Finally, 27 long years later, the
cold class contempt that Hillsborough came to signify is laid out for all to
see.
Those who died did not die because they were “
animals” or drinking too much or behaving
badly. They were
unlawfully killed.
Their families did not
grieve too much because they were from Liverpool and therefore emotionally
incontinent or full of working-class mawkishness; they grieved because they
lost their loved ones in absolutely horrific circumstances.
Still, to read the
details of how these people died tightens my stomach.
Of the 96 who died, 37
were teenagers. The reality is that the dead were all sorts of people from
different backgrounds.
But very quickly they became no longer individuals but
part of a mob who somehow deserved this awful fate.
As life was squeezed out of
them, then too their humanity was taken from them by the police, by politicians
and parts of the press.
The
marathon campaign by the bereaved families and their supporters has been one
class act. In the face of despair, there has been dignity.
Yet we have to ask
why it has taken so long for the truth to be acknowledged. It is surely to do
with the way we do not like to talk about out-and-out class conflict.
Instead,
we are told that class hardly exists, except as an anthropological display to
gawp at disdainfully on reality TV.
The refusal of the establishment to
countenance the level of police “coverup” is because “they” were indeed all in
it together.
All of this was relayed in the press so that the dead were reduced to the kind
of rabble who urinated on and stole from each other.
One of the extraordinary
revelations is that it was the South Yorkshire police themselves who had a
drinking problem, with bars in many of the stations.
But no one who remembers that time
thought that the police were on “our” side to begin with.
In the 80s, sides
were demarcated explicitly. If the miners’ strike was our last civil war, then
the police were clearly lined up against us.
They did Thatcher’s dirty work,
waving their overtime payslips in the face of striking miners.
The
South Yorkshire police, Burnham said “used the same underhand tactics against
its own people in the aftermath of the miners’ strike that it would later use,
to more deadly effect, against the people of Liverpool”.
In all
this it must be said there were individual police officers who behaved
decently, but the complicity between the police and parts of the conservative
establishment remain horrifying.
The confidence of Kelvin MacKenzie, Boris
Johnson and Bernard Ingham (who spoke of “
tanked-up yobs”) still persists.
Their
apologies are a joke, still exhibiting the same contempt. Are we to accept
MacKenzie was merely duped?
Liverpool never forgot or
forgave Johnson and his ilk because it didn’t simply imagine itself under
attack – it
was under
attack.
As always the culture it produced understood this and laughed in the
face of such demonisation. Johnson’s editorial accused Liverpool of
wallowing in its victim
status.
As crushed economically as that city was in the 80s, it
sensed its own power. Frankie Goes to Hollywood T-shirts read: “Frankie says
arm the unemployed.”
It must be somewhat galling for
those in power now to have to accept this ruling, for they do not hide their
class contempt either.
They have elevated it to actual policy: all schools must
be modelled on the schools they went to, but with fewer resources.
All
hospitals must be run to make a profit. Taxes are for the little people. Those
who don’t “get on” have only themselves to blame.
An increasing range of
theories come into play about why poor people are poor, which is never to do
with lack of money but lack of civility. Or perhaps there is something wrong
with their actual brains!
Imagery of working-class people invariably invokes
moral deprivation by showing a tendency to excess.
Social
mobility, the supposed solution to all this, only allows the odd person to slip
through the net.
The middle class must simply hold on. Once there, one is
required to be grateful (I am not) or merely chippy (I am).
As I strain my ears
to hear someone who talks like me on Radio 4 that isn’t in a drama about child
abuse, I never know who I am to be grateful to.
Sure,
class contempt works both ways, though it is impolite to show it except by
gentle humour. Rage is so 1980s.
We must not discriminate against the posh
apparently, though class doesn’t really exist any more.
As more and more people
tell us it no longer matters, we see more and more of our creative stars were
privately educated, that our leaders come from the same tiny enclave.
Retro-feudalism.
This
fantasy should be well and truly shattered by the
Hillsborough verdict.
This was a war crime
committed in a war that was not then, nor is now, a figment of our imagination.
Class war.
