#ynwa:

‘When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die’

-        Jean Paul Sartre

I have no direct experience of Hillsborough.  I’ll leave that to people who were actually there.  My experience is second-hand, shop-soiled by both where I live and who I am; both as a political and as a human animal.  There are a number of core things I believe in, as a result of what happened 29 years ago.

Firstly, it’s that The Sun is still the great, beating heart of darkness in the English consciousness.  Their headline, The Truth is still the greatest lie ever printed in a British newspaper. They’ve apologised several times, but as we say in Liverpool ‘they can shove it where Paddy shoved his ninepence’.  The Sun made us the enemy.  Thirty years ago, we were alongside other groups like Asians, gays and lesbians.  Now: this metaphorical ‘enemy’ is Muslims, transgender people, anyone with a mental illness.  

I believe Rupert Murdoch would regard this as progress.

It’s not the most egregious British newspaper.  I believe that is The Daily Mail, a paper which supported fascism; which both hates women and sexualises teenage girls at the same time.    But The Sun told a lie to sell newspapers.  It insulted a city and trivialised the grief of people to do so.  That is unforgivable.

I lived in Liverpool at the time.  I can remember the public burning of The Sun, the endless funerals, and the second-hand news of who had died and who had survived.  It’s a special city, Liverpool.  It’s like a column of Roman soldiers that closes ranks when one of us is attacked.  I saw this again four years later, when James Bulger was murdered.  I saw it again, ten years later when Ken Bigley was murdered by insurgents in Iraq.

It is still fashionable to insult our grief. Those who do, quite rightly suffer the wrath of our bombast.  Boris Johnson, a man with no principles, accused of us ‘wallowing in our grief’.  Billy Connolly was heckled off stage in London, after wishing that Bigley’s captors ‘would just get on with it’.  Alleged comedian Alan Davies played to a half-empty Liverpool Empire, after saying about Hillsborough ‘It gets on my tits, that shit’ on an Arsenal podcast. It seems that we are still fair game, even in the era of more minutes silence than you can throw a referee’s whistle at; fields of flowers sellotaped to lampposts and the oxymoronic phrase ‘thoughts and prayers’. To paraphrase Orwell: English grief good, Scouse grief bad.

On a side note, every time Liverpool plays Man Utd, Man City or Chelsea they sing songs about Hillsborough.  A minority of Liverpool fans sing songs about the Munich Air Disaster.  You do not fight shite with shite.  There needs to be a cultural change, a spirit of mutual respect.  It’s eleven humans against eleven, not city against city, class against class, death against death.

Ultimately, Hillsborough needs to be seen in the context of other English tragedies.  Five years prior to Hillsborough, Miners at Orgreave were beaten, attacked with dogs, arrested and charged for the mere crime of defending their livelihoods and communities. Again, South Yorkshire Police closed ranks to protect its members.  Last year, we had the fire at Grenfell Tower.  People died, at home, alone in the middle of the night.  I can already see the powers that be, closing ranks, mouthing platitudes and hoping it will all go away.

The over whelming message of Hillsborough, Orgreave and Grenfell is that if you are working class, you can be insulted, belittled, arrested, charged and ultimately killed by the upper classes. Your grief costs less than theirs.  You can be treated with impunity, simply due to the amount of zeroes in your bank account. On the bright side, we have our uses; the English working class.  We provide wealth and labour to the wealthy.  We can create convenient outrage for press barons.  We can be told that voting for Brexit - an act of economic and cultural hari-kari would be a good thing – by failed stockbrockers, insurance salesmen and overgrown public schoolboys.

However – we will not go away quietly, doffing our metaphorical cap. We are not as bovine as we seem.  We can stand together as one class, one group of people, in the face of almost insurmountable forces and odds.  #ynwa is not just a hastag; or even a song.  It should be a belief. 

Justice can be delayed, but not denied.