The (Not Always) Fine Print - Vol. 4
When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high...
15th April, 1989. A date football fans will never forget.
97 Liverpool supporters lost their lives at the Hillsborough Stadium. What should’ve been an FA Cup semi-final descended into the worst disaster in British sporting history. Not because of the fans, but because of catastrophic crowd management.
Hillsborough wasn’t just a tragedy on the day either. It became a decades-long wound. For years, their families carried the unbearable weight of grief made heavier by cover-ups, smears and institutional bias.
I wasn’t there. I wasn’t even alive yet. But as a Liverpool fan that comes from a family of avid reds, I’ve heard the echoes of the pain caused by the disaster ever since I was old enough to understand what had taken place.
More than a tragedy
Hillsborough itself was unforgivable, but what came after was even worse. A cover-up so calculated and callous it still makes my stomach turn. Instead of taking responsibility, South Yorkshire Police and the political leaders at the time colluded to pin the blame onto the very people who had just lost friends and family. Officers doctored witness statements. Senior figures spread the lie that fans were drunk, ticketless and violent. It was an industrial-scale gaslighting operation against grieving families and an entire city.
Then there was The Sun. With its infamous “The Truth” headline, it spewed a front page of outright lies. Claims of theft, urination on police, attacks on emergency services. All of them baseless. It wasn’t journalism. It was a character assassination of working-class supporters, gleefully amplified by police chiefs, Tory ministers, and their media mouthpieces, who wanted to paint Scousers as the villains. The fact that it took decades for that so-called newspaper to even attempt an apology tells you everything you need to know about its ethics, or lack thereof.
The rot went right to the top of government too. Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet was so desperate to protect authority figures from scrutiny that it closed ranks. Rather than confronting catastrophic policing failures, the Tories enabled the narrative that ordinary fans were to blame. For years, families were left shouting into the void, dismissed as troublemakers or conspiracy theorists, all while they were simply fighting for justice.
What Hillsborough revealed wasn’t just individual negligence. It exposed how quickly those in power will rewrite reality to protect themselves. 97 people died, yet survivors and their families were put on trial in the court of public opinion. A court that, despite everything, still has it out for the fans. A season hasn’t passed since where a small yet vocal section of opposition fans haven’t chanted “always the victims, it’s never your fault” at Scousers. That’s the cruelty of the cover-up. Grief was compounded by lies, and justice delayed for more than three decades.
A law born from lies
That’s why the Hillsborough Law bill matters so much. For decades, families were left in the dark because powerful institutions lied through their teeth. Police rewrote witness statements. Politicians protected their own. Newspapers happily played the role of attack dogs. At every turn, the truth was buried deeper. That’s despite five different British Prime Ministers across both mainstream parties having the opportunity to make a change between 1989 and the 2016 inquest.
36 years on, the new law introduced in parliament this week is designed to stop that from ever happening again. At its core is something that should have been obvious all along. A duty of candour. In plain English, that equates to public bodies and officials now being legally required to be honest, transparent and proactive when disasters occur. No more cherry-picking evidence, strategic silence or rewriting history while families grieve.
How this wasn’t at the forefront of our supposedly democratic system in the first place?
It’s tragic that it took the deaths of 97 people, decades of tireless campaigning for this to happen. Families sacrificed their health and livelihoods just to force those in power to tell the truth. But here we are. It’s 2025 and while (once passed) the Hillsborough Law won’t erase the suffering, it does set a precedent. It says to every police force, government department and public authority: if you screw up, you own it. You don’t spin it!
Cynics out there say it’s just words on paper. I should know, I am one. After all, laws are only as strong as their enforcement and as the old adage goes; who watches the watchmen? It’s still a seismic shift though. It takes away the state’s favourite weapon — silence — and puts families of victims of future tragedies on much firmer ground.
It may have taken over three decades, but the Hillsborough families turned lies into truth, and now (almost) into law. That’s resilience, and an indictment of the system that forced them to keep fighting for so long.
The day is darkest before the dawn
In the face of all that pain, the families, fans and the city of Liverpool never stopped walking together. That’s what makes this moment bigger than politics and much more important than football. It’s about solidarity in the darkest times.
So it only feels right to close with the anthem that carried them through it all, and will always carry them: You’ll Never Walk Alone.