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• Threshold for possible parliamentary debate passed
• Anne Williams says ‘inquests were riddled with corruption’

The mother of a young man who died in the Hillsborough disaster has had an e-petition calling for a new inquest into his death signed by more than 100,000 people, so qualifying it for a possible parliamentary debate. Anne Williams, whose son Kevin was 15 when he died at the 1989 FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Sheffield Wednesday’s ground, has never picked up Kevin’s death certificate because she does not believe the official account of how he died.

Since the disaster almost 23 years ago Williams has always disputed the legitimacy of the subsequent inquest into the deaths of the 96 mostly young Liverpool supporters. The Sheffield-based coroner, Dr Stefan Popper, ruled that he would take no evidence on anything that happened after 3:15pm on the day of the disaster. That was only 11 minutes after the 3:04pm “surge” in the Leppings Lane end, which precipitated the worst of the fatal crushing, and so it eliminated from the inquest any examination of the police’s and the emergency services’ response, which is now accepted to have been inadequate.

Lord Justice Taylor in his interim report on the disaster, which found the primary cause of the disaster was mismanagement by South Yorkshire police, noted that it was 3:13pm when a sole St John Ambulance vehicle came on to the pitch. There was, Taylor recorded, a “belated call” for medical assistance from doctors and nurses in the crowd at 3:30.

Owing to a pending investigation into possible criminal charges against those responsible for the disaster – none were ultimately brought – the coroner held “mini-inquests” into the individual victims’ deaths, with very limited evidence heard and no cross-examination permitted. The combination of that process and the 3:15pm cut-off imposed at the main inquest means that the families of those who died have never had a detailed account of what happened, the response to it, and whether their loved ones might have been saved.

The jury at the main inquest delivered a verdict of accidental death, not unlawful killing, which left many families feeling that nobody in charge was ever held responsible. A group of families failed with a legal challenge to the coroner’s conduct of the inquest, including the 3:15pm cut-off and the manner of his summing-up.

Williams’s own investigation into the circumstances of Kevin’s death found that two witnesses, Derek Bruder, an off-duty police officer, and a woman special police constable, had both testified that Kevin had signs of life up to 4pm. Bruder said that he felt a pulse, the SPC that Kevin had opened his eyes and said “Mum”.

The statements of both these witnesses were changed following visits from the West Midlands police, the force that investigated Hillsborough on behalf of Taylor, the coroner and the Department of Public Prosecutions. Since then, both witnesses have stood by their original statements.

The cause of Kevin’s death was given officially as traumatic asphyxia, a crush injury which meant he would have been dead by 3:15pm, within minutes of the crush itself. However, Williams has since obtained the opinions of three senior medical experts, one of whom, Dr Iain West, consultant forensic pathologist at London’s Guy’s Hospital, decided Kevin in fact had neck injuries and might have been saved had he received the correct assistance at the scene, after 3:15pm.

A fleet of ambulances were waiting outside the ground, but they were never called to assist the dying and injured Liverpool supporters. The more recent South Yorkshire police chief constable Meredydd Hughes, who retired last year, has told the Guardian that the response to the unfolding disaster was “chaotic” and there had been a failure of leadership.

Anne Williams’s petition states: “Kevin did not die from traumatic asphyxia or in an accident; I will not pick up his death certificate until we get the cause of death put right and the accidental death verdict struck down.” In relation to the way the witness statements were changed to suggest there were no signs of life after 3:15pm, Williams’s petition alleges: “Kevin’s inquests were riddled with corruption, suppressing of vital evidence and perverting the course of justice.”

An e-petition to the government requires 100,000 signatures for it to qualify for consideration as the subject of a parliamentary debate. Williams’s had only 35,000 two days before its deadline on Thursday. Then in a surge of support following campaigns on Twitter, Facebook and Liverpool supporter websites, the 100,000 figure was passed by noon on Thursday.

Williams thanked everybody who signed the petition and said she will be speaking to Stephen Mosley, the Conservative MP for Chester, where she lives, to urge him to call for a parliamentary debate. Her petition concludes: “I want the attorney general to look at the evidence again and send Kevin’s case back to the divisional court recommending a new inquest into the death of my son.”

An independent panel chaired by James Jones, the Anglican bishop of Liverpool, is currently examining all the official documents held by South Yorkshire police, the ambulance authority and all other public bodies relating to Hillsborough, to prepare a report into the disaster, which is expected in the summer.

Hillsborough disasterLiverpoolDavid Conn
guardian.co.uk

Monday’s Commons debate on the tragedy sounded like a prime example of old-fashioned class justice meted out to the working class by their old foe in blue – the police

Despite David Conn’s excellent articles in the Guardian, I must admit to a sceptical shrug when catching the start of Monday’s Commons debate on the 1989 Hillsborough football stadium disaster.

Yes, 96 visiting Liverpool fans died in the crush, but, surely, the issues have all been aired and investigated, the Sun has long been ostracised on Merseyside for its vicious and inaccurate front-page splash?

Scousers may have a reputation for thriving on a good grievance but when I started listening more carefully and left my TV set in order to watch the debate in person from the press gallery I rapidly concluded that this particular grievance is justified.

As Anfield’s local MP, Labour’s Steve Rotheram, present at the fatal match as a youngster, explained to fellow MPs: “A botched inquest, a flawed inquiry, a farcical review of evidence and a system that worked against, instead of for, the families, have left a bitter taste.”

What we were listening to sounded like a prime example of old-fashioned class justice meted out to the working class by their old foe in blue, in this instance, South Yorkshire police.

Not that the point seems much disputed any longer. Speaking for the government, Theresa May, the home secretary, promised “full disclosure”, as Patrick Wintour reports here. It was a strangely emotional occasion with clapping from the public gallery, not my style at all. But the effect was powerful. You can read the debate in Hansard – it starts in column 662 at 5.42pm – here.

Just read some of the remarks made last night by Andy Burnham, heckled at Anfield during the 20th anniversary service when he was culture, media and sports secretary, but a supporter of the Justice for the 96 campaign – many of whose supporters still want a police officer or official prosecuted for what happened that day.

Here’s one startling assertion: “The first damaging lie about Hillsborough came even as people lay dying, not long after 3.15, from a senior public servant, the officer in charge on that day. Chief Superintendent Duckenfield told the then chief executive of the Football Association that Liverpool fans had forced gate C, as my hon friend said. That was not true; he had given permission for the gate to be opened. Professor Phil Scraton wrote in his brilliant book, Hillsborough – the Truth: ‘Graham Kelly unwittingly … repeated Duckenfield’s lie to the waiting media. Within minutes, it was broadcast to the world: an appalling disaster was happening, and Liverpool fans were to blame.’”

Many people have known that for a long time, but not all. So here’s another: “Sadly for the families, that set the level for what was to follow. Blood alcohol levels were taken from the victims, including children, as they lay dead in the gymnasium at Hillsborough.

“By today’s standards, that is an unthinkable intrusion into the private grief of the families. As the families arrived at Hillsborough later that day to identify loved ones, they were subjected to police questioning as though they, and the deceased, were suspects.

“In the 80s, the authorities could get away with that type of behaviour – people just had to put up with it – but by today’s standards, it is truly shocking.”

“There was much worse to come,” Burnham told MPs.

“Days later, the most sickening lies imaginable were briefed by public servants to newspapers throughout the land. It was a brutal campaign to set public opinion against the supporters and to pre-empt the public inquiry that was to be carried out by Lord Justice Taylor.

“Let me remind the house that Taylor found that hooliganism played no part in the Hillsborough disaster, and that the main reason for it was the ‘failure of police control’. Yet even today, people talk about Hillsborough in the context of hooliganism. Casual allegations are still made about drunkenness and disorder.”

The MP for Leigh – Burnham is Liverpool-born and an Everton fan but grew up elsewhere in Lancashire – then set out what struck me as the most shocking claim of all, already in the public domain.

“In the House of Lords, there are files containing the original personal statements of police officers who witnessed these terrible events at first hand. They are hard to read, so distressing are the scenes they describe. One in particular stands out, and I have it with me this evening. It is the handwritten statement of police constable No 227 from Woodseats police station. These are his recollections of the crucial moments just after 3pm on 15 April 1989:

I realised at that time that a great tragedy had occurred. I began to feel myself being overcome with emotion, but soon realised that I would be of no use to anyone if I felt sorry for myself. I was assisted out of the terracing and on to the pitch. I saw several officers wandering about in a dazed and confused state. Some were crying and some simply sat on the grass. Members of the public were running about with boarding ferrying people from the pitch to the far end of the ground.

“PC 227’s words evoke the haunting TV images that people were later to see replayed time and again. There can be little doubt of their sincerity, but they are not the only words on the page. Attached to the top-right corner of the statement is a note from a senior officer. It reads: ‘Last two pages require amending. These are his own feelings. He also states that PCs were sat down crying when the fans were carrying the dead and injured. This shows they were organised and we were not. Have the PC rewrite the last two pages excluding the points mentioned.’

“In the cold light of 2011, those are truly shocking words. They go to the heart of the untold story of Hillsborough. The unforgettable words ‘they were organised and we were not’ transport us straight back to a very different time: an era of ‘them and us’, when football supporters were considered to be the ‘enemy within’. It is as though the officer was describing a battle for supremacy between two sides rather than the immediate aftermath of a terrible tragedy.”

Quite so. I rarely attend big sports events, the sense of being part of a huge partisan crowd doesn’t do it for me, a country boy. Yet I was touched last weekend to see more people turning up at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium – 60,000 – to watch Wales’s defeat by France (and that ref) in the Rugby World Cup than watched the actual match in distant Auckland.

But the MP’s words – echoed by colleagues in the debate – evoke a world long gone and much changed. As a more sporting chum explained this was the Thatcherite 80s, when the miners strike was a vivid memory (especially in South Yorkshire), when the middle-class “Nick Hornby-isation” of football supporters was in its infancy and all-seating stadiums a rarity in Britain. Racist chants and other nastiness disfigured many games.

Hillsborough helped change all that, along with expanding globalisation of football, a TV-rights-and-franchise driven affair. It has made the Premier League the world leader but – like the City of London – an alien and alienating foreign-owned affair whose pampered, overpaid stars often let themselves and the rest of us down. Yes, Wayne, I mean you. Different era, different problems.

In the 80s the police saw football as a crowd control issue, one in which ordinary fans – more working class than now, when ticket prices are so much higher – were regarded as a problem to be lumped in with the hooligan element and treated with disdain.

It’s not simply a matter of class justice. Football fans think the victims of the Marchioness riverboat tragedy, which took place on the Thames at night in the same accident-strewn year, got better attention because many were middle class and lived in London. Yet even they had their hands chopped off for identification purposes (and lost).

It probably wouldn’t happen now, I think. A police officer is currently on trial for allegedly thumping Ian Tomlinson, the news vendor who collapsed and died while walking through the 2009 G20 protest. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has criticised the way Nottinghamshire police failed to address a domestic abuse case which led to the death of Casey Brittle, 21, a year ago.

So the coppers are under great pressure at a time when wider society is under pressure too. As the riots showed, public opinion will instinctively side with law and order over chaos. It’s a tricky balancing act. Theresa May has Bernard Hogan-Howe to run the Met police. Operational mistakes can be costly in both lives and public trust.

If anything the stakes are higher than in 1989. So well done Dr Giles Fraser, the clergyman at St Paul’s, who advised the police to leave the scene of last weekend’s anti-capitalist demo in the City. He said he knew they meant well, but his cathedral didn’t need that sort of protection.

Hillsborough disasterLiverpoolAndy BurnhamMichael Whiteguardian.co.uk

• Petition reached 138,000 signatures
• Papers will be released next spring

The government has confirmed that issues around the release of Cabinet minutes relating to the Hillsborough tragedy will be debated in Parliament next month after an e-petition calling for their release reached more than 138,000 signatures.

The government had promised to put forward for debate any petition that reached more than 100,000 signatures and the Backbench Business Committee has now scheduled a half-day debate for 17 October, with a vote on a motion if necessary.

The petition had called for the immediate release of the Cabinet papers, seen as potentially significant in revealing the approach taken by the Thatcher administration to the disaster, as decreed by the Information Commissioner following an FOI request by the BBC.

After the petition reached 100,000 signatures, supported by a Twitter campaign, the government was obliged to make its position clear and confirm that it was committed to the publication of the documents.

It said the papers would be released after the Hillsborough Independent Panel set up by the previous government to examine the full circumstances of the disaster, with access to previously unseen documents, had delivered its report next spring.

“The government is happy for all the papers to be released as soon as the panel so decides, in consultation with the families. We expect them to be shared with the Hillsborough families first and then to the wider public,” it said last month in response to the campaign.

The scheduling of the debate was welcomed by Margaret Aspinall, who lost her son James in the disaster and is chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group. “It’s another good piece of the jigsaw that is coming together. It’s good that this will all be aired in Parliament,” she said.

But she reiterated that the preferred way forward was for the documents to be considered first in context by the Hillsborough Independent Panel, due to report next spring, and then released to the families of the 96 victims before being made public.

“The best way forward is for the panel to go through it all and then to inform the families and then the public. We have to trust the process,” she said.

The families hope that the report, which will draw on thousands of unreleased documents, will shed light on the many unanswered questions still surrounding the 1989 disaster and its aftermath.

Hillsborough disasterLiverpoolOwen Gibsonguardian.co.uk