We've got the truth, now for the justice

The thing about the phone hacking scandal is that we really ought not to have been surprised.  Hearing that the upper echelons of politics, the police and the press were hand-in-glove, and not in a good way, should have elicited from us little more than a weary sigh.

Some of us did not need to be told that Hillsborough was a monumental cock-up by the South Yorkshire constabulary; compounded by a vicious, cynical cover-up by way of a dirty tricks campaign against the victims.  Yesterday’s report into the tragedy was confirmation, not revelation.

So we have the truth.  But truth without justice will mean the bereaved families of Merseyside will still not be at peace.

For their part, the Football Association were right to offer a full apology, albeit after a fashion.  The semi final simply should not have been played at Sheffield Wednesday FC.  The ground’s safety certificate had expired but the ground was chosen anyway.  There had been chaos at the 1981 semi final there between Spurs and Wolves yet the ground was chosen anyway.  This, you see, was ‘the good old days’; we didn’t bother with all this elf ‘n’ safety nonsense.  We had common sense.

There are others from whom a mere apology is not enough.  Falsifying evidence is a crime.  Bullying junior officers to make substantive alterations to witness statements is a crime.  Killing through negligence is a crime.  Perverting the course of justice is a crime.  Conspiring to provide a false defence against charges of manslaughter, even after the fact, is a crime.

If the establishment want us to believe that this is a new era, in which justice cannot be ducked by those in power, and the press cannot be used to cover your backside, then certain people need to be brought to book.  These people were powerful: they occupied top positions in the government and the police.

Some are dead and have escaped justice.  Many are now retired.  But retirement from work is not retirement from civilization.  People have committed manslaughter and others have conspired with them after the fact.  Thatcher’s government used the police as their private army, and nowhere more than South Yorkshire.  In the 1980s it was a very dangerous place to be a working class northerner, such as a miner or a football fan.

It doesn’t matter how old David Duckenfield is, or how ill he says he is.  Arrest him and try him.  It shouldn’t matter that Bernard Ingham – Margaret Thatcher’s then chief press secretary – is eighty years old, or that Margaret Thatcher is demented.  Arrest them and try them; wheel them into court on a hospital bed if necessary.  Their status must be no protection from justice, just as the lowly social status of Liverpudlians in 1989 should not have been a barrier to it.

Others must also pay the price.  Kelvin MacKenzie, who only yesterday accepted that he wrote malicious lies in the Sun, must no longer appear on the BBC.  No serious newspaper should allow him to divest himself of his odious views in their pages.

Boris Johnson, who perpetuated the lies in an editorial in the Spectator in 2004, has apologised and should now resign the London Mayoralty.  If he believed what he wrote he is an idiot; if he didn’t, he is beneath contempt.  Either way, he is not fit for public office.

‘Sir’ Norman Bettison, then a South Yorkshire chief inspector, who was heavily implicated in the police cover-up and subsequently made chief constable of Merseyside, of all places, must resign as chief constable of West Yorkshire.  That knighthood doesn’t look too clever, either.

There is one other group of people who ought to be examining their consciences.  Football hooligans.  Those sociopathic tribal drunkards who stole the terraces from peaceable football supporters in the seventies and eighties are responsible for conditioning the British public so that they believed the lies cooked up by the Tory government, the South Yorkshire police and the Sun.

Justice must sweep through the intransigence and the obscurantism like a wrecking ball.  Only then can the bereaved families of Hillsborough’s 96 victims begin to truly come to terms with their loss.