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.
