Showing posts with label Hillsborough. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hillsborough. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 03, 2016

Actual Conspiracies


It can take decades for what was once branded a “conspiracy theory” to graduate to the rank of actual fact, and for the State to awaken official knowledge and restore the truth from its concealed state to the manifest.

The term “Conspiracy theory” has started loosing its derogatory sense frequently used in the past by opinion formers – nowadays, quite often, it is just the preliminary stage to the emergence of truth ... as were the facts about the Hillsborough disaster, which have recently made it to the level of officially sanctioned history.

The verdict in the Hillsborough inquest has now exposed many of the callous machinations employed by the State in its daily course of business – the spin, the slurs and the lies that were designed to baffle the public, and protect the Establishment’s interests and the officials’ backs.

As the Hillsborough inquest revealed, the police were instrumental (as they were – and still are - in the Gaul case) and blameworthy for the cover-up. Yet, they were not the only culprits. Conspiring against the victims were all the tentacles of the State: first and foremost the civil service, then policemen, politicians, our justice system and the press (as has also been the case in the Gaul, Derbyshire and Trident cover-ups)
So wide was the Hillsborough conspiracy that, had Gordon Brown’s Labour government not been so intent on scoring political points, we might have never heard the truth about the disaster proclaimed in a court of law. Such exposure of behind-the-scenes ‘reality’ is a very unusual occurrence in the UK – the Establishment having centuries of accreted knowledge on how to hush up inconvenient facts – that only the most vicious internecine strife within the political class can lead to their dirty laundry being washed in public.

A few days ago, Labour MP Andy Burnham said that the police force “put protecting itself above protecting those hurt by the horror of Hillsborough” and demanded that people be held accountable for their actions.
Yet, we have first-hand knowledge that the Gaul, Derbyshire and Trident tragedies – dealt with by Labour in much more unseemly ways – are conspiracies which Mr Burnham, the Labour Party and their Establishment appointees would prefer to remain just theory.

Hillsborough has been called “the biggest cover-up in British history". Maybe it was, but it was certainly not the ugliest.

LINK to a previous post on this subject

Thursday, September 13, 2012

The Hillsborough tragedy

With the publication of the Hillsborough report, that famous saying, according to which tragedy in life normally comes with betrayal and compromise, has been verified again.

The report from the panel created by the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in 2009 has just been disclosed to the public, thus allowing the families of the football fans who died in the 1989 Hillsborough disaster to find out the truth about the circumstances of their death.
And a series of shocking aspects have emerged, and further intrigues have started to take contour.

Familiar with the dealings in the Gaul, Derbyshire and Trident formal investigations (planned under Blair’s government), I could not help noticing the similarities and a number of disturbing aspects:

As the Hillsborough report revealed:
  • official negligence was covered up by blaming the victims for their own deaths;
  • the media colluded in the cover-up by presenting a misleading version of the events and  spreading smears;
  • police statements were amended to avoid liability;
  • the existence of a conspiracy to withhold the truth right across the Establishment.
Sadly, the same (and a lot more and a lot worse) can be said about several other public inquiries.

Such tragedies represent terrible, both private and public, loss. It is therefore the duty of the public, thorough the institution created to serve it, to properly investigate the causes of the loss, mitigate it and learn lessons for the future. This is not and should never be a political game. If it were, this would show a far deeper level of depravity than a hundred doctored statements.

The Hillsborough tragedy occurred under a Conservative government, and I therefore have my doubts as to whether the keenness on the part of Labour to get to the truth has been a hundred per cent motivated by compassion and honour. Why, in the campaign for the truth, has Labour been the loudest?
The panel was formed in 2009 by a Labour government who expected to lose the 2010 elections. What prevented them from setting up this panel 12 years earlier or sooner after Labour had come to power?

We have also noticed that Lord Falconer and Michael Mansfield QC are involved in advising the Hillsborough Family Support Group, with the former making lavish use of conditionals in his statements about future legal actions, and with the latter, hastily, calling the Hillsborough “the biggest cover-up in history”. 

The families, as Prime Minister Cameron said, suffered a double injustice and they have suffered a lot. Justice now needs to be done – and, most importantly, done for the right reasons. This was a tragedy and it should never be turned into a Tu Quoque defence for Labour.

UPDATE
It now turns out that documents showing the role of the police in covering up the Hillsborough disaster were handed to the Crown Prosecution Service 14 years ago. That is under the last Labour government, who must have decided to stash the evidence away as political ammunition for the future.
 
(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2202961/Complaint-senior-Hillsborough-officer-serving-blamed-fans-despite-report-referred-watchdog-lawyer-claims-cover-documents-handed-CPS-14-years-ago.html)

UPDATE

Negotiations are now ongoing:

http://www.scotsman.com/news/uk/hillsborough-files-lawyer-casts-doubts-over-prosecutions-1-2533661

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/news/9554051/Hillsborough-Police-watchdog-may-be-limited-in-investigation.html