The Truth
If you’ve been reading my blog you’ll know that I’m a West Ham Utd fan, but yesterday I saw something on TV that made me feel so proud of another team’s fans… the Kopites of Liverpool FC.
Yesterday was the Third Round of The FA Cup and Liverpool were playing against Arsenal. It was being televised live on the BBC. The Kopites decided it was a perfect opportunity to gain maximum exposure for the Hillsborough Justice Campaign and show their feelings to the BBC about them employing Kelvin MacKenzie.
They made banners and organised a mosaic made from red and white cards, spelling out “The Truth” to be displayed in The Kop, while chanting “Justice for the 96″ for the first 6 minutes of the match. The relevance of the 6 minutes is how long the Semi-Final FA Cup Tie in April 1989 was played for before being halted.
The Truth Mosaic in The Kop - Photo used with kind permission of Stephen Poynor (redforlife at RAWK)
In the weeks before Christmas it was revealed that Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of The Sun newspaper, had been hired by the BBC to present a Christmas Day programme on BBC Radio 5 Live. Liverpool fans were horrified to hear about this, how could the BBC employ this man to present a show for them at all, let alone on Christmas Day? On many forums petitions were organised (11,000 signatures were collected), and many sent emails to the BBC complaining about the choice of presenter. They did have a small success with these actions with the programme being moved to Christmas Eve.
On the 15th of April 1989 a dreadful tragedy took place at the very start of the FA Cup semi-final game held at Hillsborough and it cost 96 Liverpool fans their lives.
As of today, the bereaved families and those fans that were injured and/or mentally scarred by the events of that tragic day have not seen justice done. Despite an inquiry by Lord Justice Taylor, which stated that the official cause of the disaster was the failure of police control, many people still (wrongly) believe it was caused by the fans turning up drunk and late for the match and forcing open a gate which led to the fans being driven by momentum into the narrow tunnel that lead to two, already overcrowded, centre pens in the Leppings Lane End of the stadium. Yes, many fans were late arriving, mainly due to traffic delays and a large crowd did build up outside the turnstiles, but instead of delaying the kick-off, a decision was made, by the police, to open a set of exit gates and allow the fans to get in quickly. More and more fans were entering the pens, completely unaware that fans at the front of the pens were being crushed against the fencing at the front.
As fans were having the life literally squeezed out of them, the game kicked off. Despite pleas for help from the fans, the police did nothing to help. In fact not only did they do nothing to help, they actually tried pushing fans, who had managed to climb over the fence, back into the pens. 6 minutes into the game the police finally realised this was not an attempted pitch invasion, but was a life threatening situation and the game was stopped.
Still the catalogue of errors by the police continued. While fans were doing their best to help fellow fans escape, were attempting to save lives, give the kiss of life and CPR to dying men, women & children, the police refused to allow the many ambulances and paramedics waiting outside the ground access to the pitch and the dying and injured. Fans tore down advertising boards and used them as makeshift stretchers, running across the pitch with them trying to get them badly needed medical assistance.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, the national press carried stories over the following days of shocking behaviour by Liverpool fans towards the police & the victims. The editor of The Sun newspaper, Kelvin MacKenzie, even used the front page headline “THE TRUTH” with “Some fans picked pockets of victims”, “Some fans urinated on the brave cops” and “Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life” as sub-headlines. The story that followed these headlines claimed that fans had attacked, robbed and urinated on police officers, ambulance crews, firemen and victims. These claims were very quickly found to be untrue and all the newspapers published a full apology immediately, all except The Sun newspaper that is.
The people of Liverpool and Liverpool fans countrywide were incensed by the headlines and to this day a boycott of The Sun continues strongly, with people refusing to even read it, let alone buy it. A lot of newsagents in Liverpool still refuse to stock the paper.
It took just over 15 years for The Sun to publish an apology, a cynical attempt to regain a circulation that has never recovered from the boycott on Merseyside, an apology that went on to blame rival papers for a “campaign of hate” against The Sun.
Kelvin MacKenzie further angered the people of Liverpool and the fans as recently as November 2006 by saying he’d only apologised in 2004 because Rupert Murdoch, The Sun’s owner, had ordered him to. He said “I was not sorry then and I’m not sorry now”.
Relevant links:
Memorial Page
The Hillsborough Justice Campaign
RAWK
Video footage of ‘The Truth’ protest