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Friday, 14 September 2012

THE HILLSBOROUGH DISASTER: BLOOD ON THE SUN

The context of this post is the decade of the 1980’s. Many of you weren’t yet born, and because culturally, politically and psychologically the time was to have such great consequences for the future, many of you simply may not want to know or be unable to understand what I’m saying, and that’s not being patronising but honest. However some of you in your thirties and forties might remember the hell, and care about what actually happened.

The decade of the 1980’s was about Margaret Thatcher and the police; it was about Rupert Murdoch, the police, striking print workers and the Sun newspaper; it was about Margaret Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch, the Sun newspaper, the police and the Miner’s Strike. And of course it was about the Hillsborough Disaster, the police and the Sun newspaper. Altogether it was about an alliance between Margaret Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch, the police and the Sun newspaper and their clash with wide sections of the British working class,  a majority of whom, let it be not forgotten, voted to elect her on no less than three occasions to be Prime Minister of this country.

Looking back from the thirty years perspective of this present decade and the current revelations of a long time police and media cover up and gross falsification of the Hillsborough tragedy, many of our youth, indeed our own children if we brought them up to care, may be justified at pointing a finger at their elders and asking us WHY? Why did so many of you go along with Margaret Thatcher and her directing the police against striking workers? Go along with Rupert Murdoch and the often vicious, visceral headlines of his Sun newspaper? Why indeed? Those of you in your forties and fifties might have good reason to feel ashamed, but then you really know why, don’t you?

Yes you really know why! Bad as it sounds, you were bought. Margaret Thatcher and her Governments and up for hire judiciary attacked the Trades Union Movement, took away free school milk from the children of the poor and gave you the right to buy the council houses and flats you lived in. Gave you the right to own your own home then took electricity, gas, water and transport services out of public ownership and bought you with the chance to own tiny pieces of them with shares at knock down prices. All that and more with the Sun newspaper and its owner’s alliance with the lady who wasn’t for turning leading the sales pitch to buy you and your soul.

British nationalism and patriotism! A strong Britain at last under the forceful Margaret. We’re not having the Europeans, the Argies or anyone else telling us what to do. You all waved your flags and you loved it. Didn’t mind selling yourself for the right to buy, especially if you came from Essex and the Home Counties in which case you spent much of your time looking at property prices in estate agents’ windows to see whether the value of your house had gone up in the last couple of hours, or loved it even more when all controls and constraint were taken off trading and finance in the City of London where you worked.

Margaret Thatcher’s policies, marshalled and marketed for mass consumption by Murdoch’s newspapers, soon supplemented after his sweet and easy acquisition of a broadcasting licence for Sky Television, were soon running wild while factories, shipyards, mines and indeed whole industries were shutting down and disappearing in the great swathes of traditional working class northern England, central Scotland and South Wales. In less than a decade a rampant finance capitalism replaced much of the manufacturing and industrial capitalism which had dominated Britain for over two centuries.  

The disaster at the Hillsborough football ground was a north of England tragedy which followed the crushing of the mainly Yorkshire Miner’s Strike by police backed up by Rupert Murdoch’s media Empire and orchestrated by Margaret Thatcher. It should be considered from within that context because as we well know today, the Hillsborough tragedy involved precisely the same three antagonists. The police, the Sun newspaper and the Thatcher Government were as much wrapped up in attacking the deceased and the families of those who died, lying about their conduct and distorting the truth as they were years earlier in their attacks on striking miners.           

The context of the disaster at Hillsborough, however, goes much further back. As far back as the relationship between the Sun’s gut-wrenching visceral editor Kelvin Mackenzie who published the lie that football supporters had urinated on police on the day of the tragedy, the paper’s owner and friend Rupert Murdoch and mutual friend to them both, the police. Indeed this newspaper-police relationship originates from the time of police heavy business at Wapping when Rupert needed them to break strikes by print workers and their blockade of his new publishing set up. He’d wanted to introduce new technology that meant the loss of many jobs and ultimately succeeded. Thus was born an alliance between someone who’d fought against organised labour and a politician who emotionally hated it from the time she’d been daddy’s best girl of her Tory Councillor father.   

The alliance, next seen at work during the Miner’s Strike, therefore didn’t come out of nowhere. Margaret and Rupert… the police, the Sun and Kelvin Mackenzie… In the light of what we now know about Hillsborough, a dirty and shameful back-scratching exercise if ever there was one. And just think of the suffering of the families of the bereaved. The dead AND the living. Both fitted up by the police. Both slandered and maligned by the Sun.

The Sun! A celestial body that’s supposed to illuminate. That’s supposed to shine bright but instead shone dark and dirty that day for the bereaved and the dead of Hillsborough. A cold heartless dwarf star without integrity or truth. But hey, so what? Let’s get it clear. Despite everything it said, four million people still buy the paper each day and perhaps double that number read it. Those are the facts and the facts speak for themselves. Whatever lies it told and dirt it spread about dead kids at Hillsborough millions of people still want to read it. They’re not interested in what I say! I might get fifty people reading this post if I’m lucky so for all its decent intention, I have to admit, Rupert Murdoch understands the British public far better than I ever will.  

That’s all part of the tragedy really, for all the families who lost loved ones at Hillsborough. That there are millions of people around in this country today who still buy the Sun newspaper that told such lies about them and those they had lost. Who still believe the police when they make up stories and tell lies about innocent people who die in custody as well as those who get shot. We live in a society that’s already deeply divided and there’s no getting round the fact that it’s fast getting worse.

The police have been lying for years. The media, particularly the Murdoch controlled Sun and former News of the World have been engaged in dirty despicable practices for the same length of time and now the bankers are pissing on just about everyone. But that’s alright! We’ve always got the English football team… the overpaid, overrated ponces of the Premier League… the royal princes, rule Britannia and land of hope and glory… So go tell it to the Hillsborough bereaved who’ve been doubly betrayed. Who’ve always known only too well that there’s blood on the Sun.

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