Scouse
September 12, 2012 1 Comment
I am of Scouse descent; the Ware-Lanes originated in the Liverpool of the nineteenth century. I am no Liverpool supporter; for perhaps perverse reasons I support Aston Villa and Southend United (and Millwall, if allowed a third team).
My wife and five children are Liverpool fans, as is my boss and many friends. Liverpool’s results are the second I look for (after the Villans) – I hope for their defeat. This is only for sporting reasons – I do recognise that they are a team with a great history.
I can vividly recall where I was when I heard about the Hillsborough tragedy. I remember a warm Spring Saturday afternoon, and I was refereeing at the John H Burrows Recreation ground in Hadleigh. Coming off after a match that had a 2pm kick-off I can remember some on the touchline listening to their radios, in obvious shock and horror at the unfolding news. The rest of the day was spent watching the TV with a mixture of disbelief and stupefaction. This came, it will be recalled, only a few years after Heysel and the Bradford City fire. The beautiful game, my game, had a dreadful eighties.
Today’s revelations are appalling; this is no hyperbole. I cannot imagine how it must feel to find out that a dead loved one could have been saved.
The Police did not have a good eighties. They had become the tool of the establishment and a times treated ordinary working people as the enemy. Times have changed, thank goodness. I only hope that the PCC elections do not start us back on the road to a politicised force.
I too watched in horror as the PM gave his statement (yesterday my part of the country finally got partial digital TV allowing us access to BBC News and BBC Parliament).
Have things changed?
- Police now routinely dress in “battledress” – the last memories of the friendly copper of the past disappeared with the Miner’s Strike.
- Police now “armed” with batons and pepper spray, with Tasers (approved and unapproved) available (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-14914425). Police with firearms are a far more common sight.
- Police kettle and attempt to intimidate “demonstrators” (G20 – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18930610, Brighton Gay Pride – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-19454210 etc.)
- Police infiltrate protest groups at an operational scale that some might expect for infiltrating terrorist groups – with a suspicion that they do it at least at the urging of the corporate groups that are the subject of the protests. (e.g Radcliffe-on-Soar Power Station – http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/12/mark-kennedy-policeman-corporate-spy)
- Government about to give the police and other authorities the ability to monitor who we communicate with – without requiring a warrent. (http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/campaigns/no-snoopers-charter/snoopers-charter-mythbuster.php)
- We await Leveson and his comments on the allegedly cosy relationship between the Government, the Media and the Police
I fear that the police now keep “the Government’s Peace” rather than “the Queen’s Peace”.
Why do you think times have changed? We may have had more than a decade of labour government since the 1980s – but they introduced some pretty draconian laws to “assist” the forces of law and order. The current Con-Dem lot do not seem over-keen on repealing any of that legislation – probably having assessed that now they are in power it might suit them – particularly if we are to face a new “winter of discontent”.
Could another Hillsborough style cover-up happen? It took a fair struggle (as yet incomplete?) to find out what happened to Ian Tomlinson – and that raised huge questions about recent Police recruitment procedures and about how post-mortems are done.