Families had the strength to carry on

You’d have to cut thin slices to have enough shame to go around on Wednesday afternoon.

People from the South Yorkshire Police, West Midlands Police, South Yorkshire Metropolitan Ambulance Service, the British government, the Football Association, Sheffield Wednesday Football Club and The Sun newspaper were required to hang their heads. Among many others.

I’ll take a slice too, while it’s going. At times, over the last 23 years, it was tempting to wonder why the people of Liverpool couldn’t let it go. Hadn’t their case been proven several times? You wondered too if some of the bereaved families might rather make their peace and attempt some kind of life after tragedy, rather than deal with the constant reminders.

But we know now why they couldn’t let it go. And probably never will. To pore through the staggering expanse of documents compiled by the Hillsborough Independent Panel is to be sickened by extraordinary abuse of power and an astonishing betrayal of a city’s people by its own establishment.

Stricken children being blood-tested for alcohol to fit the narrative of a cover-up. Imagine it.

The life was squeezed out of too many on that horrible day, but not the resilience from their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters.