Hang your heads in shame Bernard Ingham and Boris Johnson over your comments on Hillsborough
A shockingly callous letter written by Margaret Thatcher's press secretary has come to light in the wake of an inquest jury's ruling that the 1989 Hillsborough stadium disaster was caused by police failures.Thatcher and her aide Sir Bernard Ingham visited the stadium the day after the FA Cup semi-final in Sheffield, and were told by South Yorkshire police that "drunken Liverpool fans" had caused the crush that killed 96 people. The pain of families and survivors has been dragged out by several inquests and repeated attempts by the police to minimise their responsibility for the deaths by blaming Liverpool fans' behaviour.Much of the media and political establishment sided with the police as campaigners fought for decades for answers on what really happened on the day of the tragedy.Their protests fell on deaf ears in Thatcher's office, if this 1996 letter from Ingham to Liverpool fan Graham Skinner is anything to go by:
"Thank you for your letter of June 13. I am sorry you are disgusted with the uncomfortable truth about the real cause of the Hillsborough disaster. It is my unhappy experience to find that most reasonable people outside Merseyside recognise the truth of what I say.
All I get from Merseyside is abuse. I wonder why. You are at least right in believing that you will have to put up with my discomforting views. I cherish the hope that as time goes on you will come to recognise the truth of what I say. After all, who if not the tanked up yobs who turned up late determined to get into the ground caused the disaster? To blame the police, even though they may have made mistakes, is contemptible."
Boris Johnson wrote this equally appaling article on Hillsbourough in the Spectator.. He is not the cuddly, idiot you see before you.The real Boris Johnson is shown by his initial approval of this 2004 Simon Heffer article:
"The extreme reaction to Mr Bigley’s murder is fed by the fact that he was a Liverpudlian. Liverpool is a handsome city with a tribal sense of community. A combination of economic misfortune – its docks were, fundamentally, on the wrong side of England when Britain entered what is now the European Union – and an excessive predilection for welfarism have created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians. They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it. Part of this flawed psychological state is that they cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it, thereby deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance against the rest of society. The deaths of more than 50 Liverpool football supporters at Hillsborough in 1989 was undeniably a greater tragedy than the single death, however horrible, of Mr Bigley; but that is no excuse for Liverpool’s failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon. The police became a convenient scapegoat, and the Sun newspaper a whipping-boy for daring, albeit in a tasteless fashion, to hint at the wider causes of the incident. “
The Establishment wished to blame the powerless, the working class, the "yobs" they used the forces of the state, the "Sun" newspaper and the higher ranks of the police force. Now it is your time to go to Hell...Bernard and Boris.......
Liverpool has taken on the Establishment and won. Now Boris Johnson and Bernard Ingham should hang their heads in shame over their comments.
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