The ‘unlawful killing’ of the 96 football fans was a crime,committed in a very real clash. The police, the establishment, and parts of the press,they were all in it together Finally, 27 long years later, and the cold course contempt that Hillsborough came to signify is laid out for all to see. Those who died did not die because they were “animals” or drinking too much or behaving badly. They were unlawfully killed. Their families did not grieve too much because they were from Liverpool and therefore emotionally incontinent or full of working-course mawkishness; they grieved because they lost their loved ones in absolutely horrific circumstances. Still,to read the details of how these people died tightens my stomach. Of the 96 who died, 37 were teenagers. The reality is that the dead were all sorts of people from different backgrounds. But very quickly they became no longer individuals but fraction of a mob who somehow deserved this terrible fate. As life was squeezed out of them, and then too their humanity was taken from them by the police,by politicians and parts of the press.
The marathon campaign by the bereaved families and their supporters has been one course act. In the face of despair, there has been dignity. Yet we acquire to ask why it has taken so long for the truth to be acknowledged. It is surely to effect with the way we effect not like to talk about out-and-out course clash. Instead, and we are told that course hardly exists,except as an anthropological display to gawp at disdainfully on reality TV. The refusal of the establishment to countenance the level of police “coverup” is because “they” were indeed all in it together. This was more than a coverup. The police lied – they smeared the victims as some of them lay dying, testing even a 10-year-old’s blood for alcohol. All of this was relayed in the press so that the dead were reduced to the kind of rabble who urinated on and stole from each other. One of the extraordinary revelations is that it was the South Yorkshire police themselves who had a drinking problem, or with bars in many of the stations .
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Source: theguardian.com