From today’s statement in Parliament this afternoon:
Mr Speaker, because of what I have described as the second injustice – the false version of events – not enough people in this country understand what the people of Merseyside have been through.
This appalling death toll of so many loved ones lost was compounded by an attempt to blame the victims.
A narrative about hooliganism on that day was created which led many in the country to accept that it was somehow a grey area.
Today’s report is black and white.
The Liverpool fans ‘were not the cause of the disaster’.
The panel has quite simply found ‘no evidence’ in support of allegations of ‘exceptional levels of drunkenness, ticketlessness or violence among Liverpool fans’ and ‘no evidence that fans had conspired to arrive late at the stadium’ and ‘no evidence that they stole from the dead and dying’.
Will we hear an apology from that loathsome liar Kelvin McKenzie for publishing a front page of lies in the Murdoch press denigrating the Liverpool supporters under the sick headline The Truth ?
Or maybe from the dolt Duff for repeating these lies in the comments to this post 20 years later when most people already knew better.
But I doubt either of them will have the dignity to issue an apology.
Duff by name, duff by…
And the MP who gave the story to the Sun, and upon whom McKenzie has always claimed to rely, still has his knighthood and OBE.
I have just had a quick skim-read of the comment thread to which you refer, Councillor, and I now look forward to you quoting any lie that I wrote, or, better still apologising for the slur.
Perhaps, what you call “a lie” was this comment written by me which actually quotes your own words:
“So, inch by grudging inch, we begin to approach a more rounded view of this particular tragedy and our host admits that “there were fans who had drunk too much, some had stayed too long in the pub, some got in without tickets, and as the game kicked off the crowd surged to get in.””
Your very own words, Councillor, ‘who’da’thunkit’?
Also you might be interested in reading this comment left at Anna Raccoon’s site which has a feeling of verisimiltude about it:
“Those that died were not drunken thugs but those that caused their deaths were Drunken Liverpudlians that arrived en mass without tickets & stormed the entrances as kick off approached. I was there I came in from the Liverpool end, I was pestered for tickets from Liverpudlians pouring out of the pubs asking for spares. Of course the culprits then scarperred after the carnage & were not breathalysed. Quite why the dead would have their blood tested for Alcohol is pointless, they were there on time with their tickets. Its not a coincidence that death & destruction followed Liverpool during these terrible times. People from Liverpool caused these deaths & no one else, we live in a society where we have to blame authority every time for any issue in our lives. The police should have told it as it was at the time & not tried to find excuses for drunken scum from Liverpool. Why were we never asked to write a witness statement? If it had been a fatal car crash I would have been asked to give evidence? If this is ever reopened we should all be asked for a written statement although I suspect like on the day there would be far more contributions made than those who on the day had tickets!”
http://www.annaraccoon.com/politics/liverpool-expects-this-day-sick-justice/
Of course, for more words of wisdom on the subject you could always try my latest post:
http://duffandnonsense.typepad.com/duff_nonsense/2012/09/i-am-going-to-write-on-a-subject-about-which-i-know-nothing-so-no-change-there-then.html
The woman sounds about as moronic as you are on the subject. There is a world of difference in recognising that some Liverpool fans had drunk too much, and some arrived late at the ground (which happens at every football match I have ever been too) and then making the ridiculous leap to say that was the cause of the crush.
As hundreds of eye witnesses have testified, (as opposed to the raccoon woman) including the Prime Minister and the craven police who were cowed into changing their statements, these things did not contribute to the deaths at Hillsborough. I have been to Hillsborough on numerous occasions. The Leppings Lane end is a ridiculous design, the police opening the gates caused a large crowd to be herded down a central tunnel into a penn which was already full. Anyone with half an ounce of intelligence would have placed officers to close the tunnel and direct the crowd to the side entrances where there was space.
It wasn’t the first time. A not dissimilar thing had happened only the previous year. The ground had no safety certificate and the senior police officers had no brains. A fatal concoction which they have spent 23 years covering up.
So no apology for calling me a liar, then!
And you seem to have forgotten that the totally soppy Bishop of Liverpool and the collection of second-rate do-gooders on his committee have told us that **none of the fans were to blame**! You, on the other hand, tell us that, yes, some of them were drunk, some of them were late (Not, according to witnesses, because of trains but because they were in the pub until the last possible minute, many of them because they had no tickets!) but drunk and/or late, according to you, the little lambkins were totally and utterly innocent. Heavens to Betsy, then I wonder who it was who was doing all the shoving? The police? Sheffield Council? Sheffield FC stewards? A tooth fairy? Maggie Thatcher? I dunno! Some-one did it, you tell me who.
No apology at all. In true lickspittle fashion you chose to follow the Thatcher/Murdoch press line of blaming the Liverpool supporters, and you have been shown to be conclusively wrong as the Prime Minister acknowledged on Wednesday. But never one to let truth get in the way of your argument you choose to ignore the evidence provided to the enquiry by Stewards, police, fans of both clubs, and rely on a fellow Thatcherite nutjob equally keen to ignore facts in order to propagate her ridiculous theories.
Presumably the injuries caused at Sheffield Wednesday in previous years was nothing to do with a hopeless stadium and a hapless police force, but was also caused by ticketless and drunk fans, forcing their way in to a splendidly designed ground? Or perhaps as you seem to acknowledge in the heading to the drivel you wrote on your own blog, it is just a case of an out of touch old right wing duffer talking out of his arse about a subject he knows nothing about.
I note that you failed to produce a single quote from me that was a provable lie.
I also note that you have averted your eyes from your very own words.
And I also note your determined efforts not, under any circs, to mention the dreaded ‘H’-word. Like most malefactors, they had ‘previous’!
The provable lie is saying the Liverpool supporters caused the deaths by being drunk and ticketless. Read Cameron’s statement you boneheaded old nitwit!
I have no difficulty in mentioning Heysel. The behaviour of the Liverpool fans who charged the Juve supporters was an utter disgrace, and they have been rightly condemned – even by Liverpool supporter groups. Some of the yobs in question attempted to blame a rotting useless stadium there, and attracted no support whatsoever. So the difference highlights, errm, the difference.
Finally, I have never ‘averted my eyes’ from my words, i stand by them. I’ve never attempted to say no fans were drunk or no fans were late. I doubt in all the years I have been going to football I have ever been to a match where that hasn’t happened. What ignoramus’ like you have to ask yourself is why that hasn’t led to mass deaths every week.
“What ignoramus’ like you have to ask yourself is why that hasn’t led to mass deaths every week.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself and, of course, it leads to the second question, why was it *LFC supporters* who were implicated in both recent major tragedies of crowd shoving leading to multiple deaths? Can you hear the faint ringing of a bell somewhere in the back of that echoing cavern that constitutes your mind, Councillor?
And another thought occurs. In your automatic, instinctive, Pavlovian leap to the defence of the working-class mob at Sheffield you display exactly and precisely the same mind-set as the police chiefs in the South Yorkshire force. It’s ‘us’ against ‘them’, my proletarian comrades/put-upon coppers against ‘them’, the outside world who always misunderstand us and put us down. Between the scousers and the coppers this is just like act II of one of those never-ending operas by Wagner featuring the forces of good and evil. Trouble in this case is that it is impossible to differentiate between the two. The only truly innocent are dead!
You will be glad to know that I’m off for the weekend so feel free to vent your spleen, but like Gen. McCarthur “I shall return”!
As has now clearly been evidenced, but is unable to penetrate your puddled old brain, is that the reason the Liverpool fans were blamed at Hillsborough was because those who have been proved to be to blame were desperate to shift the blame to them. That’s why they lied, that’s why they ordered police officers to change their statements, that’s why accounts were redacted, that’s why they locked the medics out of the Hillsborough gymnasium in order to brief junior officers.
They pushed fans back in to the crush on instructions because. It ‘was hooliganism’ that they had wrongly interpreted.
Everything which followed was the cover up, which numbskulls like McKenzie gleefully went along with and gullible reactionary right-wingers (recognise anyone) swallowed hook, line and sinker.
Have a nice weekend… (wasn’t it MacArthur who said that thing about being proud and unbending in defeat, and humble in victory? So, try practising your pride, and I’ll try to be humble).
I see! So it was the police who did the shoving and crushing! How many of them were there? I ask because I thought part of their problem was that there were not enough on duty to control the perfectly behaved crowd of impeccably behaved scousers who passed through the gates saying “After you, old Boy”, “No, no, I insist, please, you go first” and then along come what, 20?, 30?, policemen who pushed and shoved a crowd of several hundreds until they had crushed 96 people to death. Crikey, what did they have for breakfast?
All very facile, apart from the essential flaw that no-one said the police shoved anyone… but don’t let little things like that stop your childish dementia.
So, I repeat for the umpteenth time, WHO DID THE SHOVING AND THE CRUSHING?
There were late arrivals at the game because of roadworks on the M62, and the usual crew who leave it to the last minute, who then found they couldn’t get in. Rather than do the sensible thing and announce the kick off was delayed by 15 minutes, they opened the gates to the Leppings Lane entrance and let in everyone without even a ticket check and they headed for the nearest entrance which was a tunnel directly in front of them. As the crush built up in the tunnel people tried to avoid death by suffocation in there (a fairly natural reaction) by pushing forward in to the the terrace. Again, if just a couple of bloody police specials had been deployed directing folk away from the already packed area at the centre of the Leppings Lane in to the side entrances where people stood quite comfortably, the whole tragedy could have been avoided.
But then, when fans tried to climb out of the Leppings over the fences, the police responded as if it were hooliganism and actually forced them back off the fences. If the control room who could clearly see what was happening had told the referee to stop the game and opened the gates at the front of the terrace, the scale of the tragedy could have been massively reduced.
The cover up, redaction and other arse covering that followed was about covering up those police failures. By insisting that it was drunken hooligans and pushing that story out through the media and MPs they tried to avoid responsibility for their own failures. Most now accept it was duplicity, you on the other hand, just can’t grasp it.
400,000 pieces of evidence. Not one of them mentioned drunken, ticketless mobs but still some morons cling to the faint vestiges of belief that this was, indeed The Truth and somehow, for the first time ever, the Establishment had hidden the facts in order to lay the blame on itself.
The man admits he hasn’t been to a football match since Wycombe v Wolves back in the mists of time, but as usual he doesn’t prevent ignorance from allowing full reign to his prejudices. So desperate to believe The Sun and Thatcher stories it really won’t matter how much evidence there is to disprove them.
And you are still refusing to face the only single factor that counts – people were pushing and shoving. No-one was forcing them to do it, they could have walked in slowly and formed queues and waited until it was their turn. It happens, I guess, at just about every football ground in the land every Saturday and no-one gets hurt. But no, that lot (or a good, hefty proportion of them) pushed and they shoved **of their own volition** and today none of them, not a single one, has dared to come forward and admit, yes, I was one of the pushers and shovers. Instead, with exactly the same gruntish re-action that the police showed, they all cling together and cry that some-one else is to blame. And you, Councillor, condone it on the grounds of class solidarity, or some blx, and leave yourself looking and sounding exactly like the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Constabulary – my people right or wrong!
Like talking to a brick wall!
The important bit, leaving aside your nonsensical political rhetoric is contained in those two little words… “I guess”. Code for “I haven’t got a friggin’ clue”.
Leave it Bob! He’s not worth it.
I suspect you are right Stephen, I’ll take that advice. It just goes against my normal sunny disposition not to try to put people right when they are so hopelessly wrong.
They didn’t push, or shove. They walked. They walked down a steep slope, into a space where some had already died, and many more were to die. Not because of pushing and shoving, but because it was too small for the number of people in there and because escape was impossible. How difficult is that to comprehend?