British Hillsborough football fans’ deaths, Thatcher, Murdoch guilty

This video from Britain says about itself:

‘We told you The Sun lied‘: Hillsborough 96 families

27 April 2016

As the Murdoch press’ front pages today ignore the Hillsborough verdict,

including the Times, supposedly the ‘quality’ paper of the Murdoch empire

the families of the 96 said yesterday ‘we told you they lied’, ‘they’ being The Sun, the government and the police. The families believe the lies deprived the memory of their loved ones, who were portrayed as scum, of justice. That justice came yesterday after 27 years of campaigning and a two-year inquest with more than 800 witnesses that was the longest jury hearing in British legal history. The Sun apologised for their 1989 infamous editorial ‘The Truth’ in 2012. As did BoJo [London Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson] in the same year for his 2004 editorial in the Spectator. The piece shows how ingrained the image of Liverpool fans as ‘tanked-up yobs’, coined by Sir Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher‘s former press secretary, was in the establishment:

“Liverpool is a handsome city with a tribal sense of community. A combination of economic misfortune – its docks were, fundamentally, on the wrong side of England when Britain entered what is now the European Union – and an excessive predilection for welfarism have created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians. They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it.

Part of this flawed psychological state is that they cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it, thereby deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance against the rest of society. The deaths of more than 50 Liverpool football supporters at Hillsborough in 1989 was undeniably a greater tragedy than the single death, however horrible, of Mr Bigley; but that is no excuse for Liverpool’s failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon. The police became a convenient scapegoat, and the Sun newspaper a whipping-boy for daring, albeit in a tasteless fashion, to hint at the wider causes of the incident.”

That prevailing image of the victims could explain why it took so long to identify the real culprits, as Peter Fahy, former Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police says “The Taylor Report way back in 1989, identified a lot of the failings, which have been confirmed in the hearing today.” Margaret Aspinall who lost her son James in the disaster focused on how much the truth was suppressed all these years and that ‘a lot of things that came out in the past few weeks I didn’t know myself.’

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Justice at last

CROWN Prosecution Service lawyers have the responsibility now to take appropriate action after the Hillsborough disaster inquest jury decisions.

While the families of the 96 dead Liverpool FC fans see the culmination of their determined campaign as “justice at last,” the Establishment’s stringing out of this process for 27 years amounts to justice delayed and frustrated.

Some campaigners have not lived to see this day. Senior police have put families through hell by using delaying tactics to deny an undeniable truth.

When senior police officers fail to carry out their duties, with fatal consequences, there must be a legal reckoning.

But the Hillsborough families were the victims of a conspiracy in which police, the Murdoch media and politicians fed each other lies to be repeated as widely as possible to give the false impression that the fans’ behaviour contributed to the tragedy.

Football fans were viewed by Margaret Thatcher’s government as savages to be penned in behind steel fences, preventing their evacuation during overcrowding.

They were traduced in Murdoch’s Scum [Sun] as being drunken yobbos, forcing their way onto the terraces, robbing the dead and urinating on police, thus contributing to a general image of savagery.

Scum editor Kelvin MacKenzie claimed that these allegations emanated from the police.

Perhaps the CPS should give thought to conspiracy charges being laid against those it believes may have engaged in joint enterprise to besmirch the names of 96 dead LFC supporters and their fellow fans.

A full 27 years after the event, the inquest into the Hillsborough disaster concluded that 96 Liverpool Football Club supporters, crushed to death on April 15, 1989, were unlawfully killed. The verdict in the longest jury case in British legal history vindicates the extraordinary campaign by the families, friends and supporters of those killed, injured and traumatized: here.

Hillsborough inquest: legal system a key part of establishment that failed families for years. The inquest delivered the basic justice people had waited 27 years for – but a detached judge and police repetition of old, putrid claims prolonged the nightmare: here.

Related articles

• Royal Liverpool Philharmonic choir performs spine-tingling rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone in tribute to the 96
• Liverpool FC Tweet about Hillsborough verdicts
• Hillsborough disaster families vindicated
• Hillsborough inquest: the jury’s main findings
• The Times admits ‘mistake’ in leaving Hillsborough story off front page
• Bettison’s ‘drunk fans concoction’
• Hillsborough cop sorry for ‘misleading the court’
• Everton to reveal Hillsborough plaque
• Hillsborough victims showed signs of life, inquests hear
• Police pushed fans back into deadly crush during Hillsborough disaster, inquest hears