The Bohemian Budgie: Don't Buy The Scum

Friday, 5 December 2014

Don't Buy The Scum

I have a vivid recollection of being in a corner shop in Liverpool in 1994. Looking at the rows of newspapers on the shelves there was a disproportionate number of The Sun lying in a forlorn state, as usual. The shop was busy & some neophyte came in and tried to order a copy of the rag. All hell broke loose. Arms were flying about everywhere, and the room was full of angry scouse blokes & shouting. The neophyte squawked & squeeked & was eventually ejected from the shop with a brusque retrograde motion, and a faceful of expletives for good measure. Even now sales of The Scum have never recovered on Merseyside. Years after this event I was in the centre on Lime Street & saw a faded sticker on a lamp post: Don't Buy The Scum.

On 12 September 2012, the Hillsborough Independent Panel concluded that no Liverpool fans were responsible in any way for the disaster, and that its main cause was a "lack of police control". Crowd safety was "compromised at every level" and overcrowding issues had been recorded two years earlier. The panel concluded that "up to 41" of the 96 who perished might have survived had the emergency services' reactions and co-ordination been improved. The number is based on post-mortem examinations which found some victims may have had heart, lung or blood circulation function for some time after being removed from the crush. The report stated that placing fans who were "merely unconscious" on their backs would have resulted in their deaths.

The findings concluded that 164 witness statements had been altered. Of those statements, 116 were amended to remove or change negative comments about South Yorkshire Police. South Yorkshire Police had performed blood alcohol tests on the victims, some of them children, and ran computer checks on the national police database in an attempt to "impugn their reputation". The report concluded that the then Conservative MP for Sheffield Hallam, Irvine Patnick, passed inaccurate and untrue information from the police to the press [from Wiki].