Hillsborough, justice, and vilification of the working class

Justice has finally come for the Hillsborough relatives; late, and after too much unnecessary pain being heaped on them, too many obstacles put in their way, too much opposition from establishment organisations – the police, the media, political spin doctors - putting their own weasely backsides before the truth.  But finally the truth is being told.  

There is so much detail to look at, but there are few passages that better sum up the horror of what the establishment did to citizens it had disdain for than this:


"While the tabloid screamed that "the truth" was fans pickpocketing victims and urinating on cops, the real truth was the police probing victims' criminal records and taking blood samples from dead children in the hope of establishing drunkenness."


Take a while to let that sink in.  

It’s not my purpose here to go through the details, for that there are better places to look, such as the excellent work done by Eleanor Barlow, here outlining the way the myths were busted by the inquiry: “The Hillsborough myths exposed by the inquests as a tissue of lies”.  Please take the time to read it. 

As we take in what has been uncovered here, what people are more and more coming to terms with is the fact that time after time, the police and the media have been involved in cover-up and lies. Someone dies, so the reaction of the police is to lie about the victim.  

Take Jean Charles de Menezes.    Instead of owning up to their failings, the police lied about what had happened and lied about the character of the victim.  The inquest jury in December 2008 rejected the official account of events, but was told it did not have the option to return a verdict of unlawful killing.  

Take Ian Tomlison, where the police followed that same pattern of cover-up and assassinating the character of the victim. (http://www.iantomlinsonfamilycampaign.org.uk).

Take Orgreave, where the BBC and the police colluded in telling lies about striking miners.  (http://otjc.org.uk)  - The BBC, it much later turned out, was then, and is still, a member of the CBI.  During every industrial dispute it covered, and in which it broadcast quotes from the CBI, it never once declared an interest.

The list could go on.  But what we get a picture of is of the resources at the disposal of the elite, the state, weighed against ordinary people.

For the relatives of the 96 Hillsborough victims, this has been a tough 27 years.  They have borne it with dignity, dedication and tenacity, while they, their loved ones, their fellow football fans, their city, has been heaped with vilification and ridicule.  The open class prejudice with which the media has portrayed Liverpudlians has been overwhelming.  Comedians play the stereotypes for cheap laughs.  Politicians, such as Boris Johnson, join in.  But it’s not funny: what is at the bottom of this is cover-up and smear, and the disdain that the establishment has for working class people.

Remember that lesson when you read media reports of strikes, when you read about the supposed character of someone who has died at the hands of the police, or about the character of people who are on low wages or out of work.  

The Hillsborough Justice Campaign 

Here's what Yes achieves; where does No get us?

It can be infuriating as well as exhilarating  to be part of this debate we're having.  But I'm never in any doubt what side I have to be on - just a look at who backs and funds the No campaign reaffirms that.

I've written elsewhere in this blog about what I think a Yes vote immediately achieves, or leads to us achieving. Useful things, too: defending the Welfare state, defending the NHS, getting rid of Trident, renationalising the mail service. And it delivers a shock to the status quo, both here and in the rest of the UK, providing working class people with the chance to upset the neoliberal consensus.

(See these posts for a fuller discussion:

- "Will it actually make any difference to us if Scotland becomes independent?"

- "We can defend the Welfare state: we can vote Yes". ).

That's what it achieves.  What it does not achieve is a fair society and a restructuring of democracy. We do not automatically get equal access to resources, participation and decision-making for all in our society.  On the 19th September, those inequalities will still be there.  On independence day, 24th March 2016, those inequalities will still be there. Food banks will still be needed, services will still be unequal, local democracy will still be distant and unresponsive, and so on and so on.

Some Yes campaigners talk as if voting Yes solves all that in itself. It doesn't.  Yes is not a panacea; it's an opportunity to start building a better Scotland.  It starts a process.

That doesn't make it not worth doing.  It's very much worth doing.  It's a great opportunity to break the neoliberal logjam; perhaps the only such opportunity we'll have in our lifetimes.  Certainly the only such opportunity available to us now.

You might think that's obvious, so why even bring it up? Well, some people have said to me that because a Yes vote doesn't automatically bring us a fair and equal society, it isn't worth bothering with, that it's therefore a distraction.  This is a purist position I can't agree with.  We have to take what's in front of us and see what we can do with it.

To those people I say: look at what we can do immediately, and look at what we have to chance to build towards. Does voting No achieve that?  Voting No doesn't even start a process.  If No wins, then we keep WMD, we continue down the road to losing the welfare state and the NHS, the Royal Mail stays in private hands, the neoliberal project marches on uninterrupted, and we keep the institutional rightward bias of Westminster. I say it in person when I meet them, and I try to reach them through social media, to open a dialogue with them.  I don't expect one tweet to change anyone's mind, but just tweeting to the converted definitely won't.

So, I'll continue to say it: these immediate gains are worth having, so let's take them. Then let us push further and take the rest. That's what Yes achieves. Where does No get us?

Class Bias in the Media



Why should we care about the disproportionate over representation of one class in our press and broadcasting media?  Why does it matter that this class, personified by the 7% who went to private school, is vastly - vastly - over-represented in the management of the BBC, the Guardian, and all sections of civil society.

Well, this has an impact on which stories those people think of as depicting life in Britain. This happens not through deliberate editorial conspiracy, but simply through unconscious bias, based on what their life experiences are, and what the life experiences of their commissioning editors are. Unconscious filters that sift what we get to see, and results in a world-view being presented which does not reflect the real lives of the majority.

How does it work? You gather together a load of people from a particular background, and have them work with people from the same background. They are going to talk about what they know. There are few people to tell them otherwise, because in the world they inhabit, their background is vastly (and it's hard to overemphasise the proportions here) vastly over-represented.

 Only 7% of people in the UK went to private school. And yet the last information I had was that all of the section heads at the Guardian newspaper...(That's 100%. Not 10%, or 15%, or even 50%. But all of them)... All of them went to private school. So naturally, they are interested in things people from their background are interested in. "How do we pay the kids' tuition fees?" "Which part of Tuscany should I visit this year?" "What is the best Phillippe Starke lemon squeezer?" They hire people who write about those things. A feedback loop is set up, because now they're reading the things that they think people are interested in reading, because it’s what they're interested in reading. What is "newsworthy" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 Does that make them, individually, bad people? Of course not; just people. The problem isn't that x, y, or z went to public school, but that x,y,and z and all of the other letters all did.

The fact is that the reality for the 93% who did not attend private school is not the same as the guy compiling the "ten best" whatever in the i newspaper. £5 for a single shop-bought scone? £140 for a fancy lemon squeezer? Really? It's the reason so many people feel that their reality is completely divorced from that of the media. You want a reason for alienation and disenfranchisement; the feeling that nobody talks our language? There it is.