fans and temporary subhumans

Chris Applegate writes, re Hillsborough:

the attitude of the authorities to supporters in 1989 was predominantly that they were a threat, not people who should be protected.

One of the interesting things about going to watch the football in the 1980’s was that it involved a change of status. You left your house an ordinary citizen, much like any other. But as soon as it became clear where you were going, you immediately became a kind of subhuman. The police addressed you differently, assuming they talked to you at all: quite often if they wanted you to go somewhere they just grabbed your arm and pulled you in the required direction. You could be penned into confined spaces and made to wait for hours: kettling before the day.

 A degree of crowd control was and is obviously necessary, and ideally the police should look on the job as part of their art and mystery. Managing public spaces so that all within them can pursue their lawful business is tricky at times, and doing it successfully should be something to take pride in. But that was never the impression you got. On the one hand, the cops seemed to regard it as a low status job: a Saturday afternoon cattle roundup. To compensate for that they could do anything they pleased to you in the knowledge that they’d be cheered on by the local paper and that if they decided to nick you first and make up the charges later you wouldn’t stand a chance when you went up in front of the JP. There seemed to be no distinction between the actual hooligans and the general fans: they were simply a violent expression of a general problem. So also with much of the public. I remember going to a game at the old Baseball Ground in Derby one year and watching incredulously as some old dear ran outside and took her washing off the line as we were walking past.

That was in 1979 and it has to be said that we weren’t a prepossessing lot: a kind of polyester horde, an explosion in a pimple factory. And of course there was a standing temptation to play up to the stereotype: no one likes us, we don’t care. For most of every week you were just joe public. For two hours on a Saturday you were public outlaw number one. Kind of cool, in a way.

In practice, not so cool – because Hillsborough was the logical outcome of that attitude: 96 people killed through the gross negligence of the people employed to protect them, accompanied by grotesque outbursts of lying by the country’s best selling newspaper, and with justice through the legal system systematically denied. Hillsborough tends to get relegated into the annals of Scouseology and interpreted as part of the general Liverpool mythos. I remember thinking when the actual significance of the event managed to overcome the way it was reported: that could have been me. It could have been any football fan at the time. And if football fans can be treated like that – if your status is a matter of your situation and your role at a particular place and time – then so can anyone. In fact, the cops seem to have staged their own Hillsborough memorial down in London last week.

Comments

[Richard J]

The Sun really still does have a sales problem in Liverpool - when they ran discounted editions a few years ago, the two regions chosen were central London and Merseyside (as admitted by the FD in a meeting I happened to be at.)

[jamie]

From my understanding, there's genuine puzzlement at News International that the Scousers have memories longer than goldfish. There seems to be a view that this is something peculiar to Liverpool rather than the human race in general.

[dsquared]

Also all too commmon is a general view (shared by altogether too many people) that if you've had a few friends and family killed and the reasons for their death covered up, the gentlemanly thing to do is to just give up and forget about it, and that to maintain a campaign for justice over twenty years is somehow mawkish and pathological rather than admirable.

[ejh]

I remember - this would be a little before Hillsborough - having a conversation with a guy on my pub quiz team, who voted Tory and mostly had views to match.

In the course of this conversation he learned that it was normal to be searched by police when entering a football ground, which he hadn't previously known.

He was horrified - how was this possible when you weren't individually suspected of anything? I was used to it of course and so you had this weird spectacle of a Tory being told no, it's all right, we're all accustomed to it, by somebody whose political views at the time were about as Left as the spectrum allows for.

[dsquared]

I am actually surprised that nobody in the Labour Party appears to remember the football supporters' identity card scheme, or if they did remember it, they considered it politically irrelevant to their own ID card plan, which several of them honestly believe to be popular.

[Richard J]

To be fair, I don't know what proportion of NI staff worked there twenty years ago, but I'd suspect that it's a very small number. The institutional memory of a firm is surprisingly short (case in point - lots of firms in the City lost virtually all of their pre-2005 archives in a fire a few years back with remarkably little impact.)

[Alex]

Well, if you wanted to be treated as a subhuman for a few minutes, you couldn't do better than reading the Sun.

[ajay]

The institutional memory of a firm is surprisingly short (case in point - lots of firms in the City lost virtually all of their pre-2005 archives in a fire a few years back with remarkably little impact.)

Did those archives include, say, 1929-31?

[john b]

@ejh had Tory Boy never been to an airport?

@ajay hahaha!