The truth of Hillsborough and a corrupt establishment

29_april_2016 A letter a day to number 10. No 1,417

Friday 29 April 2016.

Dear Mr Cameron,

Following the absolute vindication of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster after a sustained police cover up and their deliberate lies, the fight is far from over because the battle is against unaccountable power which is as bad today, if not worse, than it was in 1989.

It raises, for me, other unfinished business, in particular the miners strike and the brutal and bloody Battle of Orgreave 1984 and the Battle of the Beanfield 1985 when the police were used as a state army to crush and brutalise the lives of ordinary people.

Following the Hillsborough verdict Kelvin MacKenzie who was the then editor of the Sun has claimed he “got caught up” in the Hillsborough cover-up. Call it what he will, it didn’t stop the usual inflammatory and the incendiary violence of the front page of the Sun at a time when all of Liverpool was grieving the loss of 96 lives. But what should we expect from someone who was really just a pimp for Rupert Murdoch?

If we want the establishment view we need to turn to Sir Bernard Ingham, Thatchers press secretary during the miners strike. It was Ingham who called the Hillsborough fans “tanked up yobs” and who refused to apologise after the verdict, thus revealing the triumph of prejudice over reason and even common decency, a prejudice which is displayed in parliament daily by you and your party of the ultra privileged in heinous displays of contempt for the lives of ordinary people.

Class warfare is alive and well, as Suzanne Moore wrote in the Guardian, “Finally, 27 long years later, the cold class contempt that Hillsborough came to signify is laid out for all to see.” Nothing has changed, mealy mouthed, two faced press statements from you, not the least, cannot disguise that the ‘long overdue justice’, as you put it, was hampered by an establishment which had and has no interest in justice for ordinary people.

The class war isn’t nearly done and the thought that in private you might consider justice to have been done is too ludicrous to contemplate. Bob Pearce has apparently asked you the same question 30 times in 20 letters over 3 years, “Mr Cameron, do you agree that the actions of the ordinary men and women at Hillsborough on 15th April 1989 deserve recognition in the form of a collective award in the same manner as other heroic acts? Yes or no?” Bob Pearce writes, “I have still had no answer.” Silence often speaks very much louder than words, Mr Cameron. Osborne wept at Thatchers funeral, but there will be no establishment tears over Hillsborough, just hypocrisy, because your government is the enemy of the people.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/28/hillsborough-could-happen-again-police-views-liverpool-fans

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/22/orgreave-truth-police-miners-strike