Bigots keeping Thatcher’s flame alive
The Hillsborough Independent Panel's report confirmed that the fatal crush was more than just a disaster. The outline of the story becomes sharper in its historical context. In the early- to mid-1980s the Thatcher government forced through a series of brutal economic reforms that were fiercely resisted by unionised workers. In what at times amounted to a civil war, the police were the government's front-line troops. A few years later, when the police scrambled to escape the blame for the Hillsborough disaster, the government looked the other way.
In his speech to the Commons on Wednesday, David Cameron insisted the Thatcher government was not complicit in the cover-up and had wanted some leading police officers to resign. Yet even Cameron admitted they could have done more to force the police to admit the truth. The quid pro quo does not need to have been explicit for people to draw their own conclusions as to what really went down in South Yorkshire.
In the Premier League, it was one of those weekends when there seemed to be more happening off the field than on. At Loftus Road, the handshakes were more absorbing than the game. At Old Trafford, Manchester United fans who had been asked by Sir Alex Ferguson not to sing about Hillsborough could be heard chanting "always the victim, it's never your fault".
The Manchester United Supporters' Trust swiftly issued a release saying "we ... condemn any chants relating to Hillsborough or indeed any other human tragedy. We did hear the usual anti-Liverpool chants at the match today but we're pleased to say, despite some reports to the contrary, there was nothing that was specifically referencing Hillsborough."
Certainly "always the victim, it's never your fault" is not as unambiguous as "you killed your own fans", which has also been sung by opposing fans at Liverpool matches. You could even make a tenuous argument that the chant is merely meant to satirise the absurd, finger-pointing frenzy with which Liverpool defended Luis Suarez. But it's clear that "always the victim" implies a pattern of behaviour, and if so, the chant is referring to something more than just Suarez.
In truth, it's a pithier version of Boris Johnson's famous Spectator article from 2004, which explained that "a combination of economic misfortune... and an excessive predilection for welfarism has created a deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians. They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status ... they cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it, thereby deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance about the rest of society."
The clinching example in Johnson's argument was Liverpool's failure to acknowledge, "even to this day", that drunk fans mindlessly fighting to get into the ground had contributed to the crush at Hillsborough. Always the victims, never their fault.
Shortly after that article was published Johnson visited Liverpool to apologise; he repeated those apologies last week. The United fans are at Anfield next Sunday; no apologies are expected.
Later on Saturday, at the Stadium of Light, Liverpool fans belted out a chorus of "we'll all be having a party when Maggie Thatcher dies." Looking at the faces on the YouTube clip it was plain that many of those singing were not old enough to remember a time when Thatcher was in power.
George Orwell disliked football nearly as much as Thatcher did, famously (and misguidedly) writing that "sport is an unfailing source of ill-will... war minus the shooting" Watching these young Liverpool fans gloat over Thatcher's imminent death, you were reminded of another Orwell essay, written just after the end of the war in Europe, called "Revenge Is Sour".
Orwell watched a young Jewish officer torment a captured SS general who, though guilty of terrible crimes, cut such a degraded figure as to be merely pathetic: "He did not look brutal or in any way frightening: merely neurotic and, in a low way, intellectual... the Nazi torturer of one's imagination, the monstrous figure against whom one had struggled for so many years, dwindled to this pitiful wretch, whose obvious need was not for punishment, but for some kind of psychological treatment."
The scene brought home to Orwell that "...the whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also. Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing SS officers kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and disgusting. It is said that when Mussolini's corpse was exhibited in public, an old woman drew a revolver and fired five shots into it, exclaiming, 'Those are for my five sons!' ... I wonder how much satisfaction she got out of those five shots, which, doubtless, she had dreamed years earlier of firing. The condition of her being able to get close enough to Mussolini to shoot at him was that he should be a corpse."
Margaret Thatcher is 86 years old and has for some years suffered from Alzheimer's disease. The Iron Lady who broke the unions and claimed there was no such thing as society is already gone. All that is left is a frail old woman who remembers as little about the 1980s as the Liverpool fans who weren't yet born when she lived at Downing Street.
Yet maybe Thatcherism left a permanent imprint on the society its architect claimed did not exist. In 1977, Manchester United beat Liverpool in the FA Cup final, thwarting their hopes of completing the treble their own club went on to claim in 1999. Were such a thing to happen today it would be the occasion for an orgy of gloating that would be audible from space. Instead, the United fans chanted "Liverpool, Liverpool" as the defeated side passed on their lap of honour, wishing them well for the European Cup final in Rome.
Now, in place of that solidarity, the fans bait each other with chants that mock the deaths at Munich and Hillsborough, some of the worst disasters to have taken place in English football history. People who have almost everything else in common stand on opposite sides of the ground hurling abuse about tragedies many of them cannot even remember. Most of them probably couldn't explain why they are doing it, but the hatred is real.
If Thatcherism was always on some level about dividing the working class so the rich could get richer in peace, the fans who sing these songs are the guardians of Thatcher's flame.
