Having revealed the cover-up after their loved ones’ deaths, families were able to mourn with a little less weight for first time

A spring breeze warmed the 24th anniversary memorial service to the 96 people who died at Hillsborough, and while there were the insistent, familiar calls for justice, for the first time in so many agonising years there was a palpable lightness amid the mourning.

On the April 15ths of previous years, the families have gathered through the rain, wind and snow to remember those they loved, and to fire anger and contempt at those who caused the disaster, then sought to shift their culpability on to the victims themselves. This year, with 6,000 supporters assembled around them in the Kop, the families maintained their battle for justice, but celebrated too, this year’s landmark breakthrough: that the truth about how the disaster happened, and the lies and smears which followed, have finally been exposed.

In September the report of the Hillsborough independent panel, chaired by James Jones, the bishop of Liverpool, blew away the false accounts of the disaster, prompted a national apology from the prime minister, David Cameron, and set in train a multi-pronged new justice process. The 1990-1991 inquest into the disaster, which the families loathed, objected to, challenged then railed against for 22 thankless years, was finally comprehensively quashed in December by three senior judges who sat for just an hour and a half. The arrangements for a fresh inquest into how so many people, who had paid to watch an FA Cup semi-final between two of our top football clubs on a sunny day at the end of the 1980s, came to die there, will be determined at a pre-hearing in London on 25 April.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission is recruiting extra staff and renting a whole new office block in Warrington to tackle the task of investigating Hillsborough properly this time round. The IPCC has said it is investigating the alleged South Yorkshire police malpractice on the day of Hillsborough to determine if it was “culpable for the deaths”, and possible perjury and perversion of the course of justice in the campaign the police then launched to blame the supporters, not themselves. A linked investigation being led by Jon Stoddart, former chief constable of Durham police, is investigating the possible criminal culpability of other individuals and organisations, including Sheffield Wednesday, who hosted the match for 54,000 people without a valid safety certificate, and the Football Association, which commissioned the game there.

Still wary after so many years of let-downs by the establishment, and particularly about the IPCC which has well-documented failings, Margaret Aspinall, the chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, warned they will not tolerate too much delay in the concluding of these processes. And yet, even from Aspinall, whose 18-year-old son James died following the lethal crush in those vile Leppings Lane pens, a little noticeable brightness broke through. She insisted justice must follow, but, thanking the key Labour MPs Andy Burnham, Maria Eagle, Steve Rotherham, Alison McGovern and Derek Twigg, Aspinall also told the crowd: “This is a celebration for getting to the truth.”

The service, with mostly the same achingly moving hymns as always, and the lighting of a candle for each of the 96, which always takes so shockingly long a time, did have, for the first time, an air of celebration. Professor Phil Scraton, the principal author of the panel’s devastating report, read a poem he had written, in which he congratulated the families, survivors of the disaster and supporters, for their indomitable campaign against “institutional injustice” which he had finally vindicated. “Shattered by loss but unbroken in spirit,” he wrote. “In the face of injustice you never backed down.”

Aspinall spoke directly to those in the crowd and beyond who had been at Hillsborough that day and survived. The sheer numbers affected have not been widely acknowledged; there were, after all, 24,000 Liverpool supporters there, thousands suffered in the pens, all had to witness the horrors unfold, many were traumatised, then traumatised again for 23 years by the police smears which blamed them for the disaster. Aspinall reached out to them, praising the heroism of many who helped the injured, dying and dead that day, and she sympathised with their trauma: “Those responsible [for the disaster] made some of you feel guilty for coming back alive,” she said. “How dare they.”

John Henry, the principal owner of Liverpool football club, had flown in from the US to read at the service, which Aspinall said the families appreciated. Henry was followed by Bill Kenwright, the Everton chairman and West End theatre impresario, in another public act of football and Liverpool civic unity over Hillsborough. Reminiscing about attending Liverpool matches with a beloved uncle as well as Everton matches as a boy, Kenwright offered empathy, emotion, even a little humour too. The greatest two words in the English language, he said, are “my mum”.

Anne Williams, whose 15-year-old son Kevin died at Hillsborough, and who fought a remarkable campaign against the inquest’s medical evidence and accidental death verdict to finally see them discredited, watched from a wheelchair, having been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Referring to her determined fight and that of the other ordinary, remarkable families, backed by a whole city routinely defamed in the national media as mawkish, Kenwright said: “They picked on the wrong city – and they picked on the wrong mums.”

Of the millions of words written, sung and acted about Hillsborough since that appalling day in 1989, this, from the showman, competes as one of the best lines. And some of the mums, hearing it, allowed themselves a smile.

A news article on 2013-04-16 11:43:00 from: The Guardian

Read the full article here.

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