Justice for the 96

Back in November of last year I wrote this piece, on the successful efforts of countless thousands of people in applying sufficient pressure on the Government to fully disclose documents relating to the Hillsborough disaster.

Those documents would not ordinarily be released for another 7 years, and their content shows that there are plenty of people with good reason to wish they hadn't been. Many of the families, and many within the football supporting community as a whole, have suspected all along that there was a cover up of the facts of the case. But just how shocking some of the revelations are has led to the Prime Minister standing in a packed and silent House of Commons to offer a formal apology for what he called the 'double injustice' of the original disaster and subsequent smearing and blame of the Liverpool fans.

Some of the main points raised by the independent review, but never published before today, include:

• New evidence about how the authorities failed, including documents which show a delay from the emergency services when people were being crushed (evidently up to 41 lives could have been saved if the emergency services had acted differently)
• Shortcomings in the response by the ambulance service and other emergency services in addition to failings by police
• Rescue attempts were held back by failures of leadership and co-ordination
• Victims' families were correct in their belief that some of the authorities attempted to create a "completely unjust" account of events that sought to blame the fans
• "Despicable untruths" about the behaviour of fans were part of police efforts "to develop and publicise a version of events that focused on allegations of drunkenness, ticketlessness and violence"
• Police officers carried out police national computer checks on those who had died in an attempt "to impugn the reputations of the deceased"
• 116 police statements amended or shortened to remove negative comments about South Yorkshire police's handling of the incident

These quoted from the BBC's website. 

23 years of campaigning for the truth are finally over, but this must not be the end. The findings of the original public enquiry must be quashed, and the people who have lied, the people who have covered up, and the people who have blamed the fans must be punished. The police's part in this must be revealed to the full glare of public scrutiny, and those responsible both for exacerbating the disaster and then smearing the victims in the aftermath must be punished.

I particularly want to see Kelvin MacKenzie sued for what he did. "The Truth", screamed his despicable rag, The Sun, while the victims still lay in the morgues. Liverpool fans caused the crush. Liverpool fans robbed the dead. Liverpool fans spat at, abused and urinated on police officers. It must be true, right? Football fans - tribal, snarling, atavistic scum, right? The Sun said it was their fault, and millions believed them. All now proven, as has been said all along by those who were there, to be utter lies. His former paper's forthcoming apology will cut little ice in Liverpool, where sales of The Sun have never recovered after what they did, and never will.

I want to hear Thatcher apologise for basically demonising football fans for years afterwards, choosing to believe the lies of a police officer over what eye witnesses were saying, and for her government's refusal to properly and impartially investigate what happened.

There is no sense of celebration, of course. The families and friends of the victims have vindication but not yet the full justice they crave. But they will. As I said back in November, the truth will out in the end. Tireless work by campaigners, notably among them Andy Burnham MP, who deserves great credit for his determination on this matter, is finally going to get justice for the 96.

Mackenzie's honesty shows up his section of his profession for what it is

Having heard from numerous people on the receiving end of some of the worst excesses of tabloid 'journalism', we now begin to hear from the other side at the Leveson Inquiry. Kelvin Mackenzie, former editor of the Sun, has been disarmingly frank in his admissions as to his attitude to facts while in charge there, and extremely irritating in his so-called justification for some of those excesses.

He openly admitted that he once held the opinion that, "...if it sounded right, it was probably right and therefore we should lob it in." This is unbelievable. Stories that could change or destroy lives, would be taken as fact by millions, 'lobbed in' on the grounds that they 'sounded right'. That's basically a licence to say what you like about who you like, providing it's vaguely plausible to your own self-interested ears. This is what I've always thought the tabloids do anyway, but to hear it openly and unrepentantly admitted before the Inquiry was mildly surprising.

He says in later years he was 'less bullish', and that the Sun got more cautious after he left. But it sounds as though the reasons for that caution were entirely commercial, and his attitude to what goes to press is pretty nauseating: "If you publish it in the Sun you get six months' jail and if you publish it in the Guardian you get a Pulitzer prize," he said. "There is a tremendous amount of snobbery involved in journalism." What absolute bollocks. Has he noticed how the style and content of the stuff his 'newspaper' published, and publishes, compares to what goes into the Guardian, or any other broadsheet? 'Footballer Joe Bloggs's sex shame with X-Factor judge's daughter' - you know the type of thing. Typical red-top fare, but not something you'd likely see in the Guardian, to stick to his own example. Mackenzie need only examine his own paper's stories if he's after the real reasons why the different sections of the press are viewed so differently. It is not beyond a tabloid journalist's abilities to print what they want without attracting legal attention, but if it's less sensationalist it sells fewer papers.

Mackenzie even found time to have a pop at Anne Diamond, who has previously given evidence to Leveson as to the distress caused by tabloids turning up at her baby son's funeral. He called her a 'devalued witness' and claimed she should have been more hostile at the time, "...if she felt as strongly as she appeared to feel at Leveson you would have thought 20 years earlier she would have been massively hostile to us, and she wasn't." The woman was grieving the loss of a baby son at the time - just maybe she had other bloody things on her mind. The fact that she still feels strongly enough 20 years later shows exactly how hurt she must have been.

But, to people like this hack, this toad, this abhorrent weasel of a man and the equally ghastly, loathsome newspaper he once edited, since when has the hurt they can cause, or indeed, as he so openly admits, concern for things like the facts, ever been of the remotest concern? More editors, former editors, showbiz columnists etc, are due to give evidence yet. Expect more of the same greasy self-justification in the days to come.