The Culture of Shame

The publication yesterday of the report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel revealed the full shocking cover up and manipulation of evidence perpetrated by the South Yorkshire Police.

Their motivation was a simple one, though breath taking in its' mendacity. It was an attempt to shift blame for the appalling disaster from their own failings to the Liverpool fans themselves.

The media were briefed by senior police officers and a local MP that the Liverpool fans, boozed up, had forced open a gate thus causing the fatal crushing. They further claimed that the bodies of the dead were pick pocketed and that the dead and dying, and those attending to them, were urinated on.

Aided and abetted by a complicit right wing media these myths and lies very quickly became the accepted truth in the eyes of public perception. If you tell a lie often enough then almost by default it becomes a perverse version of the 'truth'.

That so many people bought into and accepted this lie without question is indicative of the society that we lived in during the 1980s.

The Prime Minister of the time, Margaret Thatcher, famously declared that "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families".

The 1980s was certainly the decade where any notion of collective responsibility was superseded by a "me first, what do I get" attitude.

It was a divisive, bitter decade that viewed the population of huge swathes of Britain as a dangerous underclass.

It was a decade of riots in the streets of Liverpool, London and Bristol.

It was a decade of a bitter industrial dispute that spilled into violence.

It was a decade where being part of large, predominately working class and male, group was synonymous with a perceived criminality.

It was the culture of the decade that sowed the seeds of the Hillsborough Disaster.

If you were attending a football match in the 1980s you were at the very least seen as some kind of threat to public order. That meant being herded into, and then penned within, crumbling football grounds.

When those crumbling football grounds were then found to be also dangerous and quite literally death traps then the logic of the time decreed that it was the fans that were responsible.

Well, they were going to a football match they must have been up to no good. Some might even had a drink beforehand; that just confirms that they had to be to blame.

When you adopt that position, and you have the weight of public opinion behind you, it’s no great leap to then alter statements to not so much blur the lines between fact and fiction but distort them totally.  

That the disaster was allowed to happen in the first place was shameful enough – an institutional failure. The subsequent attempt to deflect blame, hell let’s call it for what it was; a cover up was something that Britain should forever be ashamed of.

While the publication of yesterday’s report was a welcome vindication the apologies from senior politicians and police officers are hollow and largely meaningless. The only small step that can be made to make amends is by making sure that those that really were responsible are brought to justice.