The short version is that on April 15, 1989, 96 soccer fans were killed at Hillsborough Stadium while attempting to get into the FA Cup semi-final match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forrest. Too many tickets had been sold, standard procedure at a time when many spectators stood in a series of three "terraces" to watch instead of sitting in seats. Because of the numbers in the crowd, police decided to open an exit tunnel that normally was kept closed instead of evenly funneling people into one of the other terraces. The ensuing rush to get in caused 96 people to die and 744 other people to be hurt.
If this sounds familiar, it is almost exactly the same series of events that led to eleven people being crushed to death at a Who concert in Cincinnati in 1979. The big difference between the two events though was in the aftermath. The Cincinnati venue operators, police, and local officials all owned up to their responsibility in that disaster. The English authorities went in a totally opposite direction. Those authorities ranged from the police at the stadium all the way up to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Six minutes into the match fans began falling out of the terraces onto the field attempting to flee the panic and crush. The television broadcast of the game shows police trying to prevent people from getting onto the field, actively chasing survivors off, and stopping fans who were trying to help others from doing so. Medical authorities were not called till late, so fans pulled advertising boards (called hoardings) off walls and used them as make shift stretchers. Of the army of ambulances waiting outside the stadium only one was allowed to get through to the field. Dozens who might have been saved with immediate professional care died as a result.
As bad as all of this sounds, it is only the beginning.
Once the crowd was cleared and the dead and wounded carried off, the police immediately claimed that it was all caused by the fans.They claimed drunk and ticketless hooligans rushed the gates crushing those in the front. They claimed no spectator was willing to help the police with the wounded and in fact many were looting the bodies of the dead. This despite the fact that the whole event was broadcast on live television and showed nothing of the sort. Again and again they claimed all the spectators were drunk. In fact, in the aftermath the two questions posed most insistently by investigators of the survivors and the families of the dead was if they had been drinking and if they had tickets. No official was interested in hearing anything else and certainly not anything that would implicate the police as being culpable. It would come out years later that many of the statements given by witnesses were altered by the police to support their position.
In the days following the establishment rallied around the system. Prime Minister Thatcher toured the stadium and pronounced the official view that hooligans were the cause of the disaster. Rupert Murdoch's Sun tabloid screamed a headline proclaiming "THE TRUTH" and giving voice to the lies the police spread about looting the dead, fans urinating on police as they attempted to help, and beating up police as they attempted to help. Though no official investigation had even commenced, the establishment had it's story and was going to stick to it. When challenged, the editor of The Sun stood by the story. Years later it came out that his boss, Rupert Murdoch, told him to go with the story and to stand by it even though no one else at the paper thought the story was even close to "the truth". Remember that this predates the News of the World phone hacking scandal by decades. In fact it was one of the things James Murdoch apologized for at the phone hacking parliamentary hearings.
So why was the British establishment so determined to blame everything on the fans? Keep in mind the times. This was Margaret Thatcher's England, a land where if you had money you were the good guys and if you didn't you were the bad guys. Every "riot" was the fault of the malingerers, those on the dole who sucked at the teat of the government and refused honest work. Every police man was the noble incarnation of what was good and right about the land. Soccer hooliganism was the byproduct of the cradle to grave welfare state. Any evidence of such hooliganism was proof once again that the welfare state needed to be torn down.
In such an atmosphere it was impossible for the real truth to come forward. All the institutions of the establishment were aligned and in place to prevent the actual story of what happened that day from coming out. What the establishment didn't factor into this case though was those killed weren't malingerers living off the dole. They were middle class football fans who believed in the system. Many of the dead were teens or young adults from good hard working families. Those families believed the system would bring justice. When instead it brought lies and evasion they had the passion and the means to pursue real justice. It took twenty years, the fall of Thatcher and the swinging of the national mood against the abuse of power by those in power for them to set the record straight.
In September of 2012 a report was issued by the Hillsborough Independent Panel exonerating the fans from any wrong doing and placing the blame on the police. 164 statements were found to have altered by the police. It found that the police had engaged in a systematic program of impugning the reputation of the victims. It was determined that 41 of the 96 dead would have lived with even elementary first aid. Most tellingly it found that Conservative Party MPs disseminated false information and media outlets accepted that information without challenge.
The politicians lied, the media didn't challenge the lies, the public was told to ignore the evidence of their own eyes from the television coverage, people died because the forces of the establishment failed them. All that's needed is for the government to claim the fans had weapons of mass destruction and it's the war in Iraq. Remember the 96 because sadly they were only the test run for an even larger deceptions.
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