Camden Books: Hillsborough: The Truth | Phil Scraton | Mainstream Publishing | Liverpool

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Published: 16 April 2009

20 years on, ‘truth’ remains the goal

HILLSBOROUGH: THE TRUTH (20th anniversary edition)
by Phil Scraton.
Mainstream Publishing £9.99

HAVE today’s Sky-savvy young football fans even heard of Sheffield Wednesday?
The club and its forever haunted Hillsborough stadium have been cast aside for large parts of the glittering Premier League epoch.
Twenty years ago, just a few weeks before Michael Thomas clinched the Division One title for Arsenal at Anfield, Hillsborough gained the suffix “tragedy” when 96 Liverpool supporters were crushed to death at an FA Cup semi-final match.
The romantic anarchy of football terraces was given a terminal jolt.
The thousands massed as a single entity, the evocative names of the places where fans stood: the North Bank, the Kippax and the Kop. The sub-cultures with their own songs, fashions, and literature.
Terraces also comprised brutal architecture: cage-like pens, with concrete steps and steel posts. Anyone who ever stood on a packed terrace would know the uneasy sensation of losing
independent movement under the pressure of other bodies.
Today’s all-seater stadiums symbolise a Thatcherite legacy of individualism as supporters sit as single units on expensive seats. Our only prime minister of the 1980s also helped perpetuate the image of football fans as “hooligans”.
It was that culture of suspicious hostility towards collectivism that helped condemn the 96. As bodies were contorted against metal fences, police believed they were dealing with “hooligan” violence.
In the subsequent investigations, fans were accused of drunkenly forcing their way into the ground by senior officers in charge, and were further attacked by the Sun under the headline “The Truth”.
During the inquests the blood-alcohol levels of victims were read out in court – “a league table of shame”.
For the city of Liverpool, it was a perverse postscript to a decade of mass unemployment in which football had been blissful escapism.
Professor of criminology Phil Scraton’s Hillsborough: The Truth claims to have uncovered “institutionalised injustices” and systemic bias that has left the families of the Hillsborough victims mourning in an information vacuum over what really took place. It examines how “myths” have become the popular perception of what happened.
Bereaved families continue to campaign for “Justice for the 96”, claiming negligence on the part of police in their crowd management.
As one victim’s mother says: “All we wanted was the truth and for someone to say, ‘we made a terrible mistake. Ninety-six died and we are sorry’.”
ALLAN LEDWARD

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