Felix | When Britain was a different country

The best of times, the worst of times; as I write this the papers are still full of the joys of the Olympic and Paralympic summer – all about the Games Makers, those wonderful, smiling volunteers who cheered us and guided us and helped us. The papers are also covering the outcome of the Hillsborough Report, and the images flashed up for us are the grainy black and white pictures of Margaret Thatcher with her entourage standing grimly at Hillsborough on the Monday morning, and the colour pictures of the day itself, and the film footage of the crush.

I remember Hillsborough, not because I was there but because I was away for the weekend and staying with friends, and we came into the house that Saturday afternoon, perhaps from a walk or lunch at a pub in the sunshine, and curious to see how the semi-finals were going switched on “Grandstand”. And there it was unfolding before our eyes. I remember that really nobody could tell what was really happening, and then there was a fatuous television interviewer asking Kenny Dalgleish that, given the Heysel Stadium disaster, “how do you feel?”

Rough justice

Then over the years there has been the polarisation of views, the Inquest, the Taylor Report, Jimmy McGovern’s drama-documentary, and the pressure to re-visit what really happened. What now comes as such a shock is that this was 1989 – a time that I can remember well, a time of adulthood. We are used to a past that contained appalling miscarriages of justice; we could watch the release of the Guildford Four and other such cases with the sense that all of that sort of thing went on in the 1970s, when police “rough justice” was unspokenly, wrongly tolerated as long as it did not go too far. It was a time that was far out of reach, way back behind us: it all belonged to an age of Double Diamond lager, rubbish British Leyland cars like the Allegro, cheesy pop music and ridiculous flares, and everyone smoking their heads off, sexism, racism, and having to be persuaded by Jimmy Saville to wear seatbelts. It was of the time when the lights went out because the miners were on strike. It was, in fact, a foreign country where they certainly did things differently. I remember a colleague saying that he defended in Birmingham and the Midlands at the time that the West Midlands Regional Crime Squad was in its pomp, and his clients would protest their innocence and claim that they had been fitted up and nobody believed them, and then hey presto, many years later it emerged that that is exactly what had been going on.

So it is with a jolt that within my adult working life I too have lived through an event, watched it on television, read the newspapers and formed opinions based on a wholesale, systematic, organised lie. And the people involved were there that day in the end to keep others safe – they did not think that they had a mass murdering bomber on their hands downstairs in the cells, or a major villain who needed a bit extra to make sure that the jury got him down at the trial. These were men and boys who died innocently, and left families and friends to grieve. It was a disaster, and the response went wrong, and the blame was shifted - all in what seems like only yesterday, not yesteryear.

Unearthing the truth

But all credit to the courage of those who kept going to get at the truth. In the end, and surely this is the warning to every institution or person who is tempted to do some covering up, large or small - that in the end the truth will come out, because tenacious people don’t give up. It is also why, that although there are flaws in our system that failed so many, we are still a country where, in the end, if you keep trying, you will get to the truth. That is the one comfort to take away from Hillsborough, that at least in this country, the truth is very hard to bury forever, and when it comes out, then there will be a reckoning. The good advice then is, however tempted, don’t even think about a cover up, because the right people and the good people, even if there are only a few of them, will in all probability use the law to get to the truth in the end.

So we can celebrate the campaigners’ human courage, tenacity and decency. We celebrate the Games Makers. And we can look now to our modern age, and the example that the Games Makers set, and the example that the athletes and the crowd set, and remember how proud we were to be British for the right reasons. In our profession we can also be proud and remember how important we are, because it is in the end the Law, however bruised, bent and abused it might become at one stage, it is the one thing that the liars and cheats cannot break to their will, not for ever, even if they manage it temporarily. It is by our trade – the Law - that those chickens finally come home to roost.

Now, hopefully added to the legacy of 2012, after a year of such wonderful experiences and uplifting emotions from the two sets of Games that showed the best of times and the best of people, Hillsborough, as the flip side, and the dark side, will synthesise its outcome with the positive and ensure that the likes of Hillsborough will never, must never, can never happen again. To adapt L.P. Hartley, this is a modern country, and we do things differently here.