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I read the news today, oh boy...
Thursday, September 13th, 2012 12:06 pmA lot of media time and space is rightly being given over to the report by the Hillsborough Independent Panel, led by the Bishop of Liverpool. It is a salutary lesson on the inequity in the balance of immediate power (short of complete revolution) when the agents of state are not properly audited and held to account.
It’s taken twenty-three years, but the accounting is now likely to begin – the cat is well and truly out of the bag.
Not having been at Hillsborough on that day, like most people, I picked up my awareness of the issues through the news media: initially the TV/radio and the newspapers and then in more recent years, through the internet, too. What interests me is the stubbornness of the cover up and the unwillingness of the authorities to believe that their agents might have been to blame. Moreover, the laziness and complicity of the news media is quite astonishing. These are the very institutions that hold themselves up as the guardians of the public good, the so-called fourth estate that polices the establishment, shining the antiseptic spotlight of disclosure into the dark, bacterial shadows of establishment secrecy. Except that they didn’t. They were one sleaze paper in particular, equally culpable. Not in the actual event, but certainly in the aftermath, where the truth was subjected to a comprehensive mugging and left discredited and discarded for two decades.
Those of us who attended football matches in the late 70s through to the late 80s know there was a significant problem with drunken hooligans. We also know that the simple act of wearing a football scarf was considered enough for a person to be considered somewhat subhuman by the police on duty and by anyone in authority. The hooligans were always the minority and most games passed off peacefully. But that didn’t stop anyone at a football match being treated worse than cattle. The police’s version of events never quite sounded right, but it had a horrible plausibility reinforced by constant media attention to the worse elements of the sport being extrapolated to the many.
Well, this story is going to run and run. The families of the victims now have the material they need to get the justice they have been denied for so long, but I do worry. I don’t like to think that I am paranoid and I am certainly not a conspiracy theorist. People are too lazy as a rule and organisations too inefficient for continual large-scale conspiracies to get off the ground, but I do worry.
I worry that where it has been shown that evidence has been tampered with, where attention has been deflected and blame apportioned in one case, where arses have been covered with a ham-fisted cover-up in one grand attempt to hide the truth, does this not suggest a skill that may have been deployed on more than one occasion both before and since? And if so, what still lies rotting in the shadows that we don’t know about because it was smaller in impact and of less interest to the public?
It’s taken twenty-three years, but the accounting is now likely to begin – the cat is well and truly out of the bag.
Not having been at Hillsborough on that day, like most people, I picked up my awareness of the issues through the news media: initially the TV/radio and the newspapers and then in more recent years, through the internet, too. What interests me is the stubbornness of the cover up and the unwillingness of the authorities to believe that their agents might have been to blame. Moreover, the laziness and complicity of the news media is quite astonishing. These are the very institutions that hold themselves up as the guardians of the public good, the so-called fourth estate that polices the establishment, shining the antiseptic spotlight of disclosure into the dark, bacterial shadows of establishment secrecy. Except that they didn’t. They were one sleaze paper in particular, equally culpable. Not in the actual event, but certainly in the aftermath, where the truth was subjected to a comprehensive mugging and left discredited and discarded for two decades.
Those of us who attended football matches in the late 70s through to the late 80s know there was a significant problem with drunken hooligans. We also know that the simple act of wearing a football scarf was considered enough for a person to be considered somewhat subhuman by the police on duty and by anyone in authority. The hooligans were always the minority and most games passed off peacefully. But that didn’t stop anyone at a football match being treated worse than cattle. The police’s version of events never quite sounded right, but it had a horrible plausibility reinforced by constant media attention to the worse elements of the sport being extrapolated to the many.
Well, this story is going to run and run. The families of the victims now have the material they need to get the justice they have been denied for so long, but I do worry. I don’t like to think that I am paranoid and I am certainly not a conspiracy theorist. People are too lazy as a rule and organisations too inefficient for continual large-scale conspiracies to get off the ground, but I do worry.
I worry that where it has been shown that evidence has been tampered with, where attention has been deflected and blame apportioned in one case, where arses have been covered with a ham-fisted cover-up in one grand attempt to hide the truth, does this not suggest a skill that may have been deployed on more than one occasion both before and since? And if so, what still lies rotting in the shadows that we don’t know about because it was smaller in impact and of less interest to the public?