Hillsborough

If you consider yourself left-wing, then there are a shedload of reasons to dislike Andy Burnham. But this speech is definitely not one of them. He's brilliant in this, and his exposure of Establishment corruption and wrongdoing here is one of the most forthright, honest and emotive I've seen from Parliament in years. Burnham's turning point came in 2009, after his speech at the 20-year anniversary Memorial Service was jeered and sliced by chants of justice. This prompted him to setup the Hillsborough Independent Panel, whose revealed evidence prompted the latest inquiry, leading to the verdict of an unlawful killing. It begs the question, just what would have happened had Burnham's speech passed through without comment? And what would have happened had the Hillsborough families not hunted down the truth of the disaster so tiresomely: paying for private prosecutions, or, in the case of the criminologist Phil Scraton, ticking carefully through investigatory steps across decades in order to unearth new evidence?

In this sense, we see how the veil of institutional accountability which democracy throws over the courts and police is, in fact, a terrain of continuous battle. A battle for people to fight for a justice they believe in, crunching through the stubborn waves of bureaucratic machinery in order to ensure that power belongs to them. If the families and supporting fans had not fought against the clouded cover-ups, institutional corruption and collusion, then quite simply, justice would not have prevailed and democratic accountability in the instance of Hillsborough would not have existed.

Watching the BBC documentary, what struck me in regards to corruption of institutional power in this instance, is simply how fragile it is. It is not a product of carefully planned routines orchestrated and talked about in the backrooms for years upon years, before disaster strikes. The people involved in the Hillsborough cover-up and denigration of the Liverpool fans were people who were utterly clueless in every possible regard, and across every element of the cover-up. So clueless that David Duckenfield, the under-qualified police chief in charge of ensuring the safety of fans at the game simply froze in his seat as it became clear that people were dying. So clueless that the edited police-office statements from the game, complete with corrections, somehow ended up in the library of the House of Lords rather than being burned at the bonfire in some Yorkshire forest. All it took, for the reign of colossal injustice to hold over 27 years was for powerful individuals, often working in separate institutions, to react to disastrous circumstances by trying desperately to save their own professional skin, frantically scratching at the cliffside for the grip of each other's limbs to hold them to safety. And there will I am sure, be much more to come in terms of just who exactly was involved in all of this. I've no doubt that The FA will be revealed for the pile of shit it is at some point. And this could go much higher - even all the way up to the Prime Minister's seat.

What this all points to is the most important need of a healthy democracy: for every single publicly concerned institution (parliaments, police, security services, media) to be completely transparent and accountable through an unrelenting democracy to the people they serve. Without this, we get Hillsborough. For, in the words of Simone Weil: power contains a sort of fatality which weighs as pitilessly on those who command as on those who obey.