Hillsborough was a crime. In the aftermath the system protected its own.

Yesterday, I did a piece on the Scotsman headline about Hillsborough, because I was absolutely infuriated when I read it. Hillsborough has always touched me deeply. I’ve always felt tremendous anger about what happened that day, because I remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday.

I remember watching the coverage on TV.

I was a football supporter, watching other football supporters dying at a match, and realising it could have been me. It could have been my father. It could have been my uncles, my cousins, my friends. I was genuinely shocked that such a thing was possible. And although I was young, I instinctively knew something had gone very badly wrong that afternoon. By that, I mean those who were supposed to be there to keep people safe had failed—and failed utterly.

I remember watching the fury explode across Merseyside four days later, when The Sun published its atrocity of a front page, and Kelvin MacKenzie stamped himself into the history books as a man whose personal quarters were already prepared for him in hell. There was no coming back from that. He could have lived his entire life prior to that headline as the shining example of moral rectitude, and it still would have damned him in an instant, for eternity.

But MacKenzie was never a shining example of moral rectitude to begin with. He was exactly the kind of piece of shit that police officers who wanted to cover their own catastrophic failures could use to get their side of the story across. Because he wouldn’t question it. Because it played into his own assumptions about other people. Because it fit his own prejudices about the working class and football fans.

I’ve followed every aspect of the story ever since. I’ve felt the same anger—although not the grief—as the families who were betrayed at every stage by those in authority. And they’ve learned one immutable truth in their quest for justice: “The system is not broken—it’s working exactly as intended.”

What they found is that they’ll never get justice. Because the system has all these inbuilt protections—and those protections aren’t for the benefit of you and me, or the public. They exist to protect the system itself. The system looks after its own. No matter what is perpetrated in its name. No matter what is done under its flag.

From Stephen Lawrence to Bloody Sunday, we’ve seen it over and over again.

When I think about things like this, I often recall a moment from Stephen King’s The Stand. I don’t know if King was quoting a real historical moment or not, but if he wasn’t, the insight in the writing is so sharp that it leapt off the page the first time I read it, and it’s stayed with me ever since.

In that moment, a general is speaking to his staff after discovering the My Lai massacre has taken place. And he says that if you come home and find your family has been attacked—your father beaten, your mother raped—you don’t call the police first. You go to their bedroom. You get some sheets. And you cover them up. Because you love them.

That moment speaks to how officialdom sees itself and its relationship to truth and fact. You always put the institution first. You always seek to mitigate guilt and avoid responsibility. Because the institution is bigger than you. And the institution is more important than you. And the institution, at all costs, must remain unblemished.

That kind of thinking has been used as a shoddy mortal justification for so much that has happened in our world, across the ages. But it’s never really been justification. It’s never been moral. It stinks. And it always will.

It’s been 36 years since Hillsborough. Ninety-seven people are dead. Not one single individual has ever been held legally responsible or accountable. Yet we know the names of the guilty. We know what they did. We know who failed in their sworn duty to protect those fans. And the crime of slandering them afterwards was, in some ways, even more diabolical and scandalous.

But the system looked after its own. It always does. And it always will, so long as we allow it to remain unchallenged and unbroken. The system isn’t broken. It’s working as intended. Because its fundamental responsibility is to itself. And it should be broken. That’s the only way we can replace it with something that does work, in the way it should, and in the way our society needs.

It is impossible for me to look at Hillsborough and see anything other than a crime, rather than the “terrible accident” that we all thought we were witnessing that day. Although deep down, it was obvious that something had gone very, very wrong. With the plan. With the regulations. With the police operation.

Yes, terrible events happen. And they’ve happened before. They’ll happen again. Not all rise to the level of a crime. Sometimes people make mistakes. And the greater the responsibility, the greater the magnitude of the mistake.

But some mistakes do rise to that threshold. And what South Yorkshire Police allowed to happen that day was more than just a series of simple errors. Their negligence—because that’s what it was—didn’t just amplify a situation that existed anyway. They created the situation.

South Yorkshire Police bear sole responsibility for Hillsborough. Because without their negligence, there would have been no tragedy.

And that was a crime in itself.

But just as great a crime was what came afterwards. The cover-up. The years of smears and lies. Officialdom protecting its own. Perhaps the most egregious part of it all is that they’ve continued to do so—right up to the present day.

Everyone knows what happened. Everyone knows who did what. We know the operational failures. We know the catastrophic decisions. We know about the cover-up—who orchestrated it, who was responsible, and who the willing, useful idiots were who peddled the police line.

Their names aren’t a secret. We’ve known for decades. Yet none of them has ever been brought to justice.

All of them, to one degree or another, live in disgrace. The Sun newspaper has never gotten over that particular stain. It is reviled on Merseyside to this day. But it continues to shape the political weather in this country, alongside other titles just as debased and untrustworthy.

The Sun screamed about “the truth.” But every word in that infamous 18 April edition was a barefaced lie. Lies fed to it by corrupt cops, and a Sheffield Tory MP. It took years to extract an admission—and an apology—from that man.

Everyone involved in the crime knew who to contact for help with the cover up; that’s the despicable fact which stands out above all others.

Everyone knew who could be trusted to go all in, to lie, to deny, to smear the living and even the dead.

I try to imagine being one of the Hillsborough family members, peeling back the layers of the onion over the years. Growing more teary, more frustrated, more furious with every segment uncovered. Hoping you’ll get to the centre—to accountability—only to find another layer. Another lie. Another institution standing in your way.

Duckenfield stood trial. Gross negligence manslaughter was the charge. The evidence seemed overwhelming. The jury acquitted him anyway. And on what basis?

His defence? That it was an “honest mistake.” How often have we heard that? Mistakes made under pressure. A man who lost his composure.

His lawyers argued that panic is not a crime. As if police officers don’t get specific training to handle exactly that kind of moment. As if someone incapable of handling that pressure should ever have been given that position in the first place.

Iain Banks is one of the great writers of his generation. And his masterpiece, in my view, isn’t The Wasp Factory, but Complicity. It tells the story of a journalist investigating a series of murders of high-level figures in the defence industry. He comes to suspect he may have inspired them with an article he once wrote, suggesting the world would be better if certain people were simply removed from it.

What he discovers is that the killer has taken him literally.

When they confront one another, the killer offers a chilling justification:

“If a certain level of skill—of competence—translates into the gift of life or death, it becomes malice when you don’t bother to exercise that skill, because people are relying on you to do just that.”

That doesn’t justify the killer’s actions. But the sentiment is true. If your position confers responsibility, and you fail in it so egregiously that lives are lost—then it is as if you caused the event deliberately.

That is the basis of the charge of negligent homicide. You were responsible. You were trusted to have the skills. And you failed.

To meet the standard of negligent homicide, the prosecution must check off several boxes. First: the defendant had a duty of care. Duckenfield, as match commander, didn’t just have that in the job description, it was the job itself. Second: that he breached that duty. Which, if you know anything about the events of that day, he clearly did. Third: that the breach led directly to the deaths. Self-evident.

But finally, the breach must be so grossly negligent that it becomes a criminal offence.

The jury couldn’t unanimously agree it crossed that high bar.

But what really sealed his acquittal were the judge’s instructions. He told the jury that, although Duckenfield was the match commander, he couldn’t be held legally accountable for the actions of others that day. It narrowed the scope of his responsibility to the point of absurdity.

Donald Denton, Alan Foster, and police lawyer Peter Metcalf stood trial in 2021 for perverting the course of justice. Their crime? Altering witness statements. Lying in official inquiries. Covering up.

The judge threw the case out. His reasoning? That internal police inquiries were not legal or statutory proceedings, and thus there was no “justice” to pervert. One of the most grotesque examples of the system protecting itself that I’ve ever seen.

And then there’s Sir Norman Bettison. A senior officer at the time of the disaster, who played a role in the cover-up. In 2017, the CPS dropped the case against him.

In the years between, he was knighted. In the ultimate grotesquerie, he was made Chief Constable of Merseyside.

How’s that for slapping the families in the face?

In every tragedy like this, there’s a search for blame. We want a simple explanation. But here, that explanation was deliberately obscured, twisted, buried. By people who didn’t just want to protect themselves, but who had powerful offices and institutions behind them, helping them bend facts and create lies.

We must never forget that Hillsborough was preventable. That it was gross negligence. That it was obscured by corruption. That no-one paid a price. None of them were fired. None of them lost their pensions. None of them went to jail.

And we must never forget that the 97 were just like us.

And that’s why Hillsborough haunts me because that could have been us. And we would have faced those same obstacles, and we would have faced that same awful official machine arrayed against us in the aftermath. We have a media up here which would have parroted official lies, blamed the fans, and a political class whose instinctive response would have been to make sure nobody in officialdom lost as much as a day’s wages.

We would have encountered a system determined at all costs to obscure its own culpability and escape its own accountability.

Eleven years ago at the 2014 inquest, a number of the families sought to reclaim the identities of their deceased loved ones by removing from them the numbers that they had been assigned in the morgue, and they gave victim impact statements which are still painful to read even now, each one personalising one of those victims and fleshing them out as individual human beings whose lives were cut short and who left behind them total devastation in their family units and in their social circles.

And I wish I had the time to write about all of them. I wish I had the room to do a personal tribute to every one of those 97, even if it was just by way of a 100 word biography telling you who those people were.

Because those are the people whose names should ring out ahead of the David Duckenfield’s and Norman Bettison’s … all I can do instead is to name them, all of them, and remember them as I try to do every year, and because it hits me like a hammer over and over again whenever I think about it, I’m going to list their ages too; some of them are so, so, so young.

So many of them are so young.

To all their families and friends and everyone who continues the struggle for justice and the fight to see some accountability; hold your heads up high, and don’t be afraid of the dark.

You’ll never walk alone.

In the names of those who have gone, our faith compels us to forgive, but we will not forget.

Jon-Paul Gilhooley, 10; Philip Hammond, 14; Thomas Anthony Howard, 14; Paul Brian Murray, 14; Lee Nicol,14; Adam Edward Spearritt,14; Peter Andrew Harrison, 15; Victoria Jane Hicks, 15; Philip John Steele, 15; Kevin Tyrrell, 15; Kevin Daniel Williams, 15; Kester Roger Marcus Ball, 16; Nicholas Michael Hewitt, 16; Martin Kevin Traynor, 16; Simon Bell, 17; Carl Darren Hewitt, 17; Keith McGrath, 17; Stephen Francis O’Neill, 17; Steven Joseph Robinson, 17; Henry Charles Rogers, 17; Stuart Paul William Thompson, 17; Graham John Wright, 17; James Gary Aspinall, 18; Carl Brown, 18; Paul Clark, 18; Christopher Barry Devonside, 18; Gary Philip Jones, 18; Carl David Lewis, 18; John McBrien, 18; Jonathon Owens, 18; Colin Mark Ashcroft, 19; Paul William Carlile, 19; Gary Christopher Church, 19; James Philip Delaney, 19; Sarah Louise Hicks, 19; David William Mather, 19; Colin Wafer, 19; Ian David Whelan, 19; Stephen Paul Copoc, 20; Ian Thomas Glover, 20; Gordon Rodney Horn, 20; Paul David Brady, 21; Thomas Steven Fox, 21; Marian Hazel McCabe, 21; Joseph Daniel McCarthy, 21; Peter McDonnell, 21; Carl William Rimmer, 21; Peter Francis Tootle, 21; David John Benson, 22; David William Birtle, 22; Tony Bland, 22; Gary Collins, 22; Tracey Elizabeth Cox, 23; William Roy Pemberton, 23; Colin Andrew Hugh William Sefton, 23; David Leonard Thomas, 23; Peter Andrew Burkett, 24; Derrick George Godwin, 24; Graham John Roberts, 24; David Steven Brown, 25; Richard Jones, 25; Barry Sidney Bennett, 26; Andrew Mark Brookes, 26; Paul Anthony Hewitson, 26; Paula Ann Smith, 26; Christopher James Traynor, 26; Barry Glover, 27; Gary Harrison, 27; Christine Anne Jones, 27; Nicholas Peter Joynes, 27; Francis Joseph McAllister, 27; Alan McGlone, 28; Joseph Clark, 29; Christopher Edwards, 29; James Robert Hennessy, 29; Alan Johnston, 29; Anthony Peter Kelly, 29; Martin Kenneth Wild, 29; Peter Reuben Thompson, 30; Stephen Francis Harrison, 31; Eric Hankin, 33; Vincent Michael Fitzsimmons, 34; Roy Harry Hamilton, 34; Patrick John Thompson, 35; Michael David Kelly, 38; Brian Christopher Mathews, 38; David George Rimmer, 38; Inger Shah, 38; David Hawley, 39; Thomas Howard, 39; Arthur Horrocks, 41; Eric George Hughes, 42; Henry Thomas Burke, 47; Raymond Thomas Chapman, 50; John Alfred Anderson, 62 and Gerard Bernard Patrick Baron, 67.