Book of the Week

Hillsborough:

The Truth

by Phil Scraton Mainstream Publishing Projects, pounds 9.99 paperback

I READ this book in a fog of anger. At the disaster itself,naturally, but also at the way the establishment ganged together to make sure that the truth - a scarcely believable story of incompetence and mendacity - was never officially told.

Let's establish a couple of facts: Hillsborough was not caused by alcohol and violence; Liverpool people had not, in Brian Clough's words, "killed their own". A combination of police incompetence and structural defects at the ground caused the disaster. How the world reacted to it was conditioned by the first action of the man in charge, Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield (who had no experience of such events): he informed Graham Kelly that Gate C had been forced by drunken fans.

In fact it was opened by the police. Kelly innocently passed this on in a TV interview. One is left hoping that Mr Duckenfield, who retired through "ill health" to pre-empt disciplinary proceedings, wakes up every morning full of remorse.

Afterwards, the police questioned survivors and bereaved with appalling insensitivity, trying desperately to establish that Leppings Lane that Saturday afternoon had been populated by insensate, aggressive drunkards intent on self-destruction.

Throughout the protracted process of inquest and inquiry, they told despicable and systematic lies at every stage. By the end, my copy was splattered with exclamation marks next to underlined passages.

Here, at random, are one or two of the bits that made my jaw drop: the ambulance driver who tried to drive on to a pitch littered with dead and dying, to be told by a policeman: "You can't go on there, they're still fighting"; another policeman who, when told by the mother of victim Andrew Sefton that he neither smoked nor drank, turned to his colleague and said: "She'll be telling us next he's a bloody virgin!"; the remark to a family member by Mr Justice Stuart-Smith on the steps of the Liverpool Maritime Museum before the so-called independent scrutiny: "Have you got a few of your people or are they like the Liverpool fans, turning up at the last minute?"

The story of the Hillsborough disaster is, in the end, grimly familiar: the little people, the ordinary people, the you and the me, we don't count. Not really. Alive or dead.

Chris Maume