THE STATE WILL PERMIT A VERSION OF THE TRUTH TO EMERGE—ONLY ONCE IT’S TOO LATE FOR CONSEQUENCES ~ punkacademic ~ The Independent Office of Police Conduct (IOPC) yesterday released its report on the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster, the worst in British sporting history. During the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough, Sheffield, a crush at the Leppings Lane End of the ground took the lives of 97 Liverpool fans, some of them in the following weeks and years due to injuries sustained. Many more fans and families suffered irrevocable trauma. The IOPC report states that officers from South Yorkshire Police could have faced disciplinary proceedings including charges of gross misconduct for their actions on the day and after. The scale of the injustice perpetrated against the Liverpool fans who died and were injured at Hillsborough, their families, friends, and indeed the city as a whole, has belatedly, gradually, been acknowledged by the state machine – but only because of a concerted campaign for justice mounted by the families and their supporters in the decades since. Many of those campaigners are dead. Anne Williams, who lost her son Kevin, died in 2013. Rose Robinson, who lost her son Steven, died in 2021. Williams never lived to see the outcome of the Goldring Inquests, which overturned the original verdicts of accidental death and ruled the fans had been unlawfully killed. Robinson never lived to see the IOPC say that police officers should have faced consequences for their actions. Several of those officers are themselves now dead, and others retired. Put simply, there will be no justice for the cop atrocity that is Hillsborough, as Margaret Aspinall has powerfully noted. The report acknowledges that the media response to the disaster was fuelled by briefings and lies on the part of South Yorkshire Police, the force responsible for policing the match, which worked hard to blame the fans for its mistakes, and traduced the memories of the dead. The 1990 Taylor Report and 2012 Hillsborough Independent Panel Report found the force to have been culpable for the disaster. The role of one particular officer, Norman Bettison, merits its own section in the IOPC report. Subsequently knighted, Bettison was both involved in the disinformation campaign which followed the disaster and later appointed Chief Constable of Merseyside Police, the force that polices Liverpool. Bettison’s appointment was controversial at the time, with two members of the Merseyside Police Authority resigning in protest. The IOPC report finds that, were Bettison still in police service, he would have a case to answer for gross misconduct on the basis of statements he made minimising his role in the cover-up and the briefing campaign which followed the 1989 disaster. Hillsborough is the latest in a series of state crimes against the public to result in a moment of nominal state catharsis once a ‘minimum safe distance’ is reached from the incident. As long as there is no real possibility of justice, the state will allow a modicum of the truth to ‘come out’, once it has been dragged kicking and screaming to that point by campaigners who will not let the matter rest. But it does so only for the sake of its own legitimacy, to maintain the facade that we live in a world where police lawbreaking is the exception, not the rule, and the state ‘learns lessons’. As with Hillsborough, so too with Bloody Sunday when the final Inquiry reported so late (after an earlier Inquiry had been a whitewash) that again many family members and campaigners were dead, and where even the one prosecution against a soldier – more than 50 years after the incident – failed. So too with the Spycops Inquiry, where whatever emerges from it has already been superseded by the fact that the very illegal acts that police spies engaged in have now been made lawful for future officers by the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act 2021. It is now lawful for the police to break the law. This is the true ‘lesson learned’; make sure you’re covered for this sort of stuff, so you don’t have the potential of a difficult investigation in the future – even thirty or fifty years hence. In Liverpool, the IOPC report has told us no more (and in fact less) than we already knew. From 15 April 1989 to now, the people of Liverpool have known what really happened at Hillsborough, just as they knew what the state was doing in the weeks and months after, and just as they knew from bitter experience the nature of the slander and lies promoted by the press. The damage is done; both the lives lost and those permanently injured mentally and physically, but also the damage to a whole city, slandered by police and government in the context of a 1980s  political culture where anti-Scouse diatribes had been a feature of media representation of a city that had refused (unlike much of the rest of England) to bend the knee to Thatcherism. Justice isn’t coming, despite the valiant efforts of the campaigners. The IOPC report provides no ‘closure’. Scousers were expendable in 1989, demeaned thereafter, and wounds will not heal. Saying that some of the perpetrators might have faced a HR process (but won’t) is, in the end, the most British of responses from a state apparatus that holds its people in contempt.   The post Hillsborough: Police condemned, but no justice appeared first on Freedom News.