Why Hillsborough victims’ long and painful fight for justice affects us all

While there is an undercurrent of anti-Scouse hostility in some of the discourse about Heysel and Hillsborough, there is also a correlation between the perceived rivalries of other teams with Liverpool

Football is about passion but it makes people irrational (Getty)

The email was titled #JFT39. It arrived two days after David Duckenfield was acquitted of gross negligence manslaughter charges connected with the Hillsborough disaster at Preston Crown Court last week and 24 hours after a piece about the verdict appeared on these pages under my byline.

“Very impartial from a self-declared professional dipper,” it read. “Let the mourners continue to chose (sic) to live their lives in perpetual denial. Victims of everything … ashamed of nothing.”

For those who don’t speak stupidish, I’ll translate:

• JFT39 is shorthand for ‘justice for the 39,’ the number of dead in 1985’s Heysel Stadium disaster that was in part caused by Liverpool fans.
• “Dipper,” as Trevor Sinclair could explain, is short for bin-dipper, a derogatory term for Scousers. It is perhaps the only slur based on poverty aimed at a UK city.
• “Mourners” are those battling for accountability over the deaths of 96 innocent people at a football match in 1989.
• ‘Victims of everything” turns mass fatalities and a cataclysmic failure of the emergency services in Sheffield into an alleged exercise in self-pity.
• “Ashamed of nothing” not only refers to Heysel but the malignant suggestion that the longest inquest in British history was some sort of perverse reverse cover-up, letting Liverpool supporters off the hook and throwing the blame for the deaths on the Leppings Lane towards the police. Like the chant, “You killed your own fans,” it repeats lies first expressed three decades ago, untruths that have been shattered by the most thorough scrutiny possible.

There is so much wrong in the email that it is almost laughable. Except it’s not funny. Family members of the victims of Hillsborough and campaigners suffer this sort of abuse on a regular basis. Louise Brookes, whose brother Andrew Mark was 26 when he died on those overcrowded terraces, sighs when asked about trolls. “My solicitor has a sheaf of offensive stuff that was sent to me,” she says. “It’s got worse since the inquests three years ago when the verdicts were changed from accidental death to unlawful killing.”

While there is an undercurrent of anti-Scouse hostility in some of the discourse about Heysel and Hillsborough, there is also a correlation between the perceived rivalries of other teams with Liverpool. Chelsea supporters were vocal and unpleasant when the two clubs went head-to-head in Europe in the 2000s. More recently Manchester City fans have discovered a keen interest about what happened in Brussels – although not acute enough to bypass the mythology on the subject and learn about the actual events.

Football is about passion but it makes people irrational. And nasty.

Even among Evertonians – the majority of whom have been unstinting in their support for the campaign for justice – there are rogue elements. At the Merseyside derby this week a couple of individuals were filmed making pushing gestures meant to signify the collapsing wall at Heysel. Losing a football match should not be a cause to turn the deaths of 39 people into a point-scoring exercise.

The Kop’s pre-match derby mural in support of the Hillsborough families was met with the usual avalanche of questions on social media. “Why do we never hear about Heysel?” There is a simple answer. There was an investigation in Brussels, officials were censured and taken to court, fans went to jail and systems were put into place by the Belgian government to try to ensure such a scenario could never happen again. The word justice is always inadequate when people are killed but it was far closer after Heysel than what occurred in 1989 when British investigators and politicians took a very different and much less rigorous approach to finding out who was really to blame.

Brookes feels that this has contributed to one of the fundamental misunderstandings about Hillsborough. “It could have happened to fans of any team who got the short straw and ended up on the Leppings Lane,” she says. “Conditions were dangerous on that terrace whoever was playing there. It just happened to be Liverpool. The authorities wanted to sweep it under the carpet and blame supporters. The families of the 96 have made sure they were not allowed to do this. If it hadn’t been Liverpool, it would have been someone else.”

History endorses that viewpoint: in 1981 Tottenham Hotspur supporters had a lucky escape on the same terrace in a similar dangerous crush.

Too few people have recognised that the issue is about public safety and civic officials taking responsibility for their actions, Brookes believes. It is not merely a Merseyside or football campaign. “So many people think it’s about Scousers,” she says. “But 41 of those who died were not from Liverpool. This gets overlooked and it’s assumed that all the 96 and survivors are from Liverpool. That’s another Hillsborough myth.”

Like her brother, Brookes is from Bromsgrove in Worcestershire and the most perfunctory look at the list of victims shows that they hailed from across the country. Grief might have been centralised on Merseyside but it was spread much wider – St Albans, Cannock, Wrexham, West Yorkshire, Stoke and Bristol, to name just a few places where the dead were mourned. Of the seven women who died, five came from London. “It was a national disaster,” Brookes said. “That often gets overlooked. Hundreds of survivors were not from Merseyside, either.”

Fighting for justice for her brother has consumed her life and Brookes is struggling to comprehend Duckenfield’s acquittal. The former chief superintendent admitted his culpability at the inquests but received remarkably sympathetic treatment by Sir Peter Openshaw, the judge at Preston. Brookes was present for almost the entire trial and was staggered by the way both the prosecution and defence were conducted.

“I was 18 on May 17, 1989, a little more than a month after Andrew Mark died,” she says. “On that day Duckenfield was back in the control box at Hillsborough and in charge. My view is that he could not have been that traumatised from the events of four weeks earlier and obviously didn’t feel he lacked experience. He was back at the scene of the disaster.”

No trolls or abuse will deflect Brookes from seeking the truth. “Football fans should be one big family,” she says. “Keep the point scoring on the pitch. Our 96 did nothing wrong and neither have we. They did not deserve what happened to them and we do not deserve abuse for fighting for justice.

“Every football fan should thank the families and our 96. That could have been any group of supporters who were lied about that day and returned home in wooden boxes. We have stood up for what is morally and legally right. Why is that a bad thing? Would you allow your loved one to die a lie?”