What’s a life sentence? The common understanding of a life sentence is that of a criminal who has been sentenced to spend the rest of her or his life behind bars, although not really. Life doesn’t always mean life and, looking dispassionately, I can understand the need for rehabilitation for some people. But when is a life sentence really a life sentence?
I am following the Hillsborough inquests, mainly through David Conn of the Guardian and the Liverpool Echo. For me, Hillsborough was a ‘Kennedy moment’. I can remember vividly where I was and what I was doing, which was looking at a television set with my ex partner in Boots the Chemist in Bristol. (Boots sold things like TV sets in those days.) I could not properly hear what was happening and I wondered at first whether it was the usual pitch invasion you saw so frequently at football matches in those days. But then, it couldn’t be the usual pitch invasion because terraces were effectively cages where football fans watched games.
This was 1989, long before multi-media took effect and before mobile phones were an essential requisite to daily life. The next thing I learned about it was when I turned on the radio when I got home and even then the report was part of a regular news bulletin. There was no 24/7 radio station like Five Live.
And we all know what happened next. 96 people went to a football match and never went home.
It is criminal that the relatives have had to wait until now before inquests took place. It is inexcusable that we are here, almost 26 years later, and justice has still not been done. It is not a simple case of better late than never because this should have happened decades ago. The families have suffered since 1989 and now, after all this time, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. The reports I have read have been, without exception, desperately upsetting; tales of incompetence, tales of lies, tales of terrible suffering. That light must ultimately be closure, or some sort of it. I cannot imagine how the families feel after so many years. Many of them must be broken beyond belief.
Someone, or some people, had to be responsible for this appalling tragedy, whether it was wilful or whether it was as a result of neglect or perhaps a combination of both. We know that the press told lies that they say were told to them by those with power. None of this can be undone.
But to get anywhere near closure, we need truth and we need justice. We need those whose actions and inaction brought about the deaths of 96 football fan.
The families of the 96 are the ones with life sentences and even the truth, justice and closure will probably not be enough, not after 29 years. And if just reading the transcripts in the papers causes me, a distant observer, some distress and upset, what can it be like for those who lost their own?
