Wednesday 11 April 2012

Hills-boo-hoo

Alan Davies got into trouble yesterday for questioning Liverpool FC's refusal to play on anniversary of Hillsborough. He's dead right (pun intended) of course. Twenty-three years ago a bunch of fans died in what was undoubtedly a disaster for their friends and families and in a much smaller way, for the club itself. Liverpool wept and wailed and whipped it up into a national tragedy and scandal, which continues to be resurrected at regular intervals. "Inquiry!" they demand and "We want closure!" they chant, like demented disciples of some long-forgotten Californian psychotherapy-sect.

Get over yourselves, Scousers. Seriously. You're just embarrassing everybody now. Public mourning is a dire, foreign weakness, which has no place in British society. We used to pride ourselves on our unmatched ability to bottle it all up while less-civilised races took to self-flagellation in the streets. We watched, amused and superior, as unwashed aliens rended their garments and ululated. And we congratulated ourselves with a wry smile and barely a twitch of our moustachioed upper lip, in the knowledge that when it all got too much we had a bottle of decent Scotch and a service revolver in the top drawer of the bureau. ("I am just going outside and may be some time.")

We already have a national day of mourning, which has stood for almost a century. On Armistice day this nation (and many others) honours the millions who knowingly volunteered their lives in the cause of freedom. There is no separate, national  commemoration for the Second World War, nor for any other conflict and rightly so. If we continue - and we have started - to demand two minutes of silence for every inconsequential localised mishap we would spend our entire lives standing to meaningless attention, grizzling to ourselves and bewailing our lot.


The way a nation mourns is a measure of its character. I cannot possibly know the grief of the survivors of Hillsborough, but neither do I want to know, or to share it. It has no meaning for me and millions of others except, like the thousands of scruffy, pathetic ad-hoc roadside shrines, to illustrate how far this country has slipped from its former majesty. So, Liverpool, if you really want to do the right thing by the Hillsborough ninety-six, you should show a bit of dignity and a bit of backbone and lick your wounds in private.

Postscript: In a hilarious encore, the people of Liverpool gave the world this story: CLICK "Merseyside Police told the community on Monday to "stop grieving, it's only a chicken"."

You really couldn't make it up!

3 comments:

  1. Strong stuff there old chap but it must be said there is also a lot of truth in it.

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  2. Ahh you are missing the point, it’s not about the grief it’s about the injustice that has still not been corrected. The “official” line is still that the Fan’s caused the problem even though now everyone accepts that it’s not the case the evidence points to the police for being at fault, and the cabinet documents will do the same when they are officially released.

    The families of the 96 want at the very least someone to hold their hands up and say that it was partly my fault. Which non-of the people in charge on the day have been prepared to do. It’s got to the stage where the Attorney General has said he will look at it properly, which previous ones have refused to do.

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  3. Read it again. I/we/England/Britain don't give a flying fuck.

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