The Truth.

Life Usually the route of my walk to work just bypasses St George's Hall, but I made a special detour so that I could walk across the plateau on this historic day for the city. As you will have seen from the television pictures, ninety-six lanterns have been placed at the bottom of the steps, each representing someone who died at the Hillsborough disaster. As passed by, a cherry picker was replacing banners hung from the top of the columns at the front of the building, which this morning simply listed the names of the victims, yes, the victims, and now have those important words, "truth" and "justice".

A big screen has also been erected, tuned to the BBC, because the rival news channel covering the event would beyond the pale in a moment like this.  Ben Brown, outside the court in Warrington read the names of those victims with their revised times of death, far longer than the 3:15 cut-off arbitrarily applied at the first inquest.  I noticed someone weeping, but otherwise an eerie calm, except for the traffic on St John's Lane and the tramping shoes of the media rushing to the scene, perhaps to ready correspondents for the lunchtime news.

But this isn't the end, these things don't end.  Those people will never return.  Their families who've suffered further through media and political smears, the cover-ups of officials, the fight to be heard, to have this inquest and its verdict will have taken its toll.  It arguably killed someone of them, the tragedy compounded by those who've died since, because it's taken so long, no knowing that the battle wasn't in vain, that vindication would come.  Now it has.

* * * * *
Back in 2012 when the Hillsborough report was published I wrote the following and since it covers most of my other feelings it seems appropriate to repeat it here. I hope you don't mind:

Originally posted: Wednesday, September 12, 2012

I wasn’t at Hillsborough. I was still something of a football fan so was watching on television. Even though I was in my early teens, my memory of the day is sketchy. I remember watching the disaster unfold in the famous footage which has reappeared on news reports in the intervening years including those related to today’s release of documents. I remember listening to the local radio stations which were the main source of news as the day went on, their schedules dumped in favour of poignant music and public service statements. I remember crying through the memorial service at the cathedral which was also broadcast live.

It wasn’t until I reached university that I realised the inaccurate perception of the disaster held amongst some people outside of Liverpool. It was in my first year, in halls, 1994. A group of us were in the room of a friend from the Birmingham area at around the time of that year’s fifth anniversary in April. I think I’d noticed that he’d bought The Sun and commented on Liverpool’s decade long boycott of the paper, how some newsagents refused to stock it or at least put it on display because of that notorious headline and the lies ironically hidden beneath. There were few chairs in the room, I remember. I was sitting on the floor, him on a computer chair.

“The Sun’s report was accurate,” he said to just the wrong person to say it to on just the wrong day. “I know it was because I know people who were there and they saw it happen.” I was too shocked to be angry, but a couple of decades later I can still remember the feeling of not knowing quite what to say. It’s worth noting this wasn’t some friendship breaking conversation. I knew he was an ignorant person from other things he’d said previously, things he’d done. But he was part of the group and so he was a friend. Sometimes “friend” can have many meanings. Nevertheless, I was surprised that he could be of this opinion.

Of course I tried to give the opposing argument, of course I did. Under questioning, I think it was the case the people he knew who were there turned out to be friends of friends of friends, not a direct conversation so indeed he had no proof in what he said. But he was vociferous in that way he could be, parroting out the allegations from The Sun’s original story to the point that it could only be that the source of his belief was the paper’s report passed along from ear to ear until it became “The Truth” in the minds of the people hearing and speaking about it. I understood then just how widely this version of “The Truth” was believed.

Watching the Prime Minister’s statement on the report and subsequent apology in parliament about an hour ago, I wondered if my friend was also watching. As David Cameron offered the shocking synopsis of the report’s findings and how little truth there was in The Sun’s story I wondered if my friend and all of the people like him would finally face up to the fact that everything they thought was wrong. I wondered if they understood the hurt those beliefs caused and that in perpetuating them, they increased the hurt of the families and the people of Liverpool. I’m also pleased that the actual truth can now be understood.