The Hillsborough verdict shatters the fantasy that class war doesn’t exist

[rug]

The ‘unlawful killing’ of the 96 football fans was a crime, committed in a very real conflict. The police, the establishment, parts of the press, they were all in it together

Wednesday 27 April 2016 14.43 EDT
Suzanne Moore

Finally, 27 long years later, the cold class 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-class 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 part of a mob who somehow deserved this awful fate. As life was squeezed out of them, 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 class act. In the face of despair, there has been dignity. Yet we have to ask why it has taken so long for the truth to be acknowledged. It is surely to do with the way we do not like to talk about out-and-out class conflict. Instead, we are told that class 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, with bars in many of the stations .

But no one who remembers that time thought that the police were on “our” side to begin with. In the 80s, sides were demarcated explicitly. If the miners’ strike was our last civil war, then the police were clearly lined up against us. They did Thatcher’s dirty work, waving their overtime payslips in the face of striking miners. That symbolic violence was accompanied by real violence. Andy Burnham is absolutely right to ask about the links between Orgreave and Hillsborough. The South Yorkshire police, Burnham said “used the same underhand tactics against its own people in the aftermath of the miners’ strike that it would later use, to more deadly effect, against the people of Liverpool”.

In all this it must be said there were individual police officers who behaved decently, but the complicity between the police and parts of the conservative establishment remain horrifying. The confidence of Kelvin MacKenzie, Boris Johnson and Bernard Ingham (who spoke of “tanked-up yobs”) still persists. Their apologies are a joke, still exhibiting the same contempt. Are we to accept MacKenzie was merely duped?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/27/the-hillsborough-verdict-shatters-the-fantasty-that-class-war-doesnt-exist