A PLACEBO FOR A PSYCHOTIC WORLD ISSUE 31/SPRING 2016 £FREE (US $FREE)

PASSIONPLAY

THE

THE WORST TWO MONTHS OFDAVE'S LIFE...UNTIL THE NEXT TWO

ALSO: TRUMP IN PARADISE, CHERNOBYL'S THIRTIETH, WHY EVERYONE'S DEAD

Fashions from Paris. Fabrics from Singapore. Stainless steel from China.Customers from Britain.

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Fashions from Paris. Fabrics from Singapore. Stainless steel from China.Customers from Britain.

A message from HM Department of Trade and Industry (Mostly Trade) (Mostly Imports)

4

STATION TO STATIONThe worst two months of David Cameron's career.

COVER STORY 8

4

GETTY IMAGES

"What's the use of being young if U ain't gonna grow old?"

5

CONTENTSVol 3 Issue 31 2sunsmagazine.com

BEING FOR THE BENEFIT 12The race for the future of the worldcontinues: overused circus metaphor ahoy.

THIRTY YEARS OF HURT15 Timewatch recaps the biggest non-Japanese nuclear disaster in history.

5

HEARTS TORN IN EVERY WAY 18Why Hillsborough still matters.

66

Editor's Shriek by John Wirstham-HarteThis might sound like a weird question - well, let's not beat around thebush, it will - but is God trying to finally reveal His existence once andfor all, in a disturbing and roundabout fashion?

It's just that so many great and talented people have died so far this year- and we're only a third of the way through - that it's genuinely startingto seem supernatural. We're only mostly kidding here - when VictoriaWood and fucking Prince died on successive days, both completely outof the blue, the 2016 phenomenon ceased to be a source of semi-

amused bafflement and instead became downright frightening. The cherry on top was the lossof Michelle MacNamara, crime writer and wife of Patton Oswalt, at 46, in the fullness of life,out of nowhere and for absolutely no reason at all. If this carnage really is a message from God,then that in particular can only be translated as "I am a fucking maniac; fear not My wrath, for Ihave no need the shelter it provides; fear not My reason, for reason is a restraint to such as I;instead simply fear Me, for I am above and beyond wrath, above and beyond reason; this is Mysport."

The only thing that's kept us from losing our minds completely (other than the fact that theywere lost long ago) is reality's usual steadfast dedication towards absolute mundanity, whichrather suggests that it is all one big, intensely dispiriting coincidence. Still, we kind of hope itreally is God's way of proving He exists, if only because that would eliminate the worst aspectof most random death: the impossibility of catharsis. Not that punching God in the face is anaction any of us are likely to take, even if He does exist, but it'd be nice at least have a target, ifnot the ammunition.

Publisher: M.H.

Editor: John Wirstham-Harte

Contributors: Ronnie Beardsley, GarethManford, Thierry Henry Thoreau, Willard vanOmnomnom Quine

Associate producers: Peter Beeston, AndrewColdrick, Alex Csar Nick Higgins, ChristopherLyons, Rhys Marshall, Chris Oakley, JacobSmith, Patrick Stratford, Juliet Wakefield

Executive producers: Steven Bride, MaximGrunewald, Neil Murton, Craig McLeod, SeanQuinn, Sarah Sea, Craig Thurston, Will Tudor

Designer: Mel ChristgoldArt director: JopsAdverts by Guy de Chipboard

FOR BOB THE FISH MAGAZINESHead of Production: CongorillaManaging Editor: John YesChairman: M.H.

All copyrights acknowledged. Any copyrighted materials are usedfor the purpopses of comment and review. No attempts havebeen made to supersede existing copyright. This magazine isreleased under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionShare-Alike 2.0 licence. Unless otherwise indicated, all materialsare used without permission. No direct profit is made from thedistribution of this magazine. All advertisments are parody unlessotherwise indicated. No affiliation should be inferred with anyproducts mentioned therein.

All copyrights acknowledged. Any copyrighted materials are usedfor the purpopses of comment and review. No attempts havebeen made to supersede existing copyright. This magazine isreleased under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionShare-Alike 2.0 licence. Unless otherwise indicated, all materialsare used without permission. No direct profit is made from thedistribution of this magazine. All advertisments are parody unlessotherwise indicated. No affiliation should be inferred with anyproducts mentioned therein. This magazine created to the soundof "N.E.W.S". Dummy photo by lynx-lair.com. Boris platephotography by Ron Brown.

CunTHE

GIVING A VOICETO ORDINARY BRITONS

SINCE 1964

88

TESTING TIME

88

It's often forgotten that schadenfreude issupposed to be a bad thing. It means

"shameful joy", after all. You're supposed to beashamed of yourself for revelling in someoneelse's misfortune. In that respect, what we've allbeen experiencing over March and April withregard to David Cameron possibly fails toqualify as actual schadenfreude, because it'shard to feel shame about the implosion of apolitical career that's done so much harm to theentire country. The Germans need to come upwith a word for "tactless but justified joy".

What with seemingly every human being withtalent or worth being systematically murderedin order to rob the world of hope, and DonaldTrump by now only stoppable by a last minutehail-mary at the convention, we need somelight relief, and David Cameron's woes haveprovided it. He's often seemed to have somekind of a messiah complex - not unlike histemplate, Tony Blair - but in the last couple ofmonths, it seems reality finally decided toindulge the metaphor. Unfortunately for him, itwas Easter. And thus did Britain bear witness tothe Passion of David Cameron.

Pigfucking dough-faced over-privileged leader of Her Majesty'sGovernment David Cameron has just experienced the worst twomonths of his political career. And the referendum campaign has onlyjust started. This could be a fun summer.

Passion 1. (n. ): A suffering or enduring ofimposed or inflicted pain; any suffering ordistress (as, a cardiac passion); specifically,the suffering of Christ between the time ofthe last supper and his death, esp. in thegarden upon the cross.

PRIME MINISTER'S

Words: Gareth Manford

99

TESTING TIME

99

PRIME MINISTER'S

1010

It started with Gideon Osborne's latest budgetin March. His 2012 effort was immediately

labelled - by Ed Miliband no less - as theOmnishambles budget. It deployed all ofGideon's usual tactics: kicking the sub-millionaire class in the face while failing to investin anything other than the already rich. Next tothe 2016 budget, it looks like a bolshevikrevolution. In Omnishambles II, everyone getsfucked, with a splintered fencepost.

It wasn't even competently evil; over the courseof a couple of days, more plotholes emerged inthe budget than the average Michael Bay film,the largest of which, a giant absence of £4.4billion, was caused by an immediate U-turn over"Personal Independence Payments" - the mealy-mouthed new name for Disability LivingAllowance. When Parliament convened for anUrgent Question on the subject of how the fuckOsborne planned to balance a budget with agaping £4.4 billion hole in the middle of it, theChancellor of the Exchequer was nowhere to beseen. Instead, one of his henchmen - DavidGauke, a gritty, modern re-imagining of DenisHealey - was thrown in at the deep end whileOsborne reportedly hid in the toilets, cowering ina cubicle. Unless he just had a massive sack ofcocaine in there and losttrack of time. Either way it'snot particularly professional,especially for a Chancellor ofthe bleeding Exchequer, andespecially when he's trying tosell himself as a potentialnew party leader and PrimeMinister.

A lot, if not most of Cameron's current woescan be traced back to one stupid decision:

to announce prior to the last election that hewouldn't be fighting the next one. We've pointedout the idiocy of saying something like thatbefore in these pages, but really: if there's a moreefficient way to sabotage your own premiershipbefore it happens, don't tell Jeremy Corbyn. Wecan only assume that Cameron was no longerexpecting the Tories to win the election. Muchlike the pollsters. Sadly for everyone, they did.

Anyway, the budget didn't just deal a potentialdeathblow to Gideon's leadership hopes. It alsosparked off a departmental civil war, the timingof which (right when the one about Europe wasstarting up) was, of course, purely coincidental.

The resignation of Iain Duncan Smith wasone of the most gratifying moments in the

Cameron premiership to date, if not the most.Most of our staff have been brutalised underCount Orlok's stewardship of the benefitssystem, which he ran as a horrific medievalprison of which he was the Governor andTorturer-in-Chief. While things aren't likely toget much better under Steven Crabb and his mid-life crisis beard, at least literally Satan isn't in thecabinet anymore.

He claimed he was resigning in protest at theOmnishambles II budget's horrendous cuts to theDWP - because of a moral objection to theirimpact on benefits claimants. He even went onthe Andrew Marr show to demonstrate hisheartbreak at the impact of these cuts. He evenmanaged to cry over the plight of some of hisown victims, despite seemingly containing nobodily fluids whatsoever.

David Gauke, the anti-matter Denis Healey,yesterday. (Credit: Hansard)

The budget wasn't evencompetently evil, being more full

of plotholes than the averageMichael Bay film.

1111

This was of course bollocks. Iain Duncan Smithis no more capable of sorrow over the fate ofanyone below upper-middle-class status, andmost people above for that matter, than a cowcan mourn for the flies it swats with its tail.We've also seen examples of Duncan Smithopenly laughing at the fate of his victims,including the woman who uses her spare room -for which she is charged extra under bedroomtax - to hide from her abusive husband. What'smore, those incidents far outumber the oneswhere he got all unconvincingly weepy about thesuffering he himself had caused under thedoctrine that being poor is something for whichyou deserve punishment and not help. This manis the protege of Norman Tebbit, remember - andshocked even him.

So no, Duncan Smith's resignation was notmotivated by a sudden attack of human decency,because he has none and, in fact, completelylacks the capacity. No, this was an entirelytactical resignation carefully designed tohumiliate Dave in the build-up to the EUreferendum.

Not that the referendum is the solemotivator. In fact it's something of a pawn

in and of itself in the bigger game to whicheverything else seems to keep returning: theleadership of the Conservative Party. Dave'smain rival is, of course, his old Eton fag andfellow Bullingdon Bumchum Boris Johnson: lessqualified (even) than Cameron, but morecharismatic and savvier with the public image.Given that Cameron used to do PR, this is a bitof a surprise, but then he was the PR man forCarlton Television.

Boris is using the EU referendum - which, let'sface it, is a frivolous waste of time - as leverageto get himself into Number 10 as quickly aspossible. Coaxing Iain Duncan Smith intosparking a full-blown civil war is presumablyphase two. God knows what Duncan Smith hasbeen promised under Boris, but we fear -genuinely fear - that in return for his loyalty now,Boris will appoint him Home Secretary. If for noother reason, Boris must be stopped.

Of course, Nosferatu being anti-EU is nosurprise to anyone. But it was a bit of a shockwhen Boris outed himself as supposedly infavour of Britain's depature from the Union. Thisis despite having written an entire article for the

Telegraph explaining (correctly) that most of ourproblems don't actually come from "Bwussells"and that leaving the EU won't instantly solveBritain. Three years later he is claiming the exactopposite, that all our problems will and can onlybe solved by leaving the Union.What's caused this strange alchemical change inBoris? The fact that Dave is on the other side, ofcourse. Here is an opportunity to go toe-to-toewith him and establish his face as the face ofbetter-than-Cameron ahead of the leadershipcontest. It's also a big boost to the Vote Leavecampaign, whose face up to then was MichaelGove's.

Gove is also tipped to figure in the leadershipelection, although he's said he's not

interested and wouldn't be very good at it. Wedefinitely believe at least half of that.

It was looking like a straight fight betweenGideon and Boris until Gideon flamed out sospectacularly with this budget and started thedominoes falling that could still lead to the fall ofDavid Cameron. Fortunately for him, he'smanaged to distract the press and population ofBritain by deliberately conflating criticism ofIsrael (from Labour at least) with anti-semitism.In this endeavour, Boris was all too happy tohelp. As, it seems, was Ken Livingstone.

A Disney version of Johnny Rotten, yesterday.(Credit: ITN)

1212

ClownMidnight

atthe

1313

And so Endgame approaches. This bitch of aprimary season is finally entering its last

few miles. Mathematically it might not becertain, but in effect we have our candidates. Onthe Democratic side, there is no longer anystopping Hillary Clinton (barring what stoppedBobby Kennedy, and let's not go there) - she willbe the first female Presidential candidate for aparty worth a damn in the history of the UnitedStates, to the surprise of almost someone.

Meanwhile, after sweeping the east-coast outposts of Maryland,

Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island, Donald Trump

hasn't outright won (just yet), but he has managed to block the routes to

the nomination of either of his two remaining rivals. The only way

anyone other than Trump is the Republican nomination this year is if the

convention descends into all-out war. Which is why this is the first time

Cruz and your friends at 2SUNS are praying for the same thing.

For his part, Cruz has reacted to his mathematical elimination from the

actual contest by cutting the last few frayed ends of the rope and finally

losing all contact with the real world. Faced with the prospect of defeat,

something his massive ego simply can't process - like a Penrose triangle,

it's comprehensible only as an impossibility - the Cruz campaign has

abandoned sanity altogether.

Apparently convinced he can still win, in defiance of the mathematical

basis of reality itself, Cruz has named himself as the party's great uniter

no matter how far behind he is. And then he announced he had a big

campaign announcement. Obviously he wasn't dropping out, so what

could it be? Turns out, he'd picked a running mate. Despite not being the

nominee, despite not having half the delegates he'd need to become the

nominee, and despite the fact that it is mathematically impossible for him

to become the nominee, he's picked a running mate.

It's not entirely unprecedented for a candidate to choose a potential VP

before the numbers are in - American Jesus Ronald Reagan even did it,

picking Richard Schweiker for his false-start 1976 bid. The difference

there was that Reagan hadn't already lost - he was narrowly beaten at the

last minute by the incumbent President Ford. Picking Schweiker was an

attempt at a hail-mary of sorts, promising to add a moderate to the ticket

to make up for Reagan's more swivel-eyed right wing idiocy. And it failed

before they could print up more than a handful of pin badges.

Cruz/Fiorina '16 already has bumper stickers and T-shirts and a logo for

a campaign that in all likelihood won't happen.

The punchline is that the running mate is Carly Fiorina, the former

Hewlett Packard CEO whose only previous political experience is failing

miserably to be elected senator in California, and then failing miserably in

this Presidential campaign as well. It's not quite the equivalent of a

drowning man tying himself to an anchor; more like he's tied himself to

someone who drowned first.

It might be mental, but it got the message across. It helps that that

message is that Cruz is mental, of course. He genuinely seems to believe

he can still win based solely on the fact that, under the strict first-past-the-

post rules of engagement, Trump hasn't actually won yet. That didn't stop

David Cameron in 2010 and it won't stop Trump from claiming

legitimacy. Not that Cruz has it completely wrong; he might not be able

to overtake or even catch Trump from this position, but he - possibly with

Kasich's help - can still prevent Trump from crossing the line, leading to

the delicious prospect of a contested convention. The convention is where

the delegates do their actual electing, where the choice is actually made.

Like the electoral college, it's usually a rubber-stamping session; they hold

a big vote to formalise what the primaries have already decided. But if at

the end of the primary process, Trump still doesn't have the clear majority

of delegates that he needs, they might need to vote again - and in a second

round, everything changes. For a start, half the pledged delegates are

wiped clean of their pledges and freed to switch their support to someone

else if they so choose. The situation turns into an old-fashioned Tory

leadership contest. This is Cruz (and Fiorina)'s only hope: Trump doesn't

make it over the line and Cruz sneaks in at the convention. He doesn't

seem to have realised - thinking as he does that he's a unifier of some kind

- that he's not that much more popular than Trump among the GOP

establishment, being as he is just as much of a swivel-eyed lunatic - more

so. And on the Convention floor it's the establishment who hold sway.

Maybe he'll parachute himself in, but he won't be their choice. And if

they suspend the rule that says they can only choose from candidates

who've won at least 8 states - and they almost certainly will - they can

pick almost anyone; they could go for (as they keep threatening) Paul

Ryan - who keeps saying he doesn't want the job and seems as confused as

anyone to find himself suddenly the moderate - or Mitt frigging Romney,

who unlike Ryan would be happy to serve, or hell, conceivably Bob

Dornan. If they really want to lose, Dennis Hastert.

So that's why Cruz is still in: because he thinks he can still sneak in

through the back door. And he can, but he shouldn't be so confident as to

pick a running mate. In all likelihood, neither of them are going to be

running anywhere. But a word of warning: sixteen years ago, Cruz

was an integral part of the legal team that got George W.

Bush into the White House without having to

win the election. If he can get

Bush there, he can get himself

there. Sanity or no sanity.

As the home stretch of theprimary season finallyapproaches, Trump's nominationlooks unpreventable. Which isnot to say they won't try.Words: Willard Van Omnomnom Quine

1414

VISIT ORYOU'RE ANTI-SEMITIC

1515

TIMEWATCH 1986

whenthewindblows

Thirty years ago, the nuclear worst case scenario happened: apower station went into meltdown, caught fire, and effectivelykilled hundreds of square miles of Ukraine. What exactly actuallyhappened at Chernobyl, and is it really a good reason to give upon nuclear power forever?

Words: Thierry Henry Thoreau

There's a famous television advert (promo,

PSA...whatever) for Greenpeace that came out a long

time ago. Directed by David Bailey and scored by Vangelis,

it depicts a funeral in a grey, washed-out world, where the

body is interred within a pill-shaped lead casket by

mourners wearing black hazmat suits, complete with air-

filtered masks, into a cemetery consisting of an endless row

of identical graves, all marked with a trefoil of a circle

flanked by three blades at sixty-degree

angles. The last shot is a seemingly

endless pan backward, reminscent of

that of Richard Attenbrough's Oh What

a Lovely War, revealing to the audience

a vast plain of graves, partially obscured

by the swirling grey radioactive dust of

the future (specifically 1999). Then,

serious-minded white serifs on black:

"Nuclear Power. Is it worth the risk?"

It's extremely well made, memorably

bleak and highly powerful. It's also not

unlike a load of old bollocks in its

message that disaster is the inevitable result of any use of

nuclear power whatsoever; that it is guaranteed by its very

nature to make the entire world over into a decrepit, dust-

covered radioactive wasteland. Puddings were over-egged

somewhat. Nuclear power will not ipso facto destroy the

world; it's dangerous as fuck, to be sure, but not to the

extent that to use it is to die - unlike, say, nuclear weapons.

The advert's knee-jerk apocalyptic tone is more

understandable when you consider the timing. It came out

in 1987; it was made in the immediate aftermath of the

Chernobyl disaster, and started playing in cinemas and the

like in a world still scared shitless of anything made of

atoms - which was problematic. In that brief window of

history, it seemed a lot less like knee-jerk scaremongering

and more like level-headed analysis.

Fears over nuclear power were first sparked into

something co-ordinated during the Carter

administration, when - in the wake of the Oil crisis - steps

were made to find some other potential energy source, one

which they wouldn't have to invade the Middle East every

five years to sustain. Nuclear fitted the bill - it was all-

American and amazingly efficient, and actually quite safe

except when it wasn't. Those times when it wasn't, and the

implications thereof, came into focus in the Spring of 1979.

First the film "The China Syndrome" was released,

depicting the potential outcome of a minor accident at a

nuclear power station, how easily such an accident could

happen despite all the safeguards (with particular reference

to the shoddy job done by the cowboys who built the plant

in the first place - see also Deepwater Horizon) and the

terrifying lengths to which the authorities would have gone

to cover it up, even as the cancer rate soars and babies are

born with feet in their chests.

The China Syndrome was released to good reviews and

a decent box-office on March 16th, 1979. Not a

fortnight later it happened for real. Sort of.

A nuclear power station exists in a very, very fragile

balance. The electricity is generated by forcing a nuclear

reaction of the same kind that happens billions of times a

minute in the sun through an atomic pile (active ingredient:

usually uranium or plutonium). Just like in the sun, this

generates a fuckload of heat, which is transferred to some

water, turning it into steam, which then turns a turbine

which generates the electricity. Simple. Except that the

atomic pile is naturally blazing hot, in addition to being

radioactive as all hell. It's therefore kept relatively

personable by a load of coolant liquid, usually more water.

The core needs to be kept in this coolant all the damn time

or you're fucked. The "China Syndrome" is a complete loss-

of-coolant incident - in which all the liquid runs out

entirely, leaving a lava-hot and extremely radioactive ingot

entirely exposed to the elements. The heat nuclear fission

generates is such that very little can stand in its way for

long. Hence the whimsical term "China Syndrome".

Without the coolant, the core burns steadily through the

ground, theoretically until it comes out the other side in

China. Except it doesn't work like that; instead, as soon as

it hits ground water, it explodes into a colossal cloud of

carcinogenic steam which permeates the atmosphere, and

whatever city the plant was in is dead. That's why there is

16161616

The inevitable result of nuclear energy, yesterday. (Credit: Greenpeace)

17171717

no (functioning) city called Okuma in Fukushima

Prefecture anymore. At Three Mile Island, the core

descended a mere (but not as mere as it sounds) centimetre

and a half closer to China, triggering the release of some

radioactive materials into the atmosphere but, as it turned

out, not enough to have any long-term health effects. It was

scary, and offputting as far as the public image of nuclear

power went, but not sufficient to scare us straight. That

would have to wait another seven years.

It's not 100% clear precisely what happened at

Chernobyl on April 26th, 1986, for the simple reason

that the only people who know for sure what happened

were the first to die while it was happening. We know

enough, however: it happened during, with jet-black irony,

a test of an emergency routine to cool the reactor down

that was something of a work in progress. The problem

was that the Soviet-designed nuclear plants had a design

flaw. Even after a total shutdown, the reactor kept right on

pumping out heat, and therefore still needed to be cooled

even though (doh) the power's off and there's no therefore

coolant flow. For this purpose, they had three backup

generators running on diesel, but they were less than ideal

because they took a full minute to start up properly. A lot

can happen in a minuted with a nuclear reactor emitting

700MW worth of heat, and so they tried to come up with

something to fill that one-minute gap. They hit upon using

the last drops of power from the steam turbine, as it was

winding down. They figured they could get another 45

seconds worth of work out of the coolant pumps that way,

leaving just 15 dry seconds before the backups kick in. That

was much more acceptable.

Trouble is, it didn't work. They tried it three times, and

couldn't get the necessary power out of the winding-

down turbine. On April 26th, 1986, they tried it for the

fourth and, as it turned out, final time, on reactor number

four. This was apparently sprung on them late in the day,

because they were woefully underprepared and made

several mistakes, not least of which was deliberately

turning off the safety systems, and then compounding the

error by powering the plant down almost entirely, instead

of just to a quarter capacity as the experiment required.

With the plant powered down and no safety systems to tell

it not to, bubbles started to form in the coolant water,

restricting both its physical flow and the flow of neutrons,

thereby increasing the power output, and forming even

more bubbles to increase the power even further and create

even more bubbles - a positive feedback loop that

eventually developed into a massive power surge which

sparked a colossal explosion that tore the centre of the

power plant apart. The thousand-ton chunk of lead

covering the reactor core flew away. Radiation flooded into

the atmosphere. And then the core of reactor 4 detonated

with an explosion even bigger than the first in a shower of

red-hot shards of graphite.

It's impossible to give an accurate death toll for

Chernobyl. 31 people were killed directly in the fires

and of radiation sickness in the following months, but

thousands more died of various cancers and thyroid

conditions that were either caused by the fallout or one hell

of a coincidence. The laugh-a-decade International Journal

of Cancer estimates a potential forty thousand cases of

cancer could be linked. An entire city was emptied.

And of course, the nuclear power industry took a major PR

hit. Greenpeace and the like now had something specific to

point to as the horrific consequence of nuclear power. An

actual disaster, with explosions and irradiated countryside,

does have a way of gripping the mind. Not In My

Backyard became Not In My Back Continent. The notion

of nuclear power wasn't killed off, far from it, but it became

a lot harder to comission new plants with images of the

ghost town of Pripyat in people's minds.

But we think even Captain Planet might think turning our

backs completely is a little bit extreme, especially since

instead of running to clean, renewable energy like solar or

hydroelectricity, we took shelter in good old fashioned

fossil fuels, which are even worse than nuclear. Nuclear

power is actually damn close to perfect in terms of

efficiency and cleanliness, and it isn't even inherently any

more likely to go wrong than any coal or oil-fired power

station. It's just that when it does go wrong, it goes

apocalyptically wrong. If a fossil-fuel power station catches

fire - say Didcot B in 2014 - it's a disaster, and people die,

but it doesn't render the land unihabitable for the next

century or more. It's fixable. The station can be back up

and running within a couple of years and nearby towns

and cities don't need to be abandoned at all. That's the

biggest drawback nuclear power has, and in all honesty we

have faith enough in human ingenuity to imagine it's

surmountable with some truly psychotic safety measures.

Whether the marketplace will allow them is another

question, of course. But it's worth looking into. Even if it's

still inferior to solar power.

And thesun shinesnow

1818

The 96 Liverpool fans who died inthe Hillsborough disaster havefinally been exonerated of allwrongdoing in their own deaths.Here's why it still matters.hse

Words: Ronnie Beardsley

The number 96 is on the verge of losing all meaning. The

first thing we saw when we looked at that metal pin-badge

was a lemniscate bisected by the letter S. The number has been

passed around for so long it's easy to get numb to it and forget

what it represents: people. 96 people. And again, it's been stated

and repeated so often that even that is in danger of not sounding

like a lot anymore.

Imagine your average church hall. Could you fit

96 people in there? How busy was the last jumble

sale? Probably not that busy. Fill that hall to

capacity in your head. That many people died on

April 15th, 1989, just for wanting to watch a

football match. And then add some more people

likewise.

That's why this matters, for one thing; dozens

lost their lives over nothing more than the FA

Cup, and in an entirely preventable fashion. No-

one need have died at Hillsborough, but some

tragic mistakes were made - and then covered up

by a police force concerned more with their own

ego and image than their jobs. And nothing

could have harmed that image worse than appearing responsible

for the deaths of ordinary working Britons. The class war was

raging on, and Hillsborough, horrible though it is to contemplate,

was a part of it.

This was a time when the police were all but explicitly

enforcers for Thatcher and her establishment allies.

Scrapping the bespoke praetorian guard that was the Special

Patrol Group fooled no-one. It may have been four years since

the Miners Strike ended, but no-one had forgotten the battle of

Orgreave, or the arresting picture of a mounted policeman

swiping his truncheon at the blameless Lesley Boulton. That

image had only been published in one newspaper at the time -

and that was the Morning Star - but somehow it had made it into

the public domain by 1989. If you weren't a fan of Thatcher - a

congregation which by then was growing almost by the minute -

then you could reasonably consider yourself the enemy of the

police forces of the United Kingdom.

Orgreave, of course, is in South Yorkshire. The police force that

fought the biggest battle in Britain's last Civil War was the same

police force that, the inquest found, failed in its duty of care at

Hillsborough. The connection is more than just geographical:

after Orgreave, the same force did much the same thing to its

then-enemy. Not that the miners are innocent of all wrongdoing,

but the men arrested in the immediate aftermath by the SYP -

spookily, 95 of them - were. Evidence against them and even

officers' signatures were forged in order to punish the miners on

general principles rather than for anything they'd actually done.

When all 95 Orgreave trials collapsed in 1987, more than

one of the lawyers involved darkly muttered that the

SYP had previous where the fabrication of evidence was

concerned. Four years later, they did it again, this time to cover

up their own catastrophic mistakes and

incompetence.

With the similar horror of the Heysel disaster only for

years earlier fresh in everyone's minds, they wove a

narrative based on it. Heysel had been different, a

full-blown riot caused by (ostensible) Liverpool

supporters that had destroyed part of the stadium and

killed over three dozen people. Liverpool "fans" were

to blame for that and Liverpool - and English football

in general - were punished for it. But where Heysel

was caused by some drunken pricks, Hillsborough

was caused by police incompetence, and that simply

wouldn't do. The underclass might start thinking they

could do something about their oppression. Besides,

they didn't want to have to face consequences. So they

created the story of "tanked up yobs", as the fuck-faced Bernard

Ingham put it in that letter, trying to get into the ground without

tickets, kicking open a gate and pouring in, overstuffing the

stadium. All entirely fictional, and all eerily similar to things they

said about the Orgreave miners in the aftermath of that.

The establishment's supporters ran with it, of course, culminating

in "THE TRUTH", for which Kelvin MacKenzie had his

morlocks at the Cun truly push the classist boat out: drunk

Liverpool fans beating up "the brave cops", stealing corpses'

wallets, and of course most famously pissing on first aiders. None

of which happened. All the footage demonstrates that everyone

in the stadium was too traumatised from shock to do anything

like that; the ones together enough to do anything other than curl

in a foetal position are all desperately, and no less importantly

instictively, trying to pull people out of the crush, or tearing down

advertising hoardings for makeshift stretchers.

MacKenzie has "apologised" for being taken in; "in some strange

way [he] got caught up in it all too". Not good enough, especially

given the number of similar non-apologies he's given and smugly

withdrawn in the past. Bernard Ingham refuses to comment at

all. Strangely the closest to penitent is David Duckenfield, the

man in charge at the time, the man who fucked up the worst, the

man most directly responsible for 96 deaths. He at least stated at

the inquest that he recognises that he failed, and offered what

seemed an extremely sincere apology. Even then, he balked at the

word "negligence". But what counts is this: the jury didn't.

1919

A badge yesterday.

(Credit: Reuters)

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If this is your first issue, thengo ahead and read theprevious 30 issues (plusspecials), because they're allgood. And most of them arebigger than this issue. TheThatcher special is particularlyhalf-decent. We're also quiteproud of the Election 2015 one.

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20

An authentic Johnson collectors plate

"Picanniny's Journey"With watermelon smile and bare feet, huddled underneath his

umbrella to protect him from the torrent of monkey shit, this

adorable little brown boy's on a trek for the greatest experience of

life - he's off to meet the Queen! All he needs is a flag to wave - a

British one, of course! He doesn't have one of his own! We

daresay he doesn't even know what a flag is! Unless his village

has some sort of crude symbol that they daub on a lion skin, tie to

a stick and wave over their heads when they're hunting the next

village over or whatever it is they do!*

This wonderful image, hand-painted by L.S. Mitford (on a canvas

which is then scanned by a giant computer that creates a massive

stencil for a machine to spray through at an endless conveyor belt

of cheap crockery) can be yours for only INSERT RANDOM

NUMBER HERE CHECK LATER!

Pro-Semitic

Guaranteed

100%

*Please note that this is only racist ifyou take it out ofcontext, for example by quoting it word-for-word in a news article

YES, I want this lump of crap! There's something terribly wrong

with me and I don't much care what it is. I understand that I

need send no money now, but I do not necessarily understand

that I need send absolutely all the money in the world later.

Name

Address

Tel. No Email

Bank account No. Sort code

I understand that this product is in no way racist, and the left-wing pressand the biased BBC are just taking it out of context if they say they are.Boris Johnson is a nice man and the best Prime Minister Britain has everhad/will ever have (delete as applicable). I am over 18 and vote.

Signed

Send to: Johnson Mint, 4 Matthew Parker Street, London SW1H 9HQ

AN

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EUROPETHE DECISION

THIS JUNE

A 2SUNS SPECIAL EDITION

22SSUUNNSS ##3311,, SSPPRRIINNGG 22001166