We can’t betray the 96 again

When my father died, we cried.

We grieved; yet we also laughed and shared memories. Friends and his acquaintances came and told us what a good man he’d been.

After a while, life began to go on, if not as normal then at least something approaching normality.

But what if you changed ‘heart attack’ to ‘crushed inside a football ground’? What if at the very moment you were in bewildered agony, the nation (or so it seemed) began to tell you that he was a drunk; that he’d been killed by his own friends; that someone had pissed on the policeman trying to save his life; in short, that he had died like an animal because basically that’s all he was?

Then the rest of the country starts ordering you to accept these lies and stop snivelling, indeed tells you that you have a disproportionate propensity for self pity which isn’t very becoming and, well, why don’t you just shut the **** up basically?

Vigils? Marches? Petitions? Lawsuits? I’m astonished people didn’t buy rifles and go on the rampage.

So the nation now believes what we knew all along. That our ‘superiors’ ganged up on us and colluded in one of the great lies of the age, simply in order to save their face, their jobs, their pensions and preserve their precious authority.

The urge to tell every last one of the recently enlightened where to stick their indignation is almost overpowering.

This country never learns from its mistakes. People who were jailed for terrorist atrocities in the ’70s had to unleash their own wave of pressure and evidence of police corruption before those innocents were let go free. That took around 20 years too, then everybody shook their heads sadly and sighed and wondered how such terrible things could occur.

When another section of the populace protested their own innocence, the same blinkers clamped down once more.

The English do love to mock the Germans for their servility in the face of authority. A long, hard look in the mirror often seems beyond them. They are especially craven towards the boys in blue.

This isn’t the first report to call the police and the media on their shameful collusion, Lord Justice Taylor did it as far back as 1990. For that he was smeared and ridiculed, whilst the paper-thin tissue of lies from South Yorkshire Police’s black ops merely presented their web of deceit to a narrow, shamefully corrupted inquest. And they got away with it again.

The names will mean little to those who are only discovering these abominations now.

For the people of Liverpool who have lived and breathed this disgrace for 23 years it instinctively balled the hands into impotent fists; Middup, Patnick, Popper, Duckinfield, Murray, McKenzie, Ingham, Bettison. On and on the list of infamy runs.

That one of the main protagonists of the smear campaign was chosen to be our city’s chief of police years later merely added to the sense of establishment spite.

In the face of such an onslaught the dignity and resistance of the families has never been in doubt, indeed it remains a permanent source of wonder.

The supporters closed ranks too, not just those who were scarred physically and mentally by the worst day in all our lives but those of us who were ‘merely’ accused of killing our own.

Some writers and journalists stuck at it, not all of them local (take a bow, David Conn at The Guardian) and a new breed of Labour MP sought to redress the bored disinclination of their predecessors.

It was hard to suppress a murderous hatred on Wednesday; there was relief too that it was all finally out there at last, but one by one the names of the accusers and liars merely inflicted more pain and a greater urge to lash out.

But we won’t, because we’re not savages. That’s how civilisation ultimately triumphs; by being better than the scum of the earth which threatens it.

The bereaved of Hillsborough shine like the brightest beacon, leading so all others may follow.

If lessons aren’t learned, and we do not make our nation a better place as a result of this, we will betray the 96 a second time.

And that will not be forgiven.