Hillsborough debate

[magee84]

There was another boy on saying he got a last minute ticket for the seating area so sold his lepping lane ticket to a guy outside the ground

I'd find it hard to live with that

Yeah heard that one too.

I think apart from the fucknuggets and trolls the people on this thread, and moreso the ones my age and older realise that could have been any of us who attended football matches supporting our team. That disaster could have potentially happened at several grounds all over the UK including in Scotland.

Id stood in a packed fenced in terrace in the old jungle at CP and there were lots of areas like that all over the UK.

That it happened when and where and to whom is a tragedy of fate. RIP the 96

[The/Republic]

The guy who phoned up telling of how he got a last minute ticket for a mates kid who then perished was in bits.... you wonder how 23 years on people can cope with the horrors of it all.

Aye mate , that's the one . Reading through this thread , I think some people seem to have forgot the human tragedy involved.

That could have been any of us.

[craigkillie]

My parents met a couple from Liverpool on holiday, and kept in touch with them for a while. The guy was a massive Liverpool fan, and was at the game, but had ended up with a ticket in the seating area. Those were the days before mobile phones, so he couldn't contact his wife for a couple of hours to let her know he was OK. She was in bits watching it on the TV, as you can imagine, and I assume there were people like that all over the city. Must have been a horrible wait for everyone who had a relative or friend at the game.

[Guest Kincardine]

I know there's a movement to reintroduce limited amounts terracing of terracing on the safe standing 'German' type, I honestly don't see attraction, I'll take a seat if that's ok.

I actually do not think it's an issue of standing up or sitting down but about organisation, planning and control.

Both of those things were woeful in the 70s and 80s and the wonder is that Hillsborogh was rare.

Also the attitude of police, especially in England, to football fans was atrocious.

I like standing up at a game. Sure, control the crowds and spend money to ensure ease of ingress and egress. However, if people want to stand then make it possible.

[welshbairn]

This is the sort of w****r the anti Liverpool brigade are in agreement with. Laughable

"A combination of economic misfortune…and an excessive predilection for welfarism have created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians. They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it. Part of this flawed psychological state is that they 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 against the rest of society.…Liverpool's failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon. The police became a convenient scapegoat, and the Sun newspaper a whipping-boy for daring, albeit in a tasteless fashion, to hint at the wider causes of the incident..."

Boris Johnson

The Spectator

October 16th 2004

It wasn't actually Boris who wrote it, he was on holiday at the time I think, but he took responsibility as Editor. Think it was either Rod Liddle or Simon Heffer. The worst thing about the article was more or less calling Ken Bigley a woose for crying and pleading for his life on video after seeing his two mates get their heads cut off, and shortly before he joined them, while being held hostage in Iraq. The tosser who wrote the article thought he should have kept a stiff upper lip and behaved like a gentleman:

Mr Bigley might not have read the last entries in Captain Scott's journals, but they have a resonance for him: 'We took risks. We knew that we took them. Things have turned out against us. Therefore, we have no cause for complaint.' Captain Scott's mentality used to be the norm for chancers and adventurers. Now, after generations of peace and welfarism, and in a society where the blame and compensation cultures go hand in hand, our modern-day buccaneers seem determined to go about their activities not merely unprepared for the likely consequences, but indignant about them. It is time we recognised that, in such a situation, it is not a breach of natural justice that the Lone Ranger does not come galloping over the horizon; it is exactly how life is. In our maturity as a civilisation, we should accept that we can cut out the cancer of ignorant sentimentality without diminishing, as in this case, our utter disgust at a foul and barbaric act of murder.

[Swampy]

In that Friday night football was a resource issue I guess that might be construed as the case: but I find it a pretty tenuous and/or childish approach to compare that to having a view on police mistakes at, and cover-ups following, the Hillsborough Disaster. Grow-up, essentially.

And yet clearly important enough for you to find it necessary to post about.

It's not tenuous at all. Had this been the day after the disaster you'd be taking the police's word for it.

[Swampy]

Just saw that thing welshbairn posted. Ken Bigley, buccanneer? He was a bloody engineer.

Edited September 12, 2012 by Swampy

[roverthemoon]

From the Guardian online:

The panel, constituted in 2009 on the initiative of the then Labour ministers Andy Burnham and Maria Eagle and in the wake an articleby the Guardian's David Conn, found that 116 of 164 statements supplied by South Yorkshire police in response to the disaster were changed to "remove or alter comments directly unfavourable to South Yorkshire police". In the days after the disaster, a narrative took hold that drunken Liverpool fans had caused the disaster by forcing a gate open. Allegations were printed that Liverpool fans had pickpocketed the dead and hampered rescue attempts in an infamous Sun front page headlined "The Truth", which led to a boycott of the paper on Merseyside that continues today. The Sun editor at the time, Kelvin MacKenzie, on Wednesday offered "profuse apologies" for the first time.

The panel found that the origin of untrue claims was a Sheffield news agency informed by four senior South Yorkshire police officers, a South Yorkshire Police Federation spokesperson and a local MP, Irvine Patnick.

The day the Sun allegations were published, the report describes a meeting of the South Yorkshire police federation in the Pickwick restaurant in Sheffield.

At the meeting, the chief constable, Peter Wright, who died last year, said officers should not talk to the media and should "prepare a rock solid story". He said the force needed to take control of the narrative presented to the inquiry and that "if anybody should be blamed, it should be the drunken, ticketless individuals".

Fucking horrendous behaviour.

[ayrmad]

Pleased to see the usual Scousebashers are out in force.

How many of those found guilty of manslaughter at Heysel were up the back at the Leppings Lane end?

How many of the 9/11 bombers were involved in the subsequent attrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq?

[ayrmad]

I doubt even the overwhelming evidence will change the opinion of these people. You just need to look at this thread to see that. Some people just like being dicks

I don't know that it's a conscious choice.

[roverthemoon]

Good article in the Telegraph

Hillsborough families will get justice for this repugnant and heartless horror story, but they will never get closure

By Henry Winter, Football CorrespondentLast Updated: 1:04AM BST 13/09/2012

Closure is a concept utterly impossible to comprehend. How can any parent recover from the sight of a coffin containing their beautiful child being lowered into a grave? The memory and the misery, the unremitting numbness and occasional outbursts of fury remain always.

Wednesday was a hugely significant day for the families of those 96 Liverpool fans who set off one sun-strewn morning for a football match and never returned.

The families’ long, dignified and relentlessly resilient campaign was vindicated. The police did tamper with statements. They did orchestrate a cover-up of unbelievable size and criminality.

Liverpool’s supporters were exonerated. They were not drunk. They were not ticketless. The truth was found. But closure?

There can’t be.

Hillsborough is a tragedy without a final chapter. So let’s not talk blithely of closure for the families, for the club, for the city of Liverpool over what happened on April 15, 1989. The pain and anger will always be there with the relatives, sometimes screaming within them, sometimes kept at bay for a day. But always there.

The parents could be driving past a wedding, a christening or a university graduation and be reminded of what they have been denied by the authorities’ incompetence and wilful neglect at Hillsborough.

They will never see their children grow up, go to college, have families of their own. How can there be closure when a mother keeps a child’s room untouched for 23 years as a shrine?

Closure is unattainable because of the succession of horrors wrought on these families. They will never forget those grim hours in that makeshift mortuary in the gym at Hillsborough or the despair-filled visits to the hospital in Sheffield. When Trevor and Jenni Hicks tried to see the body of their daughter Vicki, a police officer refused, saying: “She’s nothing to do with you any more.” Their child.

Such behaviour was callousness descending into cruelty, almost a default setting from sections of the authorities at the time.

The police treated the parents as cattle just as the police, in conjunction with the footballing bodies, had herded their children on to the Leppings Lane End, caging them in with such fatal consequences.

Police questioning of grieving relatives, sitting yards away from where loved ones lay in body-bags, was an exercise in pitilessness and one of the many reasons why there can never be closure.

Consumed with sorrow at the loss of their beloved two daughters, Trevor and Jenni Hicks were basically interrogated by the police. No sympathy. No sensitivity. Just question after brutal question. Had the girls been drinking? Did they have tickets?

When Jenni Hicks asked to go to the loo, a policewoman insisted on accompanying her, even demanding the cubicle door remained open. Once the Hicks’ statement was finished, they were allowed to leave with their daughters’ belongings in a white bin-liner.

There can be no closure when personal heartache is compounded by the heartlessness of those in authority. Trevor and Jenni Hicks had been brought up to trust the police, to assume as law-abiding citizens that the police were on their side. Such trust was abused and abused.

Closure is unrealistic when the Hillsborough Independent Panel unearthed even greater collusion by the police than suspected.

The disclosure that up to half of the 96 fans could have survived, if they had been given proper and prompter medical attention, makes the contemptuous stance of the authorities even harder to bear.

Those parents know that their sons and daughters might have lived. The feeling of bleakness intensifies.

So the families now have the truth. So now the state that so badly let them down must give them justice. A new – truthful – inquest must be ordered by the High Court.

Prime Minister David Cameron spoke well on Wednesday but proper, significant deeds must now follow his fine words. The Attorney General must take this on. So must the courts.

The families deserve to have their stories heard in court, to have those whose failures led to their children’s deaths be called to account.

Those who spread smears must be arraigned. Justice will bring undeniable succour to the families if never, ever closure.

They deserve to know who tested the blood levels of a 10-year-old for alcohol. In his report, Lord Chief Justice Taylor made a mockery of the police claims that Liverpool fans had been drinking by contacting off-licences adjacent to Hillsborough.

None reported excessive off-sales. Yet the slur remained until yesterday when Cameron declared that Liverpool fans were not responsible for Hillsborough. Blame lies with an inadequate stadium, unresponsive and repugnant police officers and the culture of treating football fans with disdain and disregard.

For this is the story of a nightmare that befell one club but it could have been another. The lore of the football jungle is tribalism.

On Wednesday, barring the odd gangs of dementors who fly around the social-media airwaves, there was rare unity among supporters. Just as at the time the first manager on the phone to Kenny Dalglish was Alex Ferguson, offering to send a supporters’ delegation over from Old Trafford to show solidarity with their rivals in their darkest hour.

Fans understood then, just as they did on Wednesday. It could have been them.

So everyone who cares about the match-day experience should hope that a new inquest takes place, that the families keep campaigning for state accountability.

Stadiums are far safer now, and mobile phones and Twitter would give far more advance warning of unfolding tragedies, but the authorities must always be reminded that fans are human beings, not the faceless useful only for fleecing.

So the families’ campaign continues. Justice will come their way. Sadly, closure never will. They had to bury their children. Nobody ever recovers from that emotional trauma.

[banana]

As has been proven today and the prime minister has apologized for it.

There has been too much nonsense spouted about this subject over the years blaming the fans for this disaster however the truth has come out eventually.

Hopefully justice will follow and they won't have to wait another 23 years for it.

I'm curious, what does justice mean regarding this incident?

[peasy23]

I'm curious, what does justice mean regarding this incident?

I would think that it would mean that if a person or persons actions on the day can be proved to be criminally negligent, rather than just incompetent, that they should be tried and punished for their crime.

[peasy23]

Yeah heard that one too.

I think apart from the fucknuggets and trolls the people on this thread, and moreso the ones my age and older realise that could have been any of us who attended football matches supporting our team. That disaster could have potentially happened at several grounds all over the UK including in Scotland.

Id stood in a packed fenced in terrace in the old jungle at CP and there were lots of areas like that all over the UK.

That it happened when and where and to whom is a tragedy of fate. RIP the 96

I don't agree with you on much but you are spot on with this post. As I mentioned further up the thread I was at Celtic Park on the same day as Hillsborough and there was a crush in the Rangers support, but as there were no fences at that time then the crowd spilled onto the track and fortunately nobody was badly hurt. I've been at numerous games in the 80s at CP, Hampden and in the enclosure at Ibrox where leaving the ground was terrifying, literally going down flights of stairs without touching them. That's not to mention times where goals were scored and you had to ride with the surging crowd and could end up yards away from where you started. It seems that some people would still rather believe the Sun and blame the phantom hoards of drunk and ticketless Scousers even though the Sun has admitted they were wrong. This was a disaster that could have happened to any support in pretty much any ground. The fact there weren't more tragic deaths at football matches back then was more down to good luck than good judgement IMO.

[Co.Down Hibee]

I must be one of those 'twisted p***ks with a hidden agenda' then because Liverpool fans have done nothing but disgrace themselves time and time again. As the whole Suarez thing and the racist chanting at the young lad from Northampton(?) at the start of the year proved. Also 99% of Liverpool fans I have met have been complete arseholes as well.

Have to agree there , hateful club and supporters.

[Co.Down Hibee]

the findings of this report reminds me of the Bloody Sunday enquiry a couple of years ago, they have basically given the public what they wanted to hear but the chances of anyone actually getting done for it are slight, maybe they'll throw up a lamb to be slaughtered but doubt it,

can you imagine the uproar if they had portioned some of the blame onto the Liverpool fans.

[GAD]

I remember in the mid 90s I went to landsdowne road for a rugby match with a ticket for the terrace behind the goal. Thousands of drunk fans with no ticket or tickets for other parts of the ground forced their way in there and there was some very hairy moments as a result. I imagine Scottish and Irish rugby fans wouldn't have been villified the way the scousers were if the same had happened.

[Savage Henry]

I would think that it would mean that if a person or persons actions on the day can be proved to be criminally negligent, rather than just incompetent, that they should be tried and punished for their crime.

Of course. No question about it. Does this count for Liverpool fans too?

[H_B]

Its despicable that some are using hysel to almost justify the death of these 96 inocent people.

Uh, who has done this you utter cretin?

[H_B]

Lord justice taylor did not think it was adequate for the occasion.

But your opinion is more noteworthy than his.

Ah right...

So you want to use the Taylor report's findings when it suits the agenda you want to push with regard to one aspect of the day, but it's discredited nonsense in relation to another established fact - that of the fans' disgraceful behaviour?