Hillsborough document release

[mossdog]

Do read this and come back and comment. It is why the connection with the miners is made.

 

They lied and fabricated evidence in much the same way. Endemic you might say. And written well before the full story was known.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2012/apr/12/hillsborough-battle-orgreave

I am fully aware of the connection the Guardian has made in their report.........the usual left trying to nail the right flavour,but people posting on here saying Thatcher knew about a cover up and should be prosecuted are living in the realms of fantasy!the average cop had a terrible job to do both at Hillsborough and in the miners strike and I don't think it's at all helpfull to drag the two together as the Guardian would like to do!

Finally here's a little piece I came across by someone...............

There's a brilliant episode of Life on Mars based all around football hooliganism, at it's conclusion Sam Tyler berates a ringleader how it was people like him who took football away from the genuine fans and made it inevitable that the authorities would respond in a harsh way and then "One day, something happens..." The responsibility for Hillsborough lies solely with Duckenfeld and the other senior officers on duty that day, but had some people not spent the previous 20 years using football as a vehicle for their own agendas then football fans wouldn't have been corralled into cages on that day and the police attitude on the day would have been very different, every football fan who invaded a pitch, beat up people on the terraces or behaved like morons in the streets outside was responsible for football having the poor reputation it did and 96 people would have come home safe that day.

[StuB]

By Mark FranklandTHESE days I manage a charity. We work a lot with veterans. I spend much of my time just sitting quietly and listening. The lads tell me about how their brains have got all screwed up by the things they have witnessed. The things they have done. They go back to the places from their past which I once watched on the news. Ireland and the Falklands and Bosnia and Iraq and Afghanistan. Bad, bad days. Times when their lives arrived at the ultimate dark place where nothing makes any kind of sense. Only the horror. And night after night their fractured brains drag them back to those fleeting moments when the horror enveloped everything else. A horror that sticks to the memory cells like glue. Dogged. Relentless. Memories summoned by a certain smell, a certain shift in the wind, a certain kind of light, a certain type of noise.And I never, ever say that I understand. Because I don’t. Like most of my generation, I am blessed for I have never been sent to a war. The primordial desperation of the battlefield is alien to me. I’ve never seen a mate blown to bits. I’ve never had to digest the damage a short burst of my SA80 has inflicted on a fellow human being. I’ve never seen people reduced to pieces.But today I realised that maybe I understand I little better than I realised.This morning various Twitter messages recommended last night’s ITV documentary on Hillsborough. So I used a spare hour to call it up online and watch. It isn’t the first such documentary. Over the years there have been lots. And Docu-Dramas. And articles in the press and discussions in the studios. And a couple of years ago thirty thousand of us turned out at Anfield because twenty years had slipped by.I’ve always been reasonably OK before. Well, the 20th Anniversary hit me pretty hard to be honest. The fact that I am writing this is proof that I lived to tell the tale. I lost no family that day. No close mates either. It was of course the worst day of my life by a country mile and I fervently hope it will remain that way. I got by. In the days that followed I was consumed by a raging anger more than anything else. We all were. Anyone who followed their team through those dark days of the Eighties was well enough used to the antics of the police. We were treated like sub human pond life. We were herded about by snapping Alsatian dogs and police horses. We were penned in. I worked in the animal feed business back then and it always struck me that the animal rights activists would have a duck fit if cows were ever treated in the way that football fans were treated. Almost every cattle shed I ever stood in was an upgrade from the terraces we visited on Saturday afternoons.Hillsborough was the culmination. 20,000 of us were placed in the care of a police force that had taken itself beyond the law. They were the ones who built conservatories on the back of their Miner’s Strike overtime. They had been granted years of knocking people around whilst a blind eye was always turned. They were the masters of their South Yorkshire universe and seemingly convinced that everyone else’s rules were for everyone else. Not them. On that day I asked a copper if my dad could take a short cut through the barriers to the stand where he was sitting. Dad was on his crutches at the time. Sixty years old and riddled with arthritis. And the response of South Yorkshire’s finest to my polite request?“**** off you Scouse *******.”I made to argue the case and his big hands hovered over his truncheon. Dad eased me away. He knew the score. Everyone did. This is South Yorkshire. These ******** are a law unto themselves. Maggie’s shock troops with the memory of their triumph at Orgreave fresh upon them.20,000 of us were to be fed through four useless, rusting turnstiles. Outside the turnstiles was a walled in yard. Like the kind of place you gather cattle outside an abattoir. The police were supposed to make it safe but they didn’t. The South Yorkshire police weren’t about keeping their fellow citizens safe. They were more into beating them black and blue. Doing their very own version of the Charge of the Light Brigade against massed striking miners in T Shirts and trainers. Hammering their riot shields with batons and howling out “Zooooloooo!” Waving their twenty quid notes and laughing at those who wanted no more than to save their jobs and communities.So they didn’t bother with the health and safety bit.They blew it. They cocked it up. Because in the end they didn’t give a ****. We were nothing to them. Scouse Scum.Once everything started to go to hell the bosses panicked and opened up the gate and duly delivered 2000 fans into the tunnel of death. Into the cages. Into hell. Into the next world.Then they lied about it and carried on lying for 23 years.Last night’s programme was different to the others I have watched. There was all sorts of CCTV I have never seen before. I kept expecting to see a fleeting glimpse of a much younger me. Frozen in a moment of time. Shocked. Confused. Scared. Horrified.Watching it made me shake. Lost pictures flickered back to life. Lost memories came up and out of the swamp. A return to the unimaginable horror of six minutes past three on a sunny, sunny spring afternoon in Sheffield. In South Yorkshire. In times gone by.In the days that followed I was really British about it. I wrote letters. And for the one and only time in my life I used the letters after my name. I signed off Mark Frankland BA Cantab. As in this guy was at Cambridge University so maybe you might take time out to listen to what he is saying. Because nobody was interested in listening to a word we had to say in those desperate days after six minutes past three on that sunny, sunny afternoon in South Yorkshire.And the response was very British too. I got a call from Paddy Barclay who was brilliant. I got a personal letter from Michael Heseltine who vowed to do all he could. I got a secretary’s one liner from Kinnock and Thatcher. Then on the Wednesday, me and dad went along to a lunch thing that our local MP put on every month for local businesses. The guest speaker was David Waddington who was the Home Secretary. I guess there must have been over a hundred of us in the room and from what I can remember his speech was as dull as ditchwater. I wasn’t much in the mood for his self-satisfied waffle. No doubt he crowed a lot about how many the Tories were locking up and how far they were flinging away the key.At last he sat down and coffee was served. I have a memory of me and dad ordering in scotches. And then all of a sudden the Right Honourable David Waddington, Her Majesty’s Home Secretary for Great Britain and Northern Ireland, marched across the room to our table and sat down. No doubt he wanted to schmooze some party donor or something.But no. Not that. He fixed me with a stare from his small, nasty eyes.“You were at Hillsborough weren’t you?”“Excuse me?”A hint of anger. A ‘do you know who you are talking to?’ sort of look. And then how the hell did he know anyway? But he did know of course. Because those were still the days of the IRA who would have liked nothing better than to blow Maggie’s Home Secretary into a million pieces. So they had security checked the guest list. And something had red flagged my name. I wonder what it had flagged? Cambridge Man causing trouble over the Hillsborough thing? He was certainly not in tea and sympathy mode. Soon he was wagging a fat, angry finger in my face and lecturing me about how everything was down to drunken Scouse fans. Christ it made me mad. I’m not any kind of violent guy but I felt like planting the smug *******. A couple of bland faced types in tight suits seemed to stiffen. For the second time in four days Dad put a hand on my shoulder. Then it was the South Yorkshire police. Now it was the bloody Home Secretary. And the message was the same bloody message. We are us. You are them. The Enemy Within. So watch it. We don’t like your type. Your type should know your place…In the end I asked him a very simple question. I asked where he had been at six minutes past three on a sunny, sunny Saturday afternoon in South Yorkshire. And with anger written through every line of his face he confirmed that he had not in fact been in the killer cages of the Leppings Lane end. And with that I suggested that he might refrain from lecturing me about what had happened. And grudgingly he stood up and stomped away. Back South. Back to London.It was my first experience of the secret side of the British State where the dark stuff goes down. I felt a sort of chill run down my spine. Already the cover up was being quietly snapped into place. The Establishment was gearing up to look after its own. Just like always. Like Peterloo and Amritsar and Bloody Sunday. We were to be added to a long, long list.It’s gone on for twenty three long years. We have sung out ‘Justice for the 96’ and ‘Stand up for the 96’ and we have boycotted the Sun. And nobody has ever gone to jail or been held to account. Pensions have been paid in full and that worthless piece of pondlife ****e Kelvin McKenzie gets to strut his stuff on Question Time.The documentary finished and I stared at the screen for a while. Part angry. Part rattled. Mostly completely haunted. Because those grainy CCTV images had lifted me up and taken me all the way back to that sunny, sunny afternoon in South Yorkshire.The day the sky fell in.

[Michael_W]

Well the truth is out. Now comes justice. With courage. About time. I hope the complicit are able to stand up and admit it. Unfortunately rats like patnick, bettison etc can face the sun even with the mark of Cain burned into their forheads.

 

How do you think justice should be served ?

Good post by mossdog by the way, lots of opinions on here and elsewhere, but those of you who were not around football in the 70s and 80s have only the media babble to base your opinions on !

[liam1412]

I am fully aware of the connection the Guardian has made in their report.........the usual left trying to nail the right flavour,but people posting on here saying Thatcher knew about a cover up and should be prosecuted are living in the realms of fantasy!the average cop had a terrible job to do both at Hillsborough and in the miners strike and I don't think it's at all helpfull to drag the two together as the Guardian would like to do!

Finally here's a little piece I came across by someone...............

There's a brilliant episode of Life on Mars based all around football hooliganism, at it's conclusion Sam Tyler berates a ringleader how it was people like him who took football away from the genuine fans and made it inevitable that the authorities would respond in a harsh way and then "One day, something happens..." The responsibility for Hillsborough lies solely with Duckenfeld and the other senior officers on duty that day, but had some people not spent the previous 20 years using football as a vehicle for their own agendas then football fans wouldn't have been corralled into cages on that day and the police attitude on the day would have been very different, every football fan who invaded a pitch, beat up people on the terraces or behaved like morons in the streets outside was responsible for football having the poor reputation it did and 96 people would have come home safe that day.

 

100% agree with everything you have said. Post of the thread

[Kevin123]

http://postcodegazette.com/news/9002450709/councillor-leads-charge-to-remove-knighthood-from-controversial-ex-mp-AT-sheffield-sheffield-town-hall/

[rossyrooney]

Fair dos Karlo...lots of them would have been on the pitch doing what they could to help the fans and victims.

The rank and file copper must have been bewildered,not one on the pitch would have experienced anything like this in their lives.

It's the higher ups that need bringing to book along with Patnick.

 

Its interesting that you try to smear Patnick. Having read his testimony he merely reported what he had been told by the police along with the caveat that he couldn't confirm it to be true. Even the Sun journalist who wrote up the story was appalled with the spin the Sun put on this.

 

But whatever he was an accessory after the fact. The lives had already been lost.

 

Perhaps you should try pointing a finger at Clive Betts. He ran Sheffield Council at the time, and it was they that turned a blind eye to the lack of safety certificate at Hillsborough, the inadequacy of the policing and the lack of ambulance cover. They were accessories before the fact and their negligence cost 96 lives. Had the council acted properly and not failed in its duty no lives would have been lost.

 

My opinion of Betts' arrogance when dismissing his part in the safety permit could not possibly be aired on these pages,let's just say i consider it below contempt.

As for Patnick,we will have to agree to disagree,in a manner of such enormity a trained politician should have made 100% sure of any statement before issuing it.If you consider it a simple mistake then surely you must be shocked by the naivety of the man.

[Coxy]

An open letter to Jeremy Clifford, Editor of the Sheffield Star

 

Dear Mr Clifford,

 

On a day when other organisations were apologising for their actions before, during and after the Hillsborough Tragedy, the lack of any apology from the Sheffield Star is conspicuous by its absence.

 

The Sun Newspaper have apologised unreservedly for their reporting of the Hillsborough tragedy and described it as "the blackest day in this newspaper's history". However late and hollow this apology is I am saddened and disappointed to see that the Sheffield Star has made no reference to its own reporting of the tragedy.

 

Under the front page headline "Fans in Drunken Attacks on Police: Ticketless thugs staged crush to gain entry" your newspaper reported the allegations of the police which have now been entirely discredited. Yet the Sheffield Star has chosen to make no reference to this in the days following the publication of the Hillsborough Independent Panel Report.

 

Although the Sheffield Star's reporting may have been made with a "lesser degree of certainty" to that of the Sun’s, the fact remains that these lies were printed on the front page, under a headline which forced these untruths firmly into the public eye.

 

The Hillsborough Independent Panel found no evidence to support the story that your newspaper ran on the 18th April 1989 and yet your organisation has done nothing to distance itself or apologise for reporting these lies.

 

It is almost beyond belief that in May 2012 you saw fit publish an apology to “Sheffield United Football Club, its fans and people who were upset by this” for an advert placed in your newspaper by Sheffield Wednesday supporters mocking Sheffield United’s inability to gain promotion, and yet you have chosen to ignore the hurt and upset that you caused the families and friends of the 96 dead, and the people of Liverpool, by your reporting of the despicable lies surrounding the events of this day.

 

Many Sheffield organisations have come under the spotlight as a result of the publication of the Hillsborough Independent Panel Report, and most have had the dignity and grace to apologise for the part that they played in the disaster. Today your organisation should feel ashamed that you have not sought to do the same.

 

The Sheffield Star 18/04/1989;

http://hillsborough.independent.gov.uk/repository/docs/PRE000000030001.pdf

[Doris Night]

An open letter to Jeremy Clifford, Editor of the Sheffield Star

 

Dear Mr Clifford,

 

On a day when other organisations were apologising for their actions before, during and after the Hillsborough Tragedy, the lack of any apology from the Sheffield Star is conspicuous by its absence.

 

The Sun Newspaper have apologised unreservedly for their reporting of the Hillsborough tragedy and described it as "the blackest day in this newspaper's history". However late and hollow this apology is I am saddened and disappointed to see that the Sheffield Star has made no reference to its own reporting of the tragedy.

 

Under the front page headline "Fans in Drunken Attacks on Police: Ticketless thugs staged crush to gain entry" your newspaper reported the allegations of the police which have now been entirely discredited. Yet the Sheffield Star has chosen to make no reference to this in the days following the publication of the Hillsborough Independent Panel Report.

 

Although the Sheffield Star's reporting may have been made with a "lesser degree of certainty" to that of the Sun’s, the fact remains that these lies were printed on the front page, under a headline which forced these untruths firmly into the public eye.

 

The Hillsborough Independent Panel found no evidence to support the story that your newspaper ran on the 18th April 1989 and yet your organisation has done nothing to distance itself or apologise for reporting these lies.

 

It is almost beyond belief that in May 2012 you saw fit publish an apology to “Sheffield United Football Club, its fans and people who were upset by this” for an advert placed in your newspaper by Sheffield Wednesday supporters mocking Sheffield United’s inability to gain promotion, and yet you have chosen to ignore the hurt and upset that you caused the families and friends of the 96 dead, and the people of Liverpool, by your reporting of the despicable lies surrounding the events of this day.

 

Many Sheffield organisations have come under the spotlight as a result of the publication of the Hillsborough Independent Panel Report, and most have had the dignity and grace to apologise for the part that they played in the disaster. Today your organisation should feel ashamed that you have not sought to do the same.

 

The Sheffield Star 18/04/1989;

http://hillsborough.independent.gov.uk/repository/docs/PRE000000030001.pdf

 

Bet they don't print it...

 

I remember a while ago the Star had a campaign about Prostitution (rightly) I pointed out in a letter, their classified ads were full of adverts for Escort Agencies and the like...They got back to me by email and said Editorial policy can't be dictated by Commercial policy...

 

They didn't print my letter either.

[rossyrooney]

An open letter to Jeremy Clifford, Editor of the Sheffield Star

 

Well said Coxy.

 

But i think it would have far more impact if you had given it it's own thread,that way it would have invited more posters to comment.........

[pitsmoorlad]

There's something puzzling me. If all the Liverpool fans turned up with tickets, why, when there's 10 minutes to kick off, did they walk past all the turnstiles and doors that would have got them in with their tickets, and then stand outside a locked gate ?