You'll Never Walk Alone

The Hillsborough Disaster happened in 1989. I was still a child and I remember the television footage at the time. Not quite as stark a Lockerbie but you know it had literally been a year of disasters much like now, that we live in perpetual war, one shock and awe moment and then onto another.

96 people died that day at a football match and it has taken 27 years for the families of those victims to find out the truth. 27 years that is as long as Nelson Mandela was in prison.  96 people were unlawfully killed by a negligent police force and ambulance service. Their negligence was wilfully covered up by the establishment, that took Liverpool supporters to be nothing more than yobs.

The cover up of the Hillsborough Disaster over 27 years had not gained much more than a hushed whispering to those who knew anything about it. Only years later and I mean over a decade; as a young adult was I stunned to learn that nobody bought The Sun in Liverpool, on account of The Hillsborough Disaster. I never enquired as to why?  And then found out much much later it was because The Sun had blamed it on the fans. That seemed bizarre to me. Hillsborough had been caused by a crush because fans obtained unauthorised entry into the stadium. I tried to fathom that out in my head and decided rather than research further, to simply declare that I really didn’t know much about it. Though it did seem rather unusual that a whole city of people would boycott a national newspaper? Only now in 2016 do I understand the immensity of what the Hillsborough victims have been fighting for and why.

The Hillsborough Disaster may well be the best example of governmental gaslighting and victim blaming on record. That did it’s best to convince a nation that nobody was to blame except for an uncontrollable mob of drunken fans. Instead we find out that there was a cover up on an industrial scale, that included the South Yorkshire Police Service, The Ambulance Service, The Masons and low and behold the Prime Minister of the time Margaret Thatcher.  No wonder the friends and families of the victims thought they were going mad. It is the stuff of conspiracy theory fairytale. Yet now we know it was and is very much true.

Not only were people unlawfully killed that day, over 27 years ago, whole lives were stolen. What should have been a tragic intercision has become a driving narrative for hundreds of people. Worse than that it has come do define many of the younger survivors who were never allowed to believe their own story, never allowed to grieve their own experiences. Lives have been needlessly ruined in order to uphold a lie.

What courageous people the survivors and the victim’s families are that they never lost sight of their own truth, never stopped believing in one another and never failed in their strength of love for those long departed.