Hillsborough verdicts reached

M18CTID said:
But what he is saying is completely and utterly wrong. Looking at all the video/CCTV evidence, few if any fans "turned up late". The vast majority turned up early! Early enough to reasonably expect to be admitted into the ground in good time to catch the kick-off. None of the footage I've seen shows "tanked up yobs" attempting to force their way in. Aside from a bit of jostling and pushing, the Liverpool fans came across to me as well a behaved bunch of fans as you'd expect considering the era that this match took place. Don't get me wrong, in amongst those thousands of fans queuing outside, I'm sure the odd few without tickets would've been amongst them but as every enquiry has proved it wasn't a significant enough a number to affect the outcome on the day.
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Absolutely, I completely agree what he said in those letters was wrong, but I don't understand his shift in opinion from what he wrote three days after the event to describing tanked up yobs in those letters, because, in my mind certainly, tanked up yobs & hooligans are very similar things. It's here (page 3), written 18th April 1989, that he says "not the result of obvious hooliganism..."

Why the change in outlook? Was he towing the party line? Was this a case of the government being led by the police (though not the press, certainly) and/or being stubbornly blind to the appeals of the relatives for them to listen to/search for/uncover the truth? Afterall, it's no secret now of the government's thoughts on Liverpool through the '80s; one policy mooted by the tories regarding the problem of Liverpool was to implement a policy of "managed decline", in other words to let the city collapse. Now this was a few years before Hillsborough and the ensuing enquiry and media palaver, but, as proved by the constant (incorrect) references to Heysel when discussing Hillsborough (I mean back then as opposed to now), such a thing as Liverpool's anti-tory, anti-establishment, them v us feeling and the rhetoric coming from that isn't going to be forgotten a couple of years later. The feelings between the city of Liverpool and the government were certainly mutual, and for the government to understand the wrongs of their stance over Hillsborough but sit back and do nothing really shouldn't surprise anyone at all.

Maybe the militant nature of the city really counted against them here. Maybe Thatcher's government found itself in a position, following the tragedy, to gain some sadistic revenge for the militancy Liverpool had shown through the previous twenty years.

So, the government back then: heartless, cruel, wicked; or just shit.
 
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Shirley said:
Very emotional moving story.

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/may/01/hillsborough-inquest-survivor-adrian-tempany
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Very emotional indeed, a difficult read like much of what's been written and broadcast this past week or so. Can only imagine how emotional the poor chap was whilst writing that. The point he makes about the FA near the end is spot on.

I can't see how people can't be brought to court for their parts in this. If not involuntary manslaughter charges or other charges over the deaths, then at least conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, perverting the course of justice, and perjury. It's been proven it happened. The evidence is in the public domain.
 
the impact of hillsborough on families was devastating as we know and Joe Glover who was one of the founder members of the HJC suffered more than most.

JOE Glover was never the same again after surviving the sickening crushes at Hillsborough.
He was standing next to his younger brother Ian moments before the 20-year-old was swept away on the Leppings Lane terrace.
Joe, 23, somehow managed to clamber onto the pitch. He was on the other side of the fence when he saw Ian just two rows into the pen.
“Help me, I’m dying,” Ian was saying to him.
He was powerless to intervene and could only watch Ian slip away.
Later on the pitch Joe desperately gave the kiss-of-life to his stricken brother. But it was too late.
He and oldest brother John, then 27, who had been sitting in the stands, carried Ian into the Hillsborough gymnasium.
They stayed with him until their dad John Snr travelled from Merseyside to identify the body and a priest read the last rites.
In the family’s own words Joe became a ‘shell’ from that day on.
He would often go missing and would later be found by his family sleeping on his brother’s grave in Kirkdale cemetery.
Rarely talking about the scars he carried, he would sometimes say: “I want to be with him. I can’t handle being here and Ian’s not.”
Almost exactly ten years after the disaster Joe was tragically killed when he was crushed by marble slabs.
He was unloading a van in Clegg Street, Everton, when he took the full weight of five tonnes of marble.
Heroically Joe had pushed his work colleague out of the way of the falling load, almost certainly saving his life.
With an eerie symmetry the 32-year-old officially died of traumatic asphyxia, a mirror image of his younger brother’s death at Hillsborough a decade earlier.
Sister Lorraine, 35, said: “He was never the same after Hillsborough.
“He blamed himself that he got out and Ian didn’t.
“He didn’t talk about it much. But once when I got home at 3am a bit drunk he was lying on the sofa saying ‘I was standing on dead people and standing on their heads’.
“Ian was asking me for help and I couldn’t. Although it was terrible when he died, at least it meant Joe and Ian were finally together.”
After Hillsborough Ian’s dad John became the driving force of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign. It looked after survivors of the disaster as well as families who lost loved ones.
It held its first meetings in early 1998, spearheaded by John, survivor Peter Carney and actor Ricky Tomlinson (who played John Glover in Jimmy McGovern's ‘Hillsborough’).
The group was formed amid disagreements about the direction the Hillsborough Family Justice Group was taking.
In the months leading up to Joe’s death he had shown signs of escaping his mental torture.
He had done his first media interview and his family were delighted with how well he was looking – the old white pallor starting to disappear.
But as recovery beckoned the freak accident struck.
Joe left two children, a son Ian, now 15, and a daughter Beth, now 11.
Lorraine added: “Ian and Joe used to share the same bedroom. Joe used to try on his brother’s clothes as he loved his fashions. He used to wear his stuff when Ian came back from a shopping spree which wound him up.
“The last thing I remember about Ian was on the morning of the match when he had a double breakfast – two of everything – before he left.
“We watched as he and Joe walked down the road together, us laughing as they were like little and large, Ian towered above Joe.”
The Glover family bond has kept them strong over the past 20 years.
Lorraine still wonders if Ian, who would have turned 40 this year, would have got married, had children, what would he look like now?
 
shackattack said:
audiostitcher.bwh9c8255b4.netdna-cdn.com/theanfieldindex/hillsborough-part1-1989/cnrhT-UMCKi-no2qisrOLA.mp3


audiostitcher.bwh9c8255b4.netdna-cdn.com/theanfieldindex/hillsborough-part2-ajourney/Qd_ny3bBwA6FiF-JECaoWQ.mp3

audio accounts from adrian tempany and phil scraton
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....... because for many people who have suffered deep trauma, the notion of closure is false. It presumes that once traumatised, you are set off on a straight path; that if you simply keep going, then one day, eventually, you will reach a finish line. Cross it, and you have won. But post-traumatic stress condemns you to a circular track, on which you must simply keep going, round and round, for ever. The going might become easier, but there is no finish line. All you can hope to do is accommodate your trauma into your life as best you can. And if you do that, then you have won.

I could have this permanently etched on my heart, as I suspect many people who have suffered from PTSD could too, because of the raw and basic truth of which it speaks.

Brilliantly, brilliantly insightful.
 
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