The sight of Mark Lawrenson holding up a copy of, and quoting from, The Sun on Football Focus beggars belief. Given the sensitivity of these weeks as families and survivors sit in silence day after day at the Hillsborough Inquests, listening to the Coroner's final summing-up of nearly two years of evidence, it was crass and insensitive betraying a lack of empathy and understanding. From the newspaper's position it was free advertising and, no doubt, a welcome step towards what it wrongly believes will be its rehabilitation on Merseyside. That is delusional, not least because The Sun's owners have never accepted responsibility for the part their editor, Kelvin McKenzie, and their staff played in promulgating a myth that survives to this day. As I have demonstrated repeatedly, most recently in the final chapter of the Hillsborough Independent Panel's Report, that myth infected every official investigation that followed and has resurfaced at the current inquests.
After the HIP Report was published I was walking through town and a bloke I'd never met ran up and hugged me. He said, 'I was in Pen Three. For the first time since The Sun published those lies I have now felt I can walk down the streets with my head up. I always thought that somehow people thought I was to blame for the 96'. That moment spoke volumes about how that front page, along with the allegations carried also in other papers, had wrongly added the accusatory guilt of causation to the deeply-felt guilt of survival. Having to carry the dreadful burden of survival, knowing that anyone in those pens could have died, having to deal with the ever-present memories of the vice-like crush on the terraces and the physical and mental trauma of survival, and having to live with the flashbacks, survivors and the bereaved were forced to endure the tirade of blame encouraged in no short measure by unsubstantiated allegations made by those in authority and eagerly reported by The Sun. It is staggering that despite all that has been written and the continuing successful boycott that a former player appears oblivious to the impact of his actions.
