tar them with the same brush was appalling, having said that, no one has any evidence that anyone drunk was responsable for what happened.

[Dujon]

I've just downloaded the "Panel's" report and shall read it at leisure over the next few days. So far I have read only the introduction. Should that preface be a guide as to what is to come then it will make sad but interesting reading.

Having worked in a communication centre during emergencies I can assure you that it can be incredibly confusing. Stitching together disparate reports from those in the field can be an exercise in some sort of mental disassociation. I used to worry about that aspect of the job - but it has to be that way, 'calm, cool and collected' regardless as to the situation. It is also necessary to trust the information given by the various leaders of those on the ground. There is no other choice.

However, there is no excuse if, after the event, personnel (of whatever level in the organisation) lie about what actually occurred. That is the crime, not the errors.

[Hoboh]

I've just downloaded the "Panel's" report and shall read it at leisure over the next few days. So far I have read only the introduction. Should that preface be a guide as to what is to come then it will make sad but interesting reading.

Having worked in a communication centre during emergencies I can assure you that it can be incredibly confusing. Stitching together disparate reports from those in the field can be an exercise in some sort of mental disassociation. I used to worry about that aspect of the job - but it has to be that way, 'calm, cool and collected' regardless as to the situation. It is also necessary to trust the information given by the various leaders of those on the ground. There is no other choice.

However, there is no excuse if, after the event, personnel (of whatever level in the organisation) lie about what actually occurred. That is the crime, not the errors.

Agreed
Are you having your cornflakes over there?

[Dujon]

Gerroff, Hoboh, I'm oiling my AK

[Hoboh]

Gerroff, Hoboh, I'm oiling my AK

Ah, it's sunny then

[Dujon]

Indeed it is. The world looks bright and beautiful, the parrots are having a bit of a chat, the temperature 14.6ºC, the humidity is 44% and the pressure 1018.9 hPa.

[Dujon]

Darn it, just ran out of oil. Back down to the Singer shop it is.

[Hoboh]

Darn it, just ran out of oil. Back down to the Singer shop it is.

Aye, they keep warning us of the dangers of the sun, bloody sadists!

[CAPSLOCK]

Now Norman Bettison is telling lies...

[Lost Leopard Spot]

Now this is the point that someone else has made about you sticking your snecker in.

My point is, that I refuse to accept that the drunken lout Liverpool fans who clearly have a responsibility of this incident which was horrendous cannot be absolved. Which in my view some are saying.

dunno why you seem to think you have any more right to post on a thread than I have?? what is that all about?? This is a forum - if you want a private conversation with someone - then that's what the PM facility is for.. otherwise - I'm afraid it's open for us all to join in - that's kind-of what a forum is about!!

which drunken lout Liverpool fans are you thinking of?

obviously the ones that your not

Can I join in?

Now, Mr. Jaffka I don't know you from Bogdan, but it would appear to me that your dialectical critique requires a certain amount of honing.