A FEW DEAD SCOUSERS


You were supposed to know who was telling the truth from the outset. It was a question of accent and tone. What were you going to believe, the precise language and well-rounded vowels of the official spokesmen, the coroner, the civil servants, the police or the ‘over emotional’ scouse accents of the Liverpool supporters. Their accents were supposed to tell you everything you needed to know; it was, as they say, supposed to be a ‘no brainer.’

The Hillsborough manslaughter has told us everything we needed to know about class in Britain and the contempt with which the established order views the lives of ordinary working people; the added dimension here being that the dead hailed from the city of Liverpool, and were that especially lowly tribal caste, football fans. It was, from an establishment viewpoint, unfortunate of course, but at the end of the day, we were talking about a few dead Scouse football fans who had  brought their fate upon themselves.[1]
It is perhaps viciously ironic that one of the offences of which Liverpool football fans were accused was of urinating on the dead, the very offence that South Yorkshire police and their conduit, the Conservative MP Irvine Patnick, who, oh so appropriately ‘leaked’ to Kelvin McKenzie. A man more than willing to facilitate this outpouring of sewage over the people of Liverpool.
I am not sure there is a word in the dictionary to describe the sheer malice and indeed, hatred visited upon the people of Liverpool during the Thatcher years, racism is the closest, though for obvious reasons will not do. In the face of the aspirational individualistic consumerism pumped out by the Thatcher ideology the people of Liverpool remained determinedly working class and collective in outlook, and thus barbed wire in Thatcher’s side. The vilification, ridiculing and dismissal of the people of the city as whining, self-pitying and stupid is well recorded and I will not run through the record here. However it is still worth quoting Boris Johnson, who elucidated the establishment position when he stated that the people of Liverpool ‘wallowed in their victim status,’[2] going on to say that the people of the city:-

 ‘"…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 about the rest of society".

It is the phrase ‘tribal grievance about the rest of society,’ that gives the game away, there are scousers and then there is the rest of society.

ONLY OBEYING ORDERS

 What can one say about that gutless liar Duckenfield? Not only does he funk in a crisis, largely of his own making, but having funked he then seeks to blame and vilify the victims of his own grotesque incompetence, setting in motion the black propaganda campaign so eagerly embraced by the Sun Newspaper.
What though of those lesser individuals, primarily in the police, but also in the other emergency services, who played their part in this campaign? Presumably had anyone come forward, and not one did, not a single soul, and held his or her hands up and owned up to their part in this campaign, - an example of cowardice and sheer moral bankruptcy that has few parallels in recent British history, - they could only rely on the discredited Nuremberg defence. I was only obeying orders.
This thought crossed my mind when I thought of the officer searching the Police National Computer, [PNC], for evidence to impugn the dead, or the medical professional taking blood samples from a dead ten-year-old boy to test his alcohol level; how odious.

The only shining light in the whole sorry Hillsborough saga has been the sheer courage and dogged determination of the Hillsborough families, who in the end proved to be made of sterner stuff than the whole weight of the establishment they confronted. If a city can be said to have a ‘spirit,’ and I am wary of such notions, surely it is the Hillsborough family support group that represents the real spirit of Liverpool. However this feels too limiting and I would go further and say that it is they who represent the true spirit of working people who know what it is to put up a fight.   


[1] The dead fans died in ‘pens’. The only consideration by the police was how to corral and control individuals seen as so much human cattle, cattle with a propensity for public disorder.
[2] It takes a peculiar imagination to envisage the degree of pleasure involved by ‘wallowing’ in the crushing to death of your two teenage daughters who had gone to watch a football match.


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