A few days on from the Hillsborough report, one powerful image abides. It is of three stoic women, speaking with power and clarity about the struggles they've endured these past 23 years. Two of them, Margaret Aspinall and Anne Williams, lost their sons, respectively James, 18, and Kevin, 15, at the 1989 FA Cup semi-final.
The third woman, Sheila Coleman, spokeswoman for the Hillsborough Justice Campaign, has faced a different kind of struggle. Her task has been to keep the appalling injustices of the disaster in the public eye, so that fellow mothers such as Margaret and Anne could, finally, get the world to accept what they had been saying with patient insistence. That their sons went to that football match in peace; that they did not contribute to their own deaths; that their lives could have been saved, and that the real architects of the Hillsborough tragedy are still at large, still unaccountable.
This was a tragedy with deep roots. For those who lean to the left, it's too easy to utter the word "Thatcher" and to link her government with everything wretched that happened in the 1980s. But it's enough, for now, to note that the style of government she fostered brought a confrontational atmosphere to everyday life. In the form of Thatcher herself, and her ally Norman Tebbit, there was little trace of any form of patrician Tory benevolence. Their credo seemed more akin to a rigid take on national identity whereby every True Brit toed the line and worked hard, uncomplainingly, for whatever they were given. Anyone who bucked against the Tories' values was deemed a "wrecker." The play-out to the Tom Robinson Band's 1979 song Power In The Darkness lists a catalogue of "wreckers" including "… football hooligans, juvenile delinquents, lesbians and left-wing scum."
Among those toeing the line, of course, were the police. There are reasons for their apparent sense of immunity. Early on, the Conservatives implemented a 45% pay rise for the force. Unsurprisingly, this fostered a spirit of kinship and loyalty among the nation's constabularies. Simultaneously, the government started into its programme of wage cuts and closures in the nationalised industries. Which inevitably set police on a collision course with pickets as industrial action escalated in the early 1980s.
Also, there seemed little sympathy in their ranks for those living in the nation's poorest communities. Complaints were rife that newly ordained snatch squads were abusing their powers of stop-and-search (the hugely unpopular "Suss" process) to humiliate peaceable citizens. Resentment smouldered in multi-ethnic quarters such as Brixton and St Paul's, Bristol, where the overriding feeling was that law and order did not apply to the forces tasked with imposing it.
With unemployment rocketing from 1.5 million in May 1979 to nearly 3 million by the end of 1980, these communities further felt a complete disenfranchisement from any likelihood of work. So the Brixton riots of April 1981 came as no surprise; neither did the disturbances that flared up in Toxteth, Liverpool, a few months later.
A year or two after Power In The Darkness, Tom Robinson might have added "scousers" to that ironic list of demons. The 1980s oversaw a radical transformation in Liverpool's national standing and its citizens' popular perception. Gone were the lovable Merseybeat bands of the 1960s, and the daffy but adorable Liver Birds. In their place came a family of incorrigible scroungers, in Bread, followed by a litany of skivers, whingers and whiners in Brookside and Boys from the Blackstuff.
Just as the mop top came to symbolise a certain Liverpudlian elan, so the hackneyed bubble perm, worn with a sloppy tracksuit and a defiant moustache, stereotyped the workshy scouser of Thatcher's Britain. Whereas the previous generation's assumption was that Liverpudlians were gregarious, generous, witty and creative, the 1980s version were viewed as chippy, aggressive and innately inclined towards criminality.
And then there was Militant. Even among lifelong Labour voters, opinions are polarised to this day over Liverpool's Militant-dominated city council of the early 1980s. Most believe their regime was in part responsible for Liverpool's acute downturn. But we now know that, in the wake of the Toxteth riots, Chancellor Geoffrey Howe urged Thatcher to abandon Liverpool to a programme of "managed decline." In those circumstances, it was going to take a different brand of local government simply to arrest that decline, let alone reverse it. Yet the sharp suits and fondness for the limelight of the council's de facto leader Derek Hatton only added fuel to the anti-Liverpudlian pyre.
By that time Mrs Thatcher had been re-elected, and the growing sense that the police did her bidding was palpable. Having gained experience and, perhaps, harbouring grudges from the riots of 1981, the mounted police took no nonsense from the pickets at Orgreave at the culmination of the miners' strike of 1984. Their actions were so violent that the Police And Criminal Evidence Act was re-drafted to include a code of conduct for police, as well as suspects.
In football, in the English first division, crowds were on the decline and hooliganism was on the rise. With outside broadcast units joining the rest of nation on strike in the 1980s, it went almost unnoticed that Liverpool and Everton won the league championship almost every year.
But the 1984-85 season was marred by violence at football grounds, culminating in tragedy when 39 Juventus supporters died at the European Cup final in Brussels after they were charged by Liverpool fans. Mrs Thatcher demanded solutions to the British Disease, and nothing – ID cards, electric fences – was considered too draconian. In the event, the culture of football violence ended organically the following season when ecstasy-fuelled Acid House ushered in a new era of communality.
It was against this social backdrop, then, that the events of 15 April 1989 unfolded at Hillsborough. Four of us set off by car from Liverpool that morning. There was a prolonged tailback across the Snake Pass, meaning we didn't get into Sheffield until after one. It's absurd to suggest that nobody approaching the ground had had a drink, but I'd seriously doubt that anybody had time to get seriously drunk. It's equally pat to say that everyone had tickets – but the touts soon put paid to that. They were virtually giving tickets away on the walk-up to Hillsborough.
As the Leppings Lane end of the ground came into sight, and the singing amplified, so the crowd flow simply stopped. We waited. There was no information. Understandably, the police were jumpy. These were football hooligans they were facing down. Liverpool fans. Scousers. Militants. The worst sort of wreckers. Everybody knows, now, what happened next.
The prime minister's apology carried symbolic value as it represented an owning-up to corruption that went to the heart of the Establishment. That, for me, was a historic admission. As for the later apologies – from Sun editors past and present Dominic Mohan and Kelvin MacKenzie, the FA – they're worthless. They only came as a result of the culprits finally realising they had no choice but to apologise.
On that day in 89, I was among the fortunate ones who went left, where others went straight ahead. For 23 years, those of us who were at that game to support Liverpool have had to endure, at best, the suggestion that somehow we were responsible for the deaths of our fellow fans. Or to listen to the wretched line of "just get over it". For Margaret Aspinall and Anne Williams, it has been far, far worse. I'm in awe of them, and Sheila Coleman – the women who just wouldn't let it lie.
Kevin Sampson @'The Guardian'
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