Panorama on Hillsborough - "How They Buried the Truth"

I have now caught up with the Panorama documentary about the cover up of the Hillsborough disaster. It was broadcast back in May but is still available for another 10 months on iPlayer. I would highly recommend watching it. As you would expect, it is an emotional and horrifying piece but it is an important one. We can all recognise that the cover up was an atrocious tragedy but the documentary explores it thoroughly, revealing how its horror is complex and not as clear cut as we would like it to be. It is not enough, I feel, to call something evil and have done with it. Panorama prove that if we are to use this label we must understand why it deserves it. And in my mind there is absolutely no doubt that the cover up was evil. 
What I found particularly interesting is the relationship between the events as perceived at the time and as perceive now. A word that continually crops up in the discussions with those involved with the events is 'hindsight', and is most commonly used as a form of defence for what they did - without hindsight they had no idea of how devastating the tragedy was.

This is not a poor excuse in and of itself, and one I'm sure most of us have used in our own personal experiences. However, it is a poor excuse for the institutionalised discrimination that the police displayed here. Many of the people that headed the institutions that investigated the events excuse themselves or their superiors because of the huge demands expected of them and their role. Lord Dear, who helped lead the initial investigation, excuses Lord Justice Taylor for allowing South Yorkshire Police to take responsibility of the officers' statements, which included censorship and editing of these statements, by claiming that because he was Lord Justice  "It is not for you or I to query that [decision] I [would] suggest".
On the other hand, Dear is not presented as entirely unsympathetic although he seems to care more about his reputation rather than actual justice. Nevertheless, he and Taylor agreed that the tragedy was caused by overcrowding and poor organisation by the police responsible for the game.
And yet, the police still avoided total responsibility for the disaster and the documentary tracks the eventual reversal of this stance and was eventually made 'officialy' true.

As I was swept up in the incredible footage and moving statements, I noticed that at the heart of the documentary was a story that seems to appear in almost every fiction I've come across: that of the individual fighting against a society ruled by a collection of powerful, single-minded individuals. It seems that the reason it crops up in so much fiction is because it is a reality that many face. While it is easy to criticise and attack institutions, when we see the destruction they can cause, such as Hillsborough, it is not difficult to see why it is so easy to do so. In the end, the tragedy is not only in the exploitation individuals suffered (as devastating as it is). It is in the inability for major institutions (in this case, the police and the government) to accept the immorality of their actions unless it is made official by other institutions. They are trapped in bureaucracy that removes emotion and any sense of justice to the event. And so of course we ask "How could this happen?", because there's nothing else left to say.

That the institutions allow themselves to be so callous in their procedures is monstrous but at least it has come to light. At least the Hillsborough Inquest Panel refused to give up and let themselves be "worn down". This is democracy and free speech at its strongest. This is why we shouldn't suffer the bullshit institutions feel the need to provide in order to cover their backs. That is not to say they are entirely evil, but the documentary stresses something that apparently institutions seem to forget - they are there to help others, not their own interests. It's far more difficult to help individuals and so it is understandable when they make mistakes or are placed under stress. But that is only because without them, many people will be helpless to the actions of evil, selfish people. As soon as institutions refuse to aid those who need help and start to behave like selfish individuals, then those victims have nowhere to turn for help.

Now, looking objectively at the programme, the documentary is clearly biased in its argument. It opposes the arguments of the police by using the perspective of the fans and the families of the fans involved in the tragedy to tell the story of the coverup. But bias isn't automatically a bad thing unless it is overwhelmingly so. As I referred to in my review of London's Burning, the drama about the London riots, the lack of input from the police limited any argument the drama wanted to put forward. Here, there is balance with the police allowed to speak alongside the victims, which is a huge improvement to how Hillsborough had been discussed at the time. The argument had been short and clear cut - the fans were to blame and the police were in the right in all of their actions. There was no opposing voice that was considered of any value i.e. any opposing argument that at all implied the police were in the wrong.

As I said at the start, this documentary absolutely proves that the cover up of Hillsborough was an atrocity which nobody involved denies. The few attempts at justifications are non-retrospective and only considered in light of the circumstances of the events. It may end with an apology by David Cameron but it is clear that Hillsborough will never be over. This is not something to swept away as history. This is a tragedy that must be remembered for the horror that it is. This is an event that must never happen again.