You shouldn’t know who Anne Williams is.
You shouldn’t know who Alastair Morgan is.
You shouldn’t know who Nicole Gbangbola is.
You shouldn’t know who Marie Lyon is.
You perhaps could know who Ste Purse is but for his work as an actor not as a campaigner.
The reason you know any of those names is because that they were bereaved, traumatised and lied to. By the state. By people in a position of authority. They were treated as inconveniences; as problems, as things to avoid.
There’s a Pratchett line that everything bad stems from treating people as things. Everything else comes from there. It’s wise and typically morally strong but can be reinforced – everything bad also stems from treating people as problems.
What I have long found difficult to conceive of is how individual people, even if part of a bureaucracy or organisation, looks at those grieving, in the most agonising loss and confusion and chooses to deepen that agony, to create more confusion, chooses to deepen the hell.
The only way such a thing is possible, as a choice a human could make, is to feel it is being part of a bigger whole, an organisation which needs to protect itself against forces from the outside. That the person is a problem. That the person is a thing to be got beyond so the organisation can get on with its work.
The only way it works is if you institutionalise inhumanity.
That we do know who those people are, and hundreds more besides, is that some ordinary people when put into that institutionalised inhumanity refuse to take it lying down. They continue being a problem.
This, to be clear, isn’t to decry those who don’t refuse to take it lying down. Compartmentalising, trying to carry on, taking that pain and torment and bundling it up and carrying it is what humans do. It is, to an extent, what being human is much of the time and it happens globally every day.
But the problem people, in their hundreds, thousands, came together to be part of a solution. Hillsborough Law. It’s important to understand that in a great many of these cases something that works as Hillsborough Law will is of no practical use to the campaigners now – Hillsborough itself being a great example. Instead it is to protect others from having to go through this hell.
It has been a campaign of selflessness, in the usual aspects like those who have worked unpaid on it, but also the other campaigns who came behind the Hillsborough banner, removing ego because the goal was to change the culture of the nation that had traumatised them and continued to do so.
We’re bound by what we have shared. But that isn’t always the same as liking it. Every development, positive or negative, sends me back to those bonds, sends me back to what has been done to ordinary people, sends me back to the banality of it all. There have been conspiracies and conversations in corners (it is worth remembering that the chase for the truth on Hillsborough David Cameron likened it to a “blind man, in a dark room, looking for a black cat that isn’t there”) but ultimately it is a machine which has stopped justice on so many occasions.
Maybe it’s me. As demonstrated when I wrote about this for The New Statesman on two occasions (when it was still just about worth writing for) I can’t take my eyes off the wreckage. When there’s good news – and this is good news, let me tell you this is the best news you’re getting all week – in this sphere, I am always filled with anger knowing how hard the road to this bit of good news has been; that the road to natural justice and to support future traumatised people is fraught with endless traps.
When there’s good news all I can think is that the people who have given almost everything they have to bring the good news about shouldn’t have had to. Shouldn’t have had their lives ripped open in the first place. Then shouldn’t have been lied to. Then should have been given every chance for justice at the time.
Because I’ve seen the toll. It’s too much. It’s just too much.
Becoming 18 in around 1999 in Liverpool and going the match was to speak to a group of people who effectively carried group trauma with them everywhere they went. Starting SOS in 2008 was even more of this. Doing The Anfield Wrap I have seen it over and over, I’ve also seen the weight that was lifted when the second Inquest verdict came through.
It was beautiful. It just took far, far too long and so, so much damage had been done.
There are people – most of whom are on the right politically but not exclusively so – who will say of campaigners that they enjoy it. That the people who do it would be doing something like it anyway, that they are professional complainers.
From my experience in the above, in being around these circles, pulling some Hillsborough Law work together, meeting those broken and trying to make sense of it all, pleading with people who could help them to make sense of it all to lift a finger to help, from all of that, my view is that this is bollocks. Absolute cast iron fantasies from people who haven’t had their life destroyed without meaning or explanation.
People who haven’t survived. And known what it is to be a survivor with all of its guilt and pressure and feelings of falling short. Chips on shoulders – “chippy” – and axes to grind. That’s what they say.
Even now expect the counter attack to come. There was some yesterday in The Telegraph. Expect it to come from the seen and unseen channels who will not believe this Labour Government has the temerity to remove power from the establishment and redress an absurd, life destroying imbalance.
Because what the Government put forward on Tuesday was almost everything that campaigners have asked for. It was something very close to what Pete Weatherby and Elkan Abrahamson originally drafted.
It was a surprise.
Given the events of last April it is a remarkable reversal from the Government and for that they deserve credit. April was a mess in public and private. The briefing against the manifesto commitment suggested a civil service in panic mode and a Government which had not grasped the issues.
What’s brought this reversal about is unclear. We can pick a version of events which we like – praise the strength of the campaign, the work of the Merseyside MPs, the threat of a Liverpool conference on the horizon, any of the above or more.
The version I want to go with is that Richard Hermer, a legal professional since 1993, the Attorney General, grasped the issue in April and realised that you can’t be a little bit pregnant. That a Hillsborough Law logically needs the three pillars. That complaints such as sick days being made illegal in public service were spurious nonsense and this campaign was underpinned politically by the Merseyside MPs and Metro Mayors, underpinned intellectually by Pete and Elkan, underpinned emotionally by the campaigners who had turned their wreckage into weaponry and that the direction of travel was irresistible but most of all it was right. Just right. And that meant it had to be done and done well.
I prefer to think intelligence won the day, natural and unimpeachable justice from a lifelong lawyer came through.
The Government will know now, almost certainly more than Keir Starmer did in 2022 when he first committed to this, that:
a) What it is proposing is the most profound cultural shift for the British State since the Good Friday Agreement;
b) It is in for a fight across committees and the Second Chamber;
c) That it has deepened its commitments to the ordinary people who have shown themselves to be extraordinary.
The Government has looked Margaret Aspinall, Clive Smith, Ste’s Purse and Kelly in the eye and allied itself to them. The Government has promised to fight alongside Charlotte Hennesey and Marie Lyon which is good news for the Government let me tell you.
We’re bound by what we have shared. The Government is bound.
None of this should have happened. We shouldn’t know these people however inspirational they may be. They shouldn’t know each other, shouldn’t have known their grief, shouldn’t have fought their fight.
Everyone would rather not have had their lives turned upside down. We would all rather that.
But because they institutionalised inhumanity we now need to institutionalise it out. Everyone got here by being in it together and the only way we get to the other side is by that continuing. There is more to do. There always is. There was vested interests to fight. There always are.
When it ends, those lives will still have been ruined. Words like “legacy” will be used and used rightly, but legacy doesn’t replace a lost child. It’s something, but it isn’t enough.
Those who have had their lives ruined know that too. They know they aren’t problems, their loved ones weren’t things and there isn’t jam tomorrow. They know that more than anyone could.
That’s why we need to stay with them. Stay with them and love them. Let them breathe and help them be. Fighting to change the wrong in our society nearly breaks you. All acts of kindness build you back up. Let’s do this together, step by step.
