Rewriting History

Issue #15 of the uniformly excellent The Football Pink is out now; I urge you to buy it, not just because I'm in it either. However, this is my piece, inspired by a review copy of the loathsome Norman Bettison's selective memoir Hillsborough Untold that seeks to paint his as an injured innocent. He isn't -:

History, as the cliché goes, is written by the winners. While such a statement may be more of a simple lie than the complicated truth, it is a good starting point for debate. Grammatically it is interesting to note that while “truth” is an uncountable mass noun, “lies” are countable, common nouns; leading to the suggestion that, ontologically at least, humans recognise honestly to be more prevalent than deceit.

And yet, what do we understand of the troublesome, persistent and pervasive presence of folk-devil mythologies in the narrative of our existence? As football fans, we united to condemn and defeat the evil establishment lie that football fans were to blame for the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. Against all the odds, the massed forces of the mainstream media, the Government and several police forces were challenged and ideologically defeated; meaning the gross distortions and mendacious falsehoods they sought to proselytise lost all credibility outside the nether world of ranting right wing stuffed shirts. The argument had been won and truth established among football fans and throughout the sections of society, who still subscribed, however tangentially, to the last vestiges of the post-war social democratic consensus, long before the law caught up with this reality. Indeed, justice was not served, in terms of official recognition, until the publication of the Hillsborough Inquest report in April 2016, which concluded what had long been recognised; the 96 who died had been unlawfully killed.

While the denials, delays and denigrations that left the families of those who suffered wholly innocent, preventable and tragic deaths that April afternoon in 1989 waiting for almost 3 decades to be vindicated, will serve as an indelible stain on the soul of the unfeeling and self-aggrandising establishment, full justice will not be served until those individuals responsible for the disaster itself and the subsequent cover-up are brought to book. At the time of writing, the Crown Prosecution Service is still considering the possibility of criminal proceedings against numerous former high-ranking police officers who served in the South Yorkshire constabulary. Without seeking to influence the outcome of due process, I hope the conclusion is that prosecutions are in the public interest. Only then will we finally have justice for the 96 and, hopefully, the city of Liverpool will be able to rest easy at last.

Perhaps one of the most surprising of the prevalent false mythologies about Liverpool is the seemingly unchallenged assertion that it has historically been a citadel of radical, Socialist politics. Such an erroneous narrative permeates social commentary about the city, from academic analysis of the causes of the Toxteth riots to the dignified diligence of the Hillsborough campaigners; the assumption is that Liverpool’s collective DNA is deepest red, politically at least. Such a fantasy has been relentlessly propagated and parroted as a justification for the self-destructive Leninist posturing by the wholly discredited Militant cult that still clings to the city’s body politic in the shape of the miniscule Socialist Party / TUSC axis, whose confrontational idiocy brought the city to its knees in the mid-80s.  

The truth, surprising as it may seem, is that Merseyside was an unyielding, steadfast bastion of Conservative and Unionist ideology well into the 1950s. “We must understand that Liverpool is rotten,” remarked Ramsey McDonald when asked to explain the failure of the Labour Party to gain any traction on the banks of the Mersey. The local Tories, bulked out by the presence of the (scarcely credible in the current era) Liverpool Protestant Party, enjoyed decades of municipal control that were marked by cautious social conservatism and ruthless, demagogic and unapologetically sectarian policies in housing and education; all designed to avoid the scourge of “Rome on the Rates” and to reduce the Catholic population to the status of second class citizens. The existence of a huge Irish population in Liverpool is not to be denied, but what is often forgotten is that as many were from the Loyalist tradition, including a sizeable minority of displaced Dublin and Wicklow based supporters of the Crown who left the newly established Irish Free State after 1922, as were from the poverty stricken Catholic sector. Indeed, it took the combined efforts of the Luftwaffe’s bombs and the 1945 Labour Government’s social housing policies, to clear the teeming dockside slums that bred and nurtured the hostility and conflict which lit the July 11^th Bootle bonfires for almost a century.  Even then, in the midst of a notable shift away from authoritarian dogmatism on a city-wide basis, the political beneficiaries were the Liverpool Liberal Party, who controlled the city until the 1970s, when Derek Hatton and the rest of the Tuebrook Trots turned up to bankrupt the place.

If we are still searching for an English city to laud for immaculate left-wing credentials, then Sheffield must be in with a shout as the focal point of the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire. This phrase, coined in the early 80s, was instantly understood and worn as a badge of honour by those in the local Labour Party. Ironically, it had been invented by the sole Tory MP in the whole area; Irvine Patnick, who was on the extreme right wing of the Conservative Party. He was against sanctions on apartheid South Africa, voted to reintroduce the death penalty, strongly supported Section 28 and, in a similar vein, opposed reducing the age of consent for gays. All fairly predictable touchstones of populist Telegraph Toryism, except that his cartoon reactionary beliefs take on an altogether darker hue when it is a matter of public record that Patnick was one of the most vocal sources for The Sun's shameful coverage of Hillsborough.  For over 20 years Patnick avoided censure for his appalling falsehoods, until September 2012, when the publication of the report by the independent panel investigating Hillsborough confirmed that "the source for these despicable untruths was a Sheffield news agency reporting conversations with South Yorkshire Police and Irvine Patnick, the then MP for Sheffield Hallam.” The Daily Express, predictably, had also carried the story, under the headline Police Accuse Drunken Fans and disseminated Patnick's lies, saying he had told Margaret Thatcher, whilst escorting her on a tour of the grounds after the tragedy, of the "mayhem caused by drunks" and that policemen had told him that they were "hampered, harassed, punched and kicked". Lies; all lies…

Following the publication of the report, Patnick was heavily criticised by the families of the dead, with the Hillsborough Justice Campaign stating that "It needs to be remembered that this man vilified Liverpool and was part of a lying machine which shamefully damaged the reputation of those fans.” In a statement issued through the Conservative Party on 13 September 2012, Patnick accepted "responsibility for passing such information on without asking further questions. So, many years after this tragic event, I am deeply and sincerely sorry for the part I played in adding to the pain and suffering of the victims' families.” He died on 30 December 2012, unmourned by all who knew him.

I mention Patnick in such detail, as his presence is surprisingly absent from former Chief Constable of both South Yorkshire and Merseyside, Norman Bettison’s recently published memoir, Hillsborough Untold. With the Crown Prosecution Service taking particular interest in the police’s conduct from April 15^th 1989 onwards, Bettison is clearly feeling the heat and has belatedly sought to put forward his version of events. Unmistakeably, this scurrilous rag-bag of rumours, half-truths and lies serves not as an apology for his role in events, but a deliberate and relentless attempt at downplaying his involvement in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Presumably, the 353 pages of cant, drivel and mealy-mouthed self-justification will form the basis of most of what Bettison will repeat under caution at a police station soon.

While trying to save his own neck is despicable enough, Bettison really puts in the hard yards by attempting to have his humble pie and eat it. He takes great pains to remind us he never joined the Freemasons, loved his time on Merseyside and attended Hillsborough in a personal capacity as a Liverpool supporter, while relentlessly failing to discredit any notion of the existence of a concerted black-ops policy post-Hillsborough, despite his best efforts. Though he issues repeated denials of the presence any blood on his hands, Bettison comes across as a shifty, vain, megalomaniac, obsessed with self-preservation and seemingly hell-bent on passing the buck to the hapless, incompetent match day supervisor David Duckinfield; the only policeman to have admitted his complicity in the deaths of 96 innocent people.

Meanwhile Bettison, with a stunning lack of empathy and insight, affects a pouting, childish sulk over his forced resignation from the position of Chief Constable of South Yorkshire. He claims that this event, triggered by Bettison’s excoriation in the 2012 Independent Review Panel’s findings, was caused by an orchestrated social media campaign against him that he likens to the Salem Witch Trials. The biter bit or what? It’s enough to make you sick.

The contempt felt by all who value democracy, freedom of speech and civil liberties for South Yorkshire police cannot be calculated. Not only is there the final denouement of the force’s conduct post Hillsborough to be considered, if we rewind the clock 5 years before Hillsborough to June 1984, the looming spectre of the Battle of Orgreave must also be investigated.  Regardless of the Tory government’s Pontius Pilate stance, combined with a “let bygones be bygones” message, the strength of public opinion will undoubtedly see a full public inquiry into the conduct of SYP on that boiling hot midsummer Monday.  The indisputable truth is that those of us who lived through the 80s intuitively knew we were in the midst of a repressive Police State; Norman Bettison’s book confirms this, as he condemns himself in his own weasel, ghostwritten words. Justice, in full, must come.