There is a Light That Never Goes Out

The light is the eternal flame of the Hillsborough Memorial at Anfield stadium, Liverpool.    It commemorates the loss of 96 lives in the worst peace-time disaster ever to affect this country.

Today has been a momentous day and I couldn’t let it pass without writing something about it

I cannot claim any great interest in football.  In fact I have spent my entire life trying to avoid it.  I can’t name any players, I don’t know the rules, I find it ultimately boring.  But I have grown up in a city that eats, sleeps and breathes it.   I was 8 years old when the Hillsborough disaster occurred.  I can remember the endless news reports and the front pages of the newspapers showing the anguished crowds crushed up against the bars gasping for breath.  I can remember my mum always trying to shield me from the horror of it and complaining that the images were far too graphic and gruesome for children’s eyes.  I can remember counsellors coming in to my school to talk to relatives of the victims.

Justice for the 96 has been emblazoned onto the city’s consciousness for the past 23 years.  You couldn’t go very long without hearing further theories emerge, new reports come to light or seeing TV dramatisations and documentaries.   Even my 5 year old daughter, who has become interested in the sport due to the intervention of ardent LFC supporting family members, often asks about “the 96 people who lost their lives”.

Many people over the years have suggested that perhaps the victim’s families should move on.  Accusations of “professional mourning” and group sentimentality have been glibly made to diminish the credibility of the grieving families.  Did I ever subscribe to this?  Perhaps.  It's been hard for many observers to not be affected by the narrative that so many elements of the media have spun out regarding the city.

Today, the devastation, loss, and perpetually unfulfilled yearning of the bereaved family members has been validated.  Today, for the first time, I have seen why these people have never given up their fight for justice.  Today, for the first time I cried my eyes out over the scale of this unspeakable tragedy.  An injustice which carries the rare ability to shock in a time when we’re all virtually unshockable. 

I am not a statistics person.  I tend to glaze over facts and figures. But, the statistics revealed in today’s report are impossible to ignore:-

Of 164 police statements altered, 116 were significantly altered to explicitly remove references to blame on the part of the South Yorkshire Police.

Senior police officers, with the knowledge and approval of the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police, immediately began a concerted cover-up by briefing the media that the whole thing was the responsibility of drunken, ticketless fans that were violently rampaging through the streets. 

In the days following the tragedy Police Officers illegitimately ran criminal records checks on the victims in order to find further information to leak to the press to turn public opinion further against the fans

Blood alcohol tests were ordered to be carried out on all of the dead, including children, to further build the web of lies.

Most damningly of all, 41 people could now be alive if the South Yorkshire emergency services hadn’t decided that football fans were not worth their best efforts.  

Nothing I or anyone could ever say could begin to carry sufficient meaning or poignancy to begin to ease the pain of the relatives of the 96. I can only hope that peaceful rest and diminishing of pain and grief can start for the victims and their families.  The light that never goes out should ever serve as a reminder of the courage and bravery of those who keep fighting when the fight is all but lost,  and the need for openness and transparency from those who are appointed to protect and to serve us, any of us, who might just find ourselves fatefully in the wrong place at the wrong time.   
  

Lucy x