English postal workers boycott Murdoch’s Sun because of Hillsborough football lies

This video from Britain says about itself:

Thatcher government dehumanised working class in Hillsborough disaster cover-up

16 October 2012

See here for a detailed article in Frontline journal posted on October 16th 2012 a week after the public meeting recorded in this video. The truth about the Hillsborough disaster of 1989 in which 96 football fans were crushed to death was first written about in the Militant newspaper back when the disaster first happened. But the mainstream newspapers and other media who were hand-in-glove with the police and the government did their best to not only cover up for those responsible for the deaths of the football fans, but waged a vicious slander campaign blaming the Liverpool fans including the dead who were the victims of profit-driven overcrowding.

The police, the mainstream media and the Tory government under Margaret Thatcher were complicit in the cover-up over the causes of the deaths 23 years ago on 15th April 1989 of the 96 football fans in the Hillsborough stadium in England. The deaths were due to bad policing, lack of proper stewarding and safety arrangements due to a policy of cramming in as many fans as possible in one small area to bring in as much profit as possible at the expense of the safety of the fans. The deaths were entirely preventable.

There was a near-disaster involving a crush with fortunately no deaths the previous year involving the same fixtures which should have been a warning signal to the police and football club stadium management about the dangerous levels of overcrowding which were quite obvious to anyone who was a football fan who could feel themselves swept off their feet anytime the crowd surged forward at peak moments of interest like goal scoring.

Working class fans were herded in with no concern for comfort or safety to milk them for as much profit as possible, much as cattle is often treated. The attitudes of the police, the government, the media and the profiteering classes towards the working class dehumanised them. They thought of them as animals and some even publicly referred to them as animals. This attitude was very much the case during the 1984-85 miners strike 4 years earlier “with Thatcher’s use of South Yorkshire and other police forces as a well-fed, well-paid, beefed-up government militia that treated working class people as scum, rampaging like uniformed thugs in the pit villages.”

Liverpudlians were also hated by Maggie Thatcher‘s Tory government because working class people there had made significant political gains with 50 to 60 thousand strong demonstrations and general strikes and militant action leading to £60 million in government funding for jobs, housing and services. Thatcher travelled to meet S. Yorkshire police chiefs the day after the disaster. A propaganda campaign smearing the victims of the disaster followed which was taken up by the mainstream press, particularly the Sun which Liverpudlians still boycott to this day.

Fans were taken for granted by the owners of the stadium. Less tickets were available for them than the other teams. Less turnstiles were open at the Liverpool end despite the fact that there were more Liverpool fans than the other team. Instead of opening up more turnstiles and letting fans go into the side terraces the fans were habitually crammed into one end of the stadium. When the kick-off time neared on the day of the 15th April 1989 there were still many Liverpool fans coming in and there was obvious overcrowding but stewards and police did not open up the side terraces nor did they delay the kick off but to hurry things up the police opened a gate which led fans down a steep tunnel and back up to the extremely overcrowded middle terraces. Once the crush started police failed to take adequate emergency measures to save lives. Fans trying to tear down fencing to escape the crush (a sensible measure in an emergency) were prevented from doing so by police who had this prejudiced mentality that the fans were vandalous thugs trying to let people in when in fact they were trying to get out. (In other football stadiums police have done the sensible thing and actually torn down fencing to prevent a crush. Not so at Hillsborough where S Yorkshire police were poisoned by their training into thinking that fans were thugs or animals to be controlled rather than people to be protected from danger.)

When fans ran onto the pitch to escape the crush in the terraces they were batoned by police. Police caused the delaying of emergency medical treatment of fans when they tried to deter ambulances from going onto the pitches by telling ambulance staff that the fans were rioting at a moment when immediate treatment was vital. 41 people died due to being denied medical treatment in time. This does not even include the figures of people whose lives were shortened by their injuries or trauma and those with permanent physical or mental damage.

Successive inquiries themselves amounted to cover-ups with important evidence ruled inadmissable. Jack Straw of the New Labour Blair government also buried the inquiry.

From daily The Independent in Britain:

Postal workers ‘will strike’ if told to deliver free Sun copies as Hillsborough anger continues

The paper still provokes anger in Skelmersdale over its coverage of the tragedy

Postal workers in Lancashire are threatening to strike if they are told to deliver free copies of the Sun next week in protest against its coverage of the Hillsborough tragedy.

Union members at the Royal Mail depot in Skelmersdale, near Liverpool, have vowed to walk out if “any copies of the Sun cross the gates”.

In a statement given to the Liverpool Class Action website, they called the  newspaper “s***e”.

The newspaper is delivering 22 million free World Cup editions around the country on Thursday and Friday.

The Sun is still reviled in parts of Merseyside and among Liverpool fans for its coverage of the Hillsborough disaster.

Skelmersdale has a strong association with Liverpool and workers advocating the postal strike are understood to support the long-running “Don’t Buy the Sun” campaign.

The Sun sparked outrage after the April 1989 tragedy where 96 people will killed and hundreds more injured.

Under a banner headline which read “The Truth”, the paper claimed the fatal crush at Sheffield Wednesday’s ground was caused by drunken Liverpool fans.

The story claimed that some stole from the pockets of the dead and urinated on police officers trying to rescue them.

Inquiries have since concluded that Liverpool fans were not responsible for the disaster and police had released misleading statements in the wake of the tragedy.

Sally Hopkins, a spokesperson for Royal Mail, said the Sun had already chosen not to include Liverpool in the mailing.

She added: “Any individual concerns will be handled sensitively with fairness, dignity and fully respecting the views of individuals.

“Local CWU representatives and delivery office managers will work together to agree sensible and amicable solutions.”

A spokesman for the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) said an official strike had not been called and the action was being taken by a group of staff.

“It’s not a strike at the moment but a divisional officer is meeting with Royal Mail to discuss it,” she added.

“Some staff members were at the Hillsborough disaster and had family there and they feel very strongly about it.”

READ MORE: HILLSBOROUGH ANNIVERSARY MARKED
POLICE ‘DOCTORED EVIDENCE TO AVOID BLAME’
FORMER SUN EDITOR OFFERS HILLSBOROUGH APOLOGY

Ed Miliband apologises for endorsing the Sun‘s World Cup issue. Labour party says leader ‘understands the anger that the people of Merseyside feel’ after criticism from councillors and MPs: here.

Labour leader Ed Miliband was forced to apologise yesterday after posing with a copy of the Sun newspaper in the year of the 25th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster: here.

Ed Miliband’s apology to “those who feel offended” by his decision to pose with Rupert Murdoch’s poisonous rag The Sun cannot disguise the stupidity of the stunt: here.

The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty. When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots. In this fin-de-siècle world, professional soccer condemns all that is useless, and useless means not profitable. Nobody earns a thing from that crazy feeling that for a moment turns a man into a child playing with a balloon, like a cat with a ball of yarn; a ballet dancer who romps with a ball as light as a balloon or a ball of yarn, playing without even knowing he’s playing, with no purpose or clock or referee: here.

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