Twenty six years ago, Nottingham
Forest played Liverpool
in an FA cup semi-final at Hillsborough. 51,627 people watched John Aldridge
score twice to claim a 2-1 victory for Liverpool
and everybody who attended the game got home alive. The following year, 96
people did not.
The disaster, as anyone who has looked into it will tell
you, was not an accident. The management of the ground on the day was corporate
negligence on behalf of the bodies responsible, particularly the police, whose
decision to open an exit gate and not man or shut a tunnel are considered the
primary causes for the deaths of fans. What angers most is that nobody has been
punished for this action and indeed the subsequent cover up and doctoring of
police reports and withheld documents to the original Taylor report. There are number of excellent
sources which describe the events of that day and the scandalous cover up.
What is important to remember about the 15th
April 1989 is that it could have been anyone, any team. It could have happened
to the Forest fans, it could have been
Manchester United or Leeds United, in short any team whose working class fans
had what is euphemistically referred to as “a reputation”. This would seem to
have affected the way the fans were perceived by the police.
Why did football fans have this reputation? The context of
the previous decade was one of a reassertion of class power, a class of people
in London who
were not the sort of people who went to football, privatization and attacks on industry
act as evidence of a class war against the sort of people that did. The police
were co-opted by the Thatcher government to be the soldiers of this battle, and
had spent a decade fighting working people across the north, Liverpool
being a flash point amongst others. When people climbed over the fences, the
police decided this must be some sort of hooliganism, formed a line, held back
ambulances and rejected their role as public servants by standing and staring
as bloody bodies appeared. These beliefs come from the history I have
described, and perhaps inform the lack of care given to the planning of the entry
into the ground, leaving the tunnel to the central pens unmanned unlike the
year before.
Hillsborough should not be looked at in isolation. The
police, F.A. and organising authorities did not just wake up 25 years ago and
let 96 people die. Their negligence must be taken in historical context to
understand it, and further to understand why it is they have evaded justice and
the media reaction, because this was part of the attack and disregard towards
the way working class people lived, in favour of the new service economy. Working
people were no longer citizens, they were the troublesome other as far as the
new elite was concerned, and this process continues to this day.
There is hope. The scenes at Anfield today and at grounds
across the weekend show that communities still continue despite individualism,
that football can still express the concerns and passions of working class
people despite its corporate, sanitised environment. Hopefully, we will see
justice for the 96, and with it start to put the sorry neoliberal experiment to
death. We would do well to remember that ‘economic restructuring’ has far
reaching effects, ones as important as life and death, on workers globally.
Economics should never become more important than that.
You’ll Never Walk Alone.
These sites give good accounts of what happened.
