Watch Liverpool

Posts Tagged ‘uk news’

• Culture, media and sport select committee will consider issue
• Inquiry will not only be restricted to football

A committee of MPs is to hold an inquiry into racism in sport following the Luis Suárez case and allegations against John Terry.

The culture, media and sport select committee has agreed to look into the issue, with an evidence session scheduled for 6 March, and representatives from Liverpool could be summoned.

The committee member Damian Collins said: “I think the events of the last two weeks have reignited concerns about racism in the game. Although this session will not necessarily be restricted to football it will be the principle area of inquiry following the Suárez case and the concerns that have arisen from that.”

Collins said the committee had only decided on Tuesday to hold the session and the witnesses and terms of reference will be decided closer to the date of the inquiry.

Suárez’s eight-match ban for racially abusing Manchester United’s Patrice Evra and a police charge against the England captain Terry, who denies any wrongdoing, for allegedly racially abusing QPR’s Anton Ferdinand have thrust the issue back into the spotlight.

Liverpool have also apologised to Tom Adeyemi, the Oldham defender who was allegedly racially abused at Anfield on Friday night. A 20-year-old fan is on police bail.

The Liverpool Walton MP, Steve Rotheram, has been pushing for the committee to hold an inquiry.

Rotheram said: “I continue to support the Show Racism the Red Card initiative and believe, given the nature of recent events, that it would be appropriate for this issue to be looked at by parliamentarians from all parties and from different football, sporting and non-sporting allegiances.

“Sport should be rightly proud that in many ways it has led the field in tackling social issues such as racism, homophobia and sectarianism and it will be interesting to see what conclusions the select committee draw from the evidence session.”

LiverpoolRace issuesguardian.co.uk

Forget Mein Kampf. It’s a collection of the 1980s precursor of Loaded, Viz et al which has beaten Jamie Oliver and everyone else at the tills

We’ve had a fair bit in the Northerner this past year on independent publishing – eg here and here -so it’s nice to round things off with a pretty sensational success story.

An anthology of the legendary fanzine The End, reprinting all 20 editions, is this year’s Christmas best-seller in Liverpool’s bookshops, beating Jamie Oliver into second place and outselling perennial chart-toppers such as the Guinness Book of Records.

At £20 a copy, that’s very handy for Sabotage Times, the excellently-named online journal and publisher of the book whose logo is an anarchist’s round bomb with a sputtering fuse. They have added a series of essays and comments on the fanzine whose admirers included John Peel. He said of it:

My favourite magazine is The End from Liverpool which concerns itself with music, beer and football. The very stuff of life itself.

That endorsement came after Peel was bombarded with latters from The End which took him severely to task for his choice of music. At a time when much of his work was slavishly adulated, they caught his eye and appealed to his own sense of independence. He gave an interview to the team, led by Peter Hooton who went on to become lead singer of The Farm.

Hooton has been involved with the new anthology which marks 30 years since the first copy of The End appeared, with its appealing home-made look and cover price of 20p. Five hundred copies were printed for £90, giving a £10 profit for a sell-out. Result, happiness.

The fanzine anticipated lads’ magazines but with a lighter touch and sure powers of observing and describing Liverpool in the days of Militant, Derek Hatton and economic decline. It went wittily for hot-dog sellers and wearers of bobble hats and derided non-Liverpudlians; in spite of that, it built up a particularly large following in Leeds and West Yorkshire, including the future editor of Loaded, James Brown, who now runs Sabotage Times

The Christmas proof of The End’s lasting appeal delights Hooton, who says:

We were hoping it would still be popular but we have been overwhelmed by the demand. To be the best-selling book in Liverpool when you think of all the competition is amazing. It’s been a real team effort.

James Brown says:

We have sold nearly 4000 books in six weeks and over 1200 to Waterstones in the city alone. It’s a triumph for independent self-publishing as we’ve done this without a distributor.

Merry Christmas, one and all. There will be Northerners during the week, but not as many as usual and at excitingly unpredictable times.

LiverpoolLiverpoolLiverpoolMartin Wainwrightguardian.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