Grief and Grievance – 20 years since Hillsborough
20 years ago today 96 Liverpool football fans were crushed to death in Sheffield’s Hillsborough stadium, during an FA Cup Semi-Final game with Nottingham Forest. The disaster had a huge impact on modern football, transforming the nature of football grounds, and consigning terraces to history. It has also had a profound and lasting impact on the people of Liverpool, to an extent which is hard to describe to someone outside of the city.
Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
The most immediate feeling around discussions of Hillsborough is grief. Horror at the scale of the human tragedy, that an afternoon at the football could result in so many deaths, but also the inescapable fact that so many knew those involved. 96 people is a huge number in a place like Liverpool, and many people you meet will know people who were there, or killed. Liverpool’s current captain Steven Gerrard, had a cousin (aged 10) killed on that day.
The media has been packed with this over the past few days (though my experience of it may be skewed by living here and watching football). The sense of grief has been visibly communicated with endless interviews with players past and present (the media is full of players from that golden generation, and it seems like every single one has been forced to offer an opinion), and families of the dead. These have been impressive, and moving, there’s no need to cynically deny that. But there’s clearly been something missing.
The slogan since 1989 has been ‘Justice for the 96′, yet you’d be forgiven for asking ‘what justice?’ The coverage zooms in on these banners, but never explains what they mean. Martin Kelner in the Guardian rightly attacks the ‘oh dearism’ of this. The concentration on the tragic event; the grief without the grievance. Because if you don’t understand where the grievance is, why we want justice, and not just memorial, then scousers really are just the sentimental whiners, wallowing in ‘vicarious victimhood’ that Boris Johnson accused us of being.
If it weren’t for this grievance then Hillsborough wouldn’t be remembered as it is. The role of the police on that day is generally thought to have contributed heavily to the death toll. The smear story by the Sun added insult to injury. The events of that day showed a callous disdain for the working class people who had travelled to Sheffield to support their team. The distortions and lies that followed sought to compound the image of scousers as feckless and violent. The city had that had bought the brunt of much of the recession of the 80s was yet again in the news.
Coming from Liverpool, but having lived away, I am consistently shocked by the misunderstandings about 15th April 1989. People so often say things like ‘no smoke without fire’, regarding the Sun reports, or have even wilder misconceptions about hooliganism and violence. The fight for justice means a lot of things, but if nothing else it should be a fight for a true accounting of the day’s events. This isn’t the place to offer it, but unless we understand that Hillsborough is about a serious injustice, about real grievance, not just blind grief, we will not understand its significance.
Update: Matt Cookson in today’s Socialist Worker on some more of the specifics of the cover up.
