A lot of people at getting very bored with the ongoing Hillsborough saga, but I think it's very important. I realise it won't bring back the 96 dead people. And prosecuting retired police officers who made mistakes a long time ago could appear vengeful. Either way the families, who have lived through decades of seeing the dead relatives effectively blamed for being killed (or at least the fellow Liverpool supporters of those killed being blamed) have at least had the comfort of the truth coming out after such a long time.
I admit that for many years I thought that the issues had been raked over enough. Some fans no doubt turned up drunk, some tried to bunk in without tickets (I have personal experience of how endemic that was around that time) but the fundamental issue - the root cause - was that the ground used was unsafe. The Taylor report rapidly led to all-seater stadiums at the top level of English football and the stadiums became better places for families to attend. The big surge in money then came into the game following the advent of Sky, leading to the amazing riches of the modern game. It's hard to imagine that football could have been so rapidly rehabilitated without the Taylor changes. A Hillsborough type incident could not happen again, at least not in the same way, which was at least one positive legacy from that awful day.
That said, the trigger event on the day which turned an unsafe situation into a disaster was the police decision to open a gate and let fans pour in to pens which were meant to have specified capacities in an uncontrolled manner. There were probably plenty of other unsafe stadiums - all of us who went to matches before 1990 can remember some scary situations, especially before stadium capacities were reduced following the Safety of Sports Grounds Act of 1975, because of the sheer numbers of people present, especially trying to exit the grounds through gates, down stairways and even in narrow streets outside the grounds.
There is now still more evidence to be heard in court about why the gate was opened. We can expect to hear testimony about the crowded situation outside the ground, with perhaps a third of the spectators still outside 20 minutes before kick off time and, possibly, a defence that, with kick off approaching and fans getting agitated, it was thought safer to open the gate. The option of delaying the kick off, which had been done at the FA Cup semi-finals held at Hillsborough in 1987, two years earlier and also at the semi-final at Villa Pak that year. The FA's Glen Kirton asked the Sheffield Wednesday club secretary, Graham Mackrell, whether the police had asked to delay the kick off. The response was that they had not because delaying the kick off caused all sorts of organisational problems at the end of the game*. I wonder if this was actually because the match commander was new to the role. These days regulators in industry would surely expect a novice to have an experienced "buddy".
The reason that there was congestion outside the ground was that 12 turnstiles accessing the North Stand from Penistone Road were closed on the day, meaning Liverpool fans with tickets for both the North Stand and west end of the stadium had to enter through Leppings Lane. The coroner said: “As a result, the 23 turnstiles at the Leppings Lane end served the whole of the north and west stands, which contained over 24,000 spectators.” There were 62 turnstiles to access the Spion Kop and south stand which that meant an average of one turnstile for 468 spectators, compared to one turnstile for 1,065 fans at Leppings Lane end. The coroner, Sir John Goldring, put it to the then Sheffield Wednesday secretary that "... it was simply not safe to get 24,500 fans through the Leppings Lane end". He replied ‘It had been achieved the previous year and it had been a situation that had been agreed with the police’.
While it hadn't been a problem in 1988, when the same 2 teams contested a semi-final, it was a problem in 1989 and when the gate was deliberately opened the disaster followed. But making a mistake in the heat of the moment is one thing, even if it was the trigger for a large number of deaths. However, then there was a systematic police cover up, sponsored at senior levels and a disgraceful smoke screen of lies about the behaviour of the fans.
I had been taken in by the various inquiries and official pronouncements over the years. Though Taylor was critical of the police it wasn't a key finding and the Thatcher government didn't want to look further. After 1997 Tony Blair and Jack Straw concluded there wasn't enough information to justify reopening the issue. It was only when Andy Burnham was heckled at the 2009 memorial service that he called for full disclosure and Gordon Brown backed him, creating the Hillsborough Independent Panel. I was wrong (as very many were) in thinking that the police had probably done the best job they could, as usual, in difficult circumstances and I think the political classes were stunned at what emerged, with Cameron and May giving full support to taking things further.
Some might say why press charges now? To me this isn't about justice for the 96 - it's to protect our society much more widely. The police cover up showed an institutional level of corruption in the South Yorkshire force. It would be very difficult to investigate whether this behaviour was more widespread. Perverting the course of justice is an extremely serious offence by anyone, but by the police it threatens our whole justice system. I expect there would be very few people in the legal system who don't think these cases should be prosecuted. The police do a hard job in often trying circumstances and we have seen heroic actions by officers on many occasions. But the bar for police conduct has to be set high and it is essential that such blatant illegal behaviour must be prosecuted and, if found guilty, severely punished.
However one party is getting off scot free. The Football Association held their semi-final at a ground that didn't have a valid, or certainly not up to date, safety certificate, a legal requirement. The whole situation over the safety certificate was a mess. Some of the evidence to the second inquest stated that the certificate wasn't valid**, though the a retired senior fire officer who was on the committee monitoring the ground's safety certificate testified that it was valid, but "hadn't been updated" and that "everybody in the working party was concerned that the safety certificate was so far out of date"***. This may all seem a bit of a detail now, but one of the reasons it needed updating was because the Leppings Lane end of the ground had been separated into three pens, a modification that was a factor in the disaster. Moreover, the three pens were not served by separate turnstiles so police were meant to monitor how many were going into each pen and close them when they got to capacity. This seems a totally inadequate way of trying to meet a safety requirement, even if the gate had not been deliberately opened, leading to an uncontrollable (and uncountable) rush of fans. But worse than that: there were discrepancies in the maximum pen capacities and they had not been checked or updated either. And the required annual inspection hadn't taken place.
Now all this was the responsibility of Sheffield Wednesday, the hosting club. One former Sheffield Wednesday executive, Graham Mackrell, is amongst the people being charged. The club itself cannot be charged as it went bust and the successor company did not take on historic liabilities. There is no body corporate to prosecute, or to sue for damages. But the Football Association had a rule at the time that required all clubs every season to fill in a form, certifying their grounds had been inspected in accordance with safety legislation and the appropriate licence obtained****. It was a disciplinary offence not to fulfill that requirement. But the FA did not follow its own rule - did not even appear to be aware of it - and so went ahead and awarded the match to Sheffield Wednesday. But officially they weren't in charge of the match, the club was, as Graham Kelly the then FA Chief Executive was careful to spell out in his original witness statement*. So the FA, a hugely rich organisation, have got away with it on a technicality, because it was not legally the body responsible for the match. Even though it was the FA Cup. How convenient.
Graham Kelly had also only been in post for about 2 months when the game was held. Even so, I think he is a very fortunate man. He oversaw the choice of the ground. And the FA, with its deep pockets, is not going to be charged with corporate manslaughter and will not be heavily fined. I think an amount approximating to the cost of the 2nd inquest would have seemed appropriate, myself.
Oh, I checked in case the phrase "scot free" is now politically incorrect. It's not - yet. The derivation of the phrase comes from the Scandinavian word shot, for which the modern equivalents in Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic mean "tax". So basically without penalty. For example see here
*from Graham Kelly's Hillsborough witness statement to the 1989 inquiry which can be seen at http://hillsborough.independent.gov.uk/repository/docs/HOM000001380001.pdf
**http://www.mirror.co.uk/incoming/hillsborough-no-valid-safety-certificate-3616429
***Hillsborough inquests - safety certificate "out of date" at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-27639456
****https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/may/10/hillsborough-disaster-fa-serious-questions-ground-safety
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