The Fault Line

The fault line is where we apportion blame, and where earthquakes happen when we do this right.

• The police whose criminal derelictions left 96 dead. 
• The press that denigrated the dead with the most humiliating and degrading calumny. 
• The authorities that persevered with a scandalous cover up for decades, fruadulently altering and redacting statements, strenuously repeating lies under oath to preserve the reputations of the criminally negligent. 
• The politicians who dismissed and insulted the victims' families and communities just as casually and unquestioningly as they automatically close ranks to protect any establishment figures incriminated by events.

Hillsborough exposes a fault line that runs right through British society. 

This fault line divides those people the police, press and politicians all blamed for what happened at Hillsborough and those people who the inquest has finally stated were really at fault. 

But it doesn't end there. 

• This fault line runs between the haves and the have-nots.
• This fault line runs between those who speak up and those who shout down.  
• It runs between the whistle-blowers and the piss-takers. 
• It runs between affluent, influential, well-connected liars who consider themselves beholden to no-one, and honest, hard working communities who invest and express their loyalty in a shared experience of the victories and defeats of their local football club every Saturday.
• It runs between bankers and businessmen whose every word the media believes and repeats as though their greed and cupidity conferred some genuine expertise and authority, no matter how many economies they crash, no matter how many crises they cause, and the real "wealth creators," the people who rely on real enterprise just to put food on the table, the people whose effort and invention is devalued to pay for the lifestyles of others
• It runs between victims of systematic paedophile abuse who have been silenced and ignored for decades and the authorities and establishment that conspire to hide and protect their powerful abusers. 
• It runs between arms dealers at trade fairs in London making fortunes buying and selling bombs and the thousands of child refugees who flee those bombs only to be turned away at our border. 
• It runs between an NHS whose workers are struggling to preserve a service true to its founding ideals and principles, and a government eager to undermine it to contrive public dissatisfaction that will ease its eventual sale to their cronies. 
• It runs between every scape goat we accuse and everybody whose guilt is denied as a result.
• It runs along and through the trenches at the Somme, dividing the indifferent aristocrats safe behind the lines and the poor bloody infantry slaughtered at the front.
• The same line runs along the terraces as the trenches. The fault line is the front line where we die of official indifference.
• It runs between the way things are and the way they should be.
• It runs between the future and the past. 

History moves at a glacial pace. Public opinions and attitudes do follow a certain logic, but it is one that moves in mysterious ways, and takes generations to unfold. But sometimes there are events that change things. Sometimes a set of circumstances can  arise that precipitates an adjustment. 

A moment of social and political tectonics occurred in Warrington today. But this is about more than one day in Warrington or another day in Sheffield. This is about all of us. The ground shifted. The fault line was exposed. And the tremors radiated out across the entire country. 

Justice will only be served when the whole rotten edifice that has obstructed the simple search for truth for decades - and continues to obstruct the truth on other issues to serve other clandestine interests - is brought crashing down as a consequence.