Hillsborough: 23 years waiting for justice

Here is the voice of one fan: “We were forced right up against the barriers which prevent the fans from getting on to the pitch. During the match we had to constantly bear the crushing force of the crowd swaying forward from behind. It would not have been so bad if we had been able to move sideways, away from this central part, but it was so packed, and the constant pushing, jostling and surging of the fans made this prospect appear even more dangerous … Some fans actually collapsed or fainted and were passed over people’s heads towards the front of this section of the ground … Some fans tried to open this gate but it had been padlocked.”

Here is a second supporter who attended the same game, “The whole area was packed solid to the point where it was impossible to move and where I, and others around me, felt considerable concern for personal safety. As a result of the crush an umbrella I was holding in my hand was snapped in half against the crush barrier in front of me. I would emphasise that the concern over safety related to the sheer numbers admitted, and not to crowd behaviour which was good.”

Neither fan was describing the scenes at the Hillsborough tragedy of April 1989. Both of these fans were frightened rather by their memories of an FA cup semi-final at the same stadium, at the same stage of the competition in 1988, the year before, a near-miss which was ignored by the club, the FA, and every other public authority.

The press coverage of the newly-published report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel has focussed less on the several warning signs that had been missed, but on the activities of those bodies that were charged with evacuating people in the event of emergency. The Yorkshire police, in particular, come out of the report with their reputation seriously tarnished.

The Hillsborough disaster took place on a Saturday. The very next day, police officers were called to a briefing at which they were instructed not to take notes in their pocket books, but to destroy them, and to record their memories instead in the form of written witness statements.

By the Thursday, i.e. just five days after the disaster, a solicitor had been found, Peter Metcalf then a senior partner at Hammond Suddards (since retired), to advise officers that there was no need to retain their pocket books, as the case would be investigated by way of an inquest, i.e. in civil litigation, and so the ordinary procedures needed for the investigation of crimes did not apply.

On the Wednesday following, there was a meeting of senior police officers, including DCC Hayes and Chief Supt Mole, and their standing counsel, Bill Woodward QC. (Woodward, then at Ropewalk chambers, was later a deputy High Court judge).

According to the notes of that meeting disclosed to the Independent Panel, “DCC Hayes informed Mr Woodward that the ‘main players in this are doing their own accounts’. He asked ‘is that OK or would you rather someone take their statement?’. Mr Woodward replied, ‘It couldn’t be better. They can put all the things in that they want and we will sort them out’.”

What Woodward appears to have grasped intuitively was the reason senior police officers were so keen to keep their junior colleagues notes away from prying eyes. Many junior officers were profoundly unimpressed by their senior colleagues’ behaviour on the day. The views of junior officers could have embarrassed the force. It was incumbent on the senior officers and their lawyers to do all in their power to suppress any information which have embarrassed the force.

A further achievement of the Independent Panel has been to publish the alterations made by the police officers, so that we can see exactly what the rank-and-file thought of their commanders. They tell us that there were insufficient radios on supply, that there were too few officers at Leppings Lane, which was the centre of the tragedy, that the force’s organisation collapsed on the day, that senior officers showed no leadership, milled about, or excused themselves from the scene.

The most significant passages of the Independent Panel’s report are those dealing with the coroner’s finding at the original inquest that all 96 people who died had been killed by 3.15pm, i.e. within 15 minutes of the game’s scheduled start (it followed that the performance of the police, or of the ambulance service, which is also criticised by the Panel, was irrelevant, as all the victims had died too quickly for any medical attention to have done them any good even if there had been any). Based on this finding, the coroner reached a verdict of accidental death.

The medical basis of this finding was that the victims had all died of a single condition, traumatic asphyxia.

But, as the Panel have noted, 41 of the 96 victims showed signs of a medical condition “cerebral oedema” (i.e. brain swelling) which only sets in after sustained exposure to asphyxiation. Its presence shows that these victims were not killed suddenly, and certainly not by 3.15, but could have been rescued had the emergency services been operating properly.

Many Liverpool fans have long held the view that these failures were not accidental. The police force charged with public protection at Hillsborough was the same Yorkshire police force which had acted with lawlessness and judicial protection during the miners’ strike of 1984-5. Within hours of the tragedy, its leading officers were in contact with the Home Secretary Douglas Hurd (there is no note of what was said), and in no time at all, the police cover up had enlisted the support of the Conservative Party and of Tory newspapers, including (infamously) the Sun.

When the Taylor report, which blamed the force for the tragedy, was first published, Margaret Thatcher toned down an initial press statement welcoming it. “The broad thrust is devastating criticism of the police”, she wrote, “Is that for us to welcome?”

The new Panel’s findings cast more light on the police cover-up, including the decision to test the dead bodies for alcohol (including the youngest victim, who was just 10 years old). The idea behind the tests was, of course, to gather information which could be fed to friendly newspapers in order to nourish the lie that Liverpool fans were football “hooligans” and responsible for their own death.

The wrongness of the original inquest also cast light inevitably on the decision of the House of Lords in the case of Alcock v Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police, in which their Lordships ransacked the common law for doctrines of wafer thin plausibility tending to exclude the police from liability to the families of the victims.

The cover up did not emerge from nowhere but was shaped by a class enmity. The Liverpool fans of 1989 had a place in the Tory imagination as the successors to the Toxteth rioters of 1981 and the Militant-run Liverpool city councillors of 1983-1987 (and judging by Boris Johnson’s stint at the Spectator this memory has barely faded). Had the crash taken place at Glyndebourne or Wimbledon, it would not have taken 23 years for the truth to be admitted.

Some establishment voices have been quick to say that Hillsborough, while lamentable, could never happen again. But while football is certainly safer than it was (a regular away fan, I remember some of the grounds that Liverpool played at during the 1989 cup run, and you would not risk an animal with the wires and fences of the time), events such as the immediate press responses to the deaths of Jean Charles de Menezes or Ian Tomlinson show that our media remains willing to publish any lie, no matter how implausible, so long as the original source is a policeman.

Finally, the most remarkable feature of the report was that, having been set up in 2009, before the last election, its authors managed to survive the Tories’ “bonfire of the quangos”. Rev James Jones who chaired the panel has been quoted as saying, “It is no secret that the incoming government was not bound by the decisions of the previous government and therefore I had to see various secretaries of state to make the case for the panel continuing at public cost when there were pressures on the public purse”. The Tories must be furious that they let the Panel report.

first published in Socialist Lawyer, October 2012

Hillsborough; never forget

On 11 April 1989, I attended an FA cup quarter final between Millwall and Liverpool, at the Den. It was a horrible stadium with fans penned right up against the wire, including what seemed to be razor-tipped circular saws, rotating in the wind above our heads. They were the days when football was just another leisure activity: a game you could watch without paying more than £10, something you could just show up to without booking in advance.

 

I found myself talking to a man in his early 60s, who told me he was a former amateur referee. He was kind and generous; he saw me as a young fan attending a match alone, and took me under his wing.

The following game was Hillsborough. I remember watching the pictures as they unfolded. What I saw, and what I still see in all the pictures, is the countless tiny acts of human solidarity; the fans (as above) who tried to lift strangers out of the crush, the doctors who rushed on to the fields to volunteer. I didn’t see, although I could half-sense, the hostility of many officers to the dying fans, and the complete failure of the official health services, the ambulance service, etc, etc, to do anything useful at all.

I also recall reading in the papers that among those killed was John Anderson, aged 62, described by the papers as … a former amateur referee.

Looking back on the events of 23 years ago I have no way of knowing whether it was John Anderson who I had met just a week before. What I do know is that his death brought home to me just how close I too had been to tragedy.

And I am also certain that every football fan in the 80s, whatever team you supported, was treated like an animal by the clubs, and nobody was more than two or three pieces of intertwined bad luck away from being caught in something like Hillsborough.

I am not surprised to learn that senior police officers altered their colleagues’ statements, on a massive scale, to protect the force. But I am truly shocked by the new evidence that with proper medical care 41 of the 96 would have lived.

Why people love sport and why people hate sport: sport as the alienation of play

 Guest post by Gareth Edwards of Inside Left

[I asked Gareth to write something on the distinction between sport and play, which he uses in his research as a way of thinking about organised sport in general and the Olympics in particular]

I once took a friend, a confirmed sports sceptic, to a game of rugby. As we watched two front row forwards, a combined forty stone of muscle, sweat and intent, collide with unnerving force he turned to me and said, “I don’t know what these guys are doing, but it certainly isn’t playing.” In a summer full-to-bursting with sporting contests – the Olympics, the Euros, Wimbledon, the test series – we’ll hear countless commentators talk of players, playing and plays in sports. But what is the relationship between sport and play?

Answers to the question have historically fallen into one of two camps. The first, exemplified by the liberal-idealist Allen Guttmann, sees sports as being a distinct subset of play, marked by its physicality, its competitiveness and its rules. In short, it argues that while not all play can be considered sport, all sport is necessarily play. The second argument, and one that characterises much of what passes for sports theory on the left, is the complete rejection of a link between play and sport. This is typified by the work of Jean-Marie Brohm whose book Sport – A Prison of Measured Time is held in far greater esteem than it deserves. In it he makes the point that “a child who practices sport is no longer playing but is taking his place in a world of serious matters”.

The problem facing such writers is that their theory of play is so lacklustre – or in Brohm’s case, entirely absent – that the attempts to analyse the nature of sport inevitably fail. Instead of theorising play in any meaningful way they are reduced to listing a set of characteristics that are used to describe, rather than define, play. These characteristics include spontaneity, a certain sense of freedom, fun, a separation from everyday life and make-believe, although this is by no means an exhaustive list. In the absence of a working definition, nearly all the serious writers on the topic fall back on the same four words: play is not work. Or to give it a sophisticated feel, they talk of play as being a non-productive or non-utilitarian activity. And when they’re feeling particularly wordy, they describe play as being autotelic, i.e. it is an activity performed for its own sake.

This commonsense dichotomy between work and play might seem to be a fair approximation to reality but it is fraught with problems, and it is possible to arrive at a far more satisfying and insightful definition of play by using Marxist concepts. I would argue that play is the unalienated, simultaneous production and consumption of use value. I’m aware that such a phrase is not only horribly unwieldy but also requires a fair amount of ‘unpacking’.

By defining play as a use value we recognise it as fulfilling a human need. As Trotsky notes in The Problems of Everyday Life, “The longing for amusement, diversion and fun is the most legitimate desire of human nature.”  Whether this need for play is an innate biological drive or socially and historically conditioned is unimportant, the fact is that the want for pleasure and excitement exists. That this creative drive should manifest itself in so many forms is an indicator of humanity’s ingenuity and inventiveness. It is, therefore, possible to see how play is the creation of use value, as Marx outlines:

“Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use values, but use values for others, social use values.”

By stating that play is an unalienated activity one is able to both incorporate and transcend the quality of freedom that writers identify. But rather than limiting the question of freedom to whether one chooses to play or not, it encompasses the freedom of the players to create and control their play environment. Either individually or collectively people choose how they play; there are no structures delimiting play’s potentiality, nor are managers and supervisors issuing instructions as to the players’ conduct. Furthermore the separation of producer from product, a key feature of alienation, is missing as play belongs immediately and irrevocably to the players.

In similar fashion the notion of the simultaneous production and consumption of use values allows us to overcome the limitations of the autotelic model. Play is still seen as an end in itself, but this definition allows one to avoid being caught in the theoretical trap of the players’ intentions. Equally it renders as redundant the notion that play is an essentially non-instrumental activity. Instead play differentiates itself from other spheres of human activity not so much through what is (or is not) produced but in the way it is consumed. Here the very act of production is the act of consumption. In a dialectical sense they occupy the same moment. Labour produces use values that may be consumed at some indeterminate point in the future but in play production and consumption occur simultaneously. The very act of playing is the satisfaction of the need to play.

How then does this relate to sport? The key to our understanding is, as Richard Gruneau has written, the fact that “the structuring of sport has become increasingly systematised, formalised, and removed from the direct control of the individual players.” Governing bodies exercise control over sports across the globe setting rules and issuing directives. In sport the players are not free to participate, instead they are faced with a series of gatekeepers – managers, coaches, selectors. Some of these people then exercise control over the way in which players play. Tactics are prescribed and, of course, plans and set pieces are part and parcel of the contemporary sporting world. You could easily argue that they predominate. Nowhere is this clearer than in the use of the word ‘play’ in the American version of football. Here a verb suggestive of spontaneity is transformed into a noun denoting a preordained manoeuvre.

At the heart of sport is a constant tension between play and competition. As the importance of the contest – and the financial stakes involved – increases so playfulness gives way to “playing the percentages”, “playing it safe” and “stopping the other team from playing”. But it would be wrong, I think, to say that there is no element of play apparent in sports. When commentators talk of an inspired move or a piece of ingenuity, it is the case that the ludic is reasserting itself in the face of the demands of competition. It should come as no surprise that those sportspeople who acquire iconic status (Best, Botham, Ali) are the ones who look as though they are genuinely ‘playing’ even in the most serious and competitive situation. The nature of the sporting contest, with its unfolding drama and the need for instantaneous individual and collective decision-making, means that individuality and personality can never be wholly removed from a game. It is possible for the quarterback to change the play.

The world of professional sports is not best understood as existing in the realm of pure play, or as its negation. If we use Marx’s criteria and look at “the relation of labour to the act of production in the labour process” then professional sports are the alienation of play.

Equally the use values produced by those playing sports no longer belong to them. Play is now a spectacle, and in turn, therefore, a commodity. In professional sports use values do not present as the fulfilment of the need of the player, but as the satisfaction of the demands of capital, where spectators are the consumers of a product. In professional sports, play is mediated through the prism of capitalist relations and placed on the market as a commodity. The sporting spectacle is no longer the by-product of play; it is the product, deliberately cultivated, and it is now play which is incidental. As Gideon Haigh laments of one sport, “cricket must be sold in order to be played.”

As ‘work’ is the contemporary manifestation of labour, so sport is a historically conditioned form of play. We may still point to its physicality, its competitive nature and the development of physical and intellectual skills as important characteristics, but when defining its relationship to play these alone are insufficient. Instead professional sport is commodified, alienated play. We may, perhaps, be so bold as to re-write the famous aphorism of Marx and say, “Players play, but not in the conditions of their own choosing”.

This isn’t simply an academic exercise, nor is it an exercise in self-justification, as we lefties attempt to excuse our guilty passion for competitive sport. The more we can understand the link between play and sport the more we safeguard against writing sports fans off as mere dupes in front of capitalist ideology and the better fitted we are to orientate ourselves on sport’s struggles and contradictions, whether they take place on the pitch, in the stands, or – increasingly – in the boardroom.