Grant Woodward: The Hillsborough lies that began as fans lay dying

The scenes being beamed from the Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield were almost impossible to comprehend. Football-mad 14-year-olds, we sat in stunned silence as the carnage unfolded before us, commentator John Motson attempting to make some sense of it all.

Even then the lies were spreading their tentacles, strangling the truth as desperate young men carried their already dead mates on makeshift stretchers across the crowd-strewn pitch.

“The reason it happened was that one of the outside gates here was broken and non-ticket holders forced their way in and overcrowded the section at the Leppings Lane End,” Motson told us and millions of horror-struck viewers.

And that’s what we thought too. That the supporters were to blame. Four years earlier, a gaggle of us had crowded round a portable black and white telly at Cub camp to watch Liverpool play Juventus in the European Cup Final.

As the violence unfolded, our Akela had told us to go to bed. We ended up listening to the game on a radio in our tent. By the end of the night, Liverpool had lost 1-0 and 39 people were dead.

Fourteen Liverpool fans were later found guilty of manslaughter and jailed for three years. English clubs were banned from European competition for five years.

So as the cameras panned across the Hillsborough pitch showing spectators pumping the chests of lifeless bodies, the feeling was that the hooligans had done it again. And the authorities were quite happy for the British public to swallow that lie. In fact, they engineered it.

The tragic irony is that if Heysel hadn’t happened there would have been no need for wire fences surrounding pitches and the penning in of supporters.

But we now know Hillsborough wasn’t caused by hooliganism. Fans hadn’t forced open the gate. David Duckinfield, the police officer in charge on that
fateful spring day, had lied to FA officials.

More than a quarter of a century later, at the fresh inquests in Warrington, he admitted it was unlocked on his orders because the police’s abject failure to properly control crowds outside the entrance had resulted in a crush as fans attempted to get into the ground.

It was a lie that set the template for the subterfuge that followed. The cover-up over the disaster would shame a banana republic. In a so-called democracy it is enough to chill you to the bone.

It started within minutes of the full horror of Hillsborough becoming apparent. It saw police photographers despatched to find discarded beer cans, evidence that drunken supporters were to blame when they were not. False stories were fed to newspapers that supporters urinated on ambulance workers and stole from the dead. Critical comments were removed from no fewer than 116 statements given by rank and file officers at the scene in a bid to absolve their superiors of blame.

All of it part of the desperate scramble by senior police officers and others to cover their tracks and conceal the truth.

This was corruption – pure and simple. And shamefully, the recent inquests saw some continue to try to deflect blame for the tragedy on to the dead.

It is worth remembering that all the damning evidence that has been presented over the past few years, laying bare the truth of what happened on that day, has always been there. Yet despite pleas from the families of the 96, successive governments – both Conservative and Labour – turned their backs on them.

And it wasn’t just the families of the 96 who were lied to, the entire nation was wickedly misled. The next logical step after the unlawful killing verdict is to start criminal proceedings against those who sought to hide the truth from us for 27 long years.

They must now be held to account. And every time those in positions of authority scoff at a “conspiracy theory”, we must remember Hillsborough.

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