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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

Had responsibility for the football tragedy been accepted early on, there would be no need for a parliamentary debate

The families of the 96, mostly young, people who died on the terraces of Hillsborough have waited 22 years, not only for the authorities culpable to acknowledge their responsibility. It has also taken this long for the families’ cause to

Demand comes as MPs consider e-petition calling for ‘full government disclosure’ over 1989 football ground disaster

The chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group has called on the Sun to reveal the identities of its sources for a notorious story which in effect blamed Liverpool fans for causing the 1989 disaster, in which 96 of the club’s supporters died.

Margaret Aspinall, whose 18-year-old son James died at the FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough stadium, said it was vital, as part of the official disclosure of all public documents relating to the disaster which MPs will debate in parliament on Monday evening, that the Sun should say exactly who was behind its briefing.

Headlined “THE TRUTH” and run on 19 April 1989, four days after the disaster, the newspaper’s story alleged that the disaster followed “mass drunkenness” among Liverpool supporters, and that some fans had urinated on police and on victims, and picked victims’ pockets as their bodies lay on the pitch. The Sun said the allegations had come from unnamed South Yorkshire police officers.

Aspinall said the report was deeply traumatic for families struggling with shock and grief, and “set the injustice in train” as the police prepared their case for Lord Justice Taylor’s official inquiry and the inquest. The latter blamed the supporters for causing the disaster.

As a result of the report, the Sun was subject to a boycott on Merseyside which has substantially lasted until today, despite attempts over the years by the paper to apologise.

In Taylor’s report into the disaster in August 1989, he described the Sun’s stories as “grave and emotive calumnies” and wholly discredited them, saying: “Not a single witness was called before the inquiry to support any of those allegations.”

The then South Yorkshire police chief constable, Peter Wright, dissociated himself from the allegations, but Aspinall said the families had always felt it set public opinion and officialdom into believing that version of events.

“That story, that our children were drunken yobs, came as we were grieving for their loss, and we had to defend their good names,” she said. “It set people’s minds, which you can still see even now, that the disaster was caused by the fans, not by the police losing control. That set the injustice in train, the real truth never came out at the inquest, and nobody in authority has ever been held to account.

“If we are now to discover the real truth, let the Sun tell us who gave them those lies which caused so much damage.

“If the Sun wants to make amends, they should reveal who it was, not allow their sources to hide behind anonymous briefings 22 years later, and help the families to understand what happened.”

MPs will debate the current public document disclosure process in the Commons after more than 100,000 people signed an e-petition calling for “full government disclosure and publication of all documents” following a freedom of information request by the BBC.

The Hillsborough families have campaigned particularly to be told about the briefings South Yorkshire police gave to the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, when she visited Hillsborough the day after the disaster.

Her then press secretary, Sir Bernard Ingham, said later that he “learned on the day” that the disaster was caused by a “tanked-up mob” of Liverpool supporters.

The home secretary, Theresa May, is expected to restate the government’s position, which is a “commitment to full transparency about the Hillsborough disaster through full public disclosure”.

That will, the government has confirmed, include cabinet papers from the time, but it is not yet clear if those discussions will detail the briefings Thatcher received from South Yorkshire police.

An independent panel of experts chaired by James Jones, the bishop of Liverpool, has been set up to examine the huge archive, and write a report setting out how the new material adds to public understanding of the disaster. The intention is to produce “as near to the full story as possible,” Jones has said.

May is likely to say all the papers, including those of Thatcher’s cabinet at the time, should be disclosed first to the panel, who will share them with the victims’ families before they are released for publication.

“The government is happy for all the papers, including cabinet papers, to be released as soon as the panel so decides, in consultation with the families,” a government spokesman said.

Andy Burnham, Labour’s shadow health spokesman, who, with another Merseyside Labour MP, Maria Eagle, initiated the public disclosure process on the 20th anniversary of the disaster two years ago, is expected to support that view.

He said he was already looking beyond the disclosure of documents to an ultimate process of “truth and reconciliation”.

“After Hillsborough, the lie was set early on that Liverpool supporters had forced open an exit gate and rushed through it, when in fact the police had ordered the gate to be opened,” Burnham said.

“What the families of innocent victims were then put through belongs to an era from which we have moved on, when the authorities were able to abuse ordinary people in a sickening way.

“When the full disclosure has happened and the report is written, I believe there should be an appropriate national response and process of reconciliation.

“The prime minister, David Cameron, gave a very dignified response to the Saville report into Bloody Sunday, and offered an unqualified apology for what took place. I believe the Hillsborough families will deserve a response on that scale.”

In his 1989 report, Taylor concluded that South Yorkshire police’s mismanagement of the crowd was “the immediate cause” of the disaster, together with safety failures by Sheffield Wednesday FC, the owner of Hillsborough, and Sheffield city council, which failed in its safety certifying role.

News International did not respond to questions as to whether the Sun would be prepared to reveal the identity of its sources for the story.

Hillsborough disasterLiverpoolHouse of CommonsFreedom of informationSheffieldThe SunNational newspapersDavid Connguardian.co.uk