Hillsborough, 36 years on

Even now, the Hillsborough Law hasn't been passed through parliament yet, and the institutional resistance to getting justice for the 97 seems as great as ever.

Both silence and a lot of noise can speak volumes, and the power of both could be heard loud and clear at Anfield on Sunday afternoon. But the crackle was already there. It was there in the pre-match rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone, a song given an added layer of poignancy on this particular week of the year. It was there in the guttural roar that followed the silence to mark the 36th anniversary of those lives being so needlessly lost.

The families of those who died that day still haven’t had closure. It remains as astonishing ever that the events of this week in 1989 have been allowed to cast a shadow that has now become generational. Even now, in 2025, the Hillsborough Law has not come into place and there seems to remain an institutional degree of resistance to passing it. It’s been 36 years now.

What, at this stage, is the possible benefit in delaying it any longer than is necessary? We all know what actually happened on the 15th April 1989. It has been laid out in agonising detail. There’s nothing more to say on that subject at this stage in proceedings. But the fact that this hasn’t been fully resolved and put to rest remains a stain on the very systems that let those who died and their families down.

Loose ends exist all over the place. No-one has ever received jail time over the deaths of 97 people, even though there was a wide-ranging cover-up reaching into various areas from the police to the media, and even to the behaviour of certain Members of Parliament. The House of Commons has had its say more than once, but it often doesn’t feel as though many other of these leopards have much changed their spots in the years since.

There even remain visual reminders. Somehow or other, the stand at the Leppings Lane end of Hillsborough that was there on the 15th April 1989 remains in situ. None of this is to say it’s currently unsafe or anything like that, though Newcastle supporters may beg to differ, but considering all the other new stands that have been built the length and breadth of the country over the last three and a half decades, that this particular one of all persists is remarkable.

As well as being an attack on those who died, their families, everybody else present that day, and Liverpool, both the football club and the city, what happened at Hillsborough was the culmination of years of attacks on football supporters, in terms of treating them like a problem to be resolved rather than a crowd to be managed. And part of the reason that this disaster landed so viscerally with the supporters of all clubs was that we all knew that it might have been us, that day.

The fences were essentially cages. Ken Bates wanted to electrify them. Up until 1985, a good number of the stands were, to some extent or other, fire hazards and it took the deaths of another 56 innocent people at Valley Parade in Bradford to finally get so much as safety checks carried out which confirmed this. Closed stands and considerable work were seen across the League as clubs finally seemed to slowly wake up to the fact that years and years of barely improving their facilities had rendered them fundamentally unsafe.

And it could have happened sooner. We all know that. It could happened at the previous year’s match between the same two teams at the same venue. It could have happened there in 1981, when Spurs supporters spilled onto the pitch during their FA Cup semi-final against Wolves. And in truth, the problem was broader than these isolated incidents alone. Anyone who went to matches in these cages, particularly during the 1980s, knew fully well how overcrowded they could get, and that perhaps the biggest reason why it didn’t happen earlier was that crowds had fallen away so drastically from the end of the previous decade.

It was essentially a policy of containment, and it didn’t work. Most of the time it just forced significant trouble to outside grounds where, from the point of view of a broader society whose patience was starting to wear thin, it became everybody else’s problem too. By the late-1980s, there were plans to make all football supporters carry ID cards. Meanwhile, by the spring of 1985, they couldn’t keep the trouble under control inside the grounds, either. So supporters were kept in these cages with their rusting crush barriers and peeling paint, their smell of piss and high, forbidding fences telling you, without any doubt whatsoever, that you were a problem.

And if we’re honest with ourselves, in terms of attitudes, how much has changed since then? Is it just that we’re having a lucky streak in this country in terms of ground safety, or have we nailed it? When the test of a 2022 Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid in Paris was hopelessly mismanaged and went horribly wrong, blame was put on the fans again. It was as though it was a reflex reaction, as though somebody within UEFA or the French police forgot that we’re not in the late 1980s any more, that everybody has a camera, and that reporters can tell the world what’s happening in real time. Parc de Princes didn’t seem very safe that night.

Hillsborough couldn’t have happened without those previous years of neglect. Those mindsets were necessary for the conflation of matters that came together to cause it to coagulate in the first place, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that they still exist today. They certainly seemed to have done so by 2022, with the response to the breakdown in control in Paris that year in some respects mirroring the reaction of the authorities in this country in April 1989 and beyond. Small wonder that flame of anger still burns as brightly. Small wonder the grief is still so intertwined with that burning desire to see justice. Small wonder that anger still burns so brightly, both in silence and in walls of sound. Thirty-six years on the flame still burns, because it has to.

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