This from Suzanne Moore from the Guardian sums up exactly how I remember policing in the 80s:
The Hillsborough verdict shatters the fantasy that class war doesn’t exist
Suzanne Moore The ‘unlawful killing’ of the 96 football fans was a crime, committed in a very real conflict. The police, the establishment, parts of the press, they were all in it together
Finally, 27 long years later, the cold class contempt that Hillsborough came to signify is laid out for all to see. Those who died did not die because they were “animals” or drinking too much or behaving badly. They were unlawfully killed. Their families did not grieve too much because they were from Liverpool and therefore emotionally incontinent or full of working-class mawkishness; they grieved because they lost their loved ones in absolutely horrific circumstances. Still, to read the details of how these people died tightens my stomach. Of the 96 who died, 37 were teenagers. The reality is that the dead were all sorts of people from different backgrounds. But very quickly they became no longer individuals but part of a mob who somehow deserved this awful fate. As life was squeezed out of them, then too their humanity was taken from them by the police, by politicians and parts of the press.
The marathon campaign by the bereaved families and their supporters has been one class act. In the face of despair, there has been dignity. Yet we have to ask why it has taken so long for the truth to be acknowledged. It is surely to do with the way we do not like to talk about out-and-out class conflict. Instead, we are told that class hardly exists, except as an anthropological display to gawp at disdainfully on reality TV. The refusal of the establishment to countenance the level of police “coverup” is because “they” were indeed all in it together. This was more than a coverup. The police lied – they smeared the victims as some of them lay dying, testing even a 10-year-old’s blood for alcohol. All of this was relayed in the press so that the dead were reduced to the kind of rabble who urinated on and stole from each other. One of the extraordinary revelations is that it was the South Yorkshire police themselves who had a drinking problem, with bars in many of the stations .
But no one who remembers that time thought that the police were on “our” side to begin with. In the 80s, sides were demarcated explicitly. If the miners’ strike was our last civil war, then the police were clearly lined up against us. They did Thatcher’s dirty work, waving their overtime payslips in the face of striking miners. That symbolic violence was accompanied by real violence. Andy Burnham is absolutely right to ask about the links between Orgreave and Hillsborough. The South Yorkshire police, Burnham said “used the same underhand tactics against its own people in the aftermath of the miners’ strike that it would later use, to more deadly effect, against the people of Liverpool”.
In all this it must be said there were individual police officers who behaved decently, but the complicity between the police and parts of the conservative establishment remain horrifying. The confidence of Kelvin MacKenzie, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and Bernard Ingham (who spoke of “tanked-up yobs”) still persists. Their apologies are a joke, still exhibiting the same contempt. Are we to accept MacKenzie was merely duped?
Liverpool never forgot or forgave Johnson and his ilk because it didn’t simply imagine itself under attack – it was under attack. As always the culture it produced understood this and laughed in the face of such demonisation. Johnson’s editorial accused Liverpool of wallowing in its victim status. As crushed economically as that city was in the 80s, it sensed its own power. Frankie Goes to Hollywood T-shirts read: “Frankie says arm the unemployed.”
It must be somewhat galling for those in power now to have to accept this ruling, for they do not hide their class contempt either. They have elevated it to actual policy: all schools must be modelled on the schools they went to, but with fewer resources. All hospitals must be run to make a profit. Taxes are for the little people. Those who don’t “get on” have only themselves to blame. An increasing range of theories come into play about why poor people are poor, which is never to do with lack of money but lack of civility. Or perhaps there is something wrong with their actual brains! Imagery of working-class people invariably invokes moral deprivation by showing a tendency to excess.
Social mobility, the supposed solution to all this, only allows the odd person to slip through the net. The middle class must simply hold on. Once there, one is required to be grateful (I am not) or merely chippy (I am). As I strain my ears to hear someone who talks like me on Radio 4 that isn’t in a drama about child abuse, I never know who I am to be grateful to.
Sure, class contempt works both ways, though it is impolite to show it except by gentle humour. Rage is so 1980s. We must not discriminate against the posh apparently, though class doesn’t really exist any more. As more and more people tell us it no longer matters, we see more and more of our creative stars were privately educated, that our leaders come from the same tiny enclave. Retro-feudalism.
This fantasy should be well and truly shattered by the Hillsborough verdict. This was a war crime committed in a war that was not then, nor is now, a figment of our imagination. Class war.
