Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

Taken from STUMBLING AND MUMBLING: April 27, 2016
HILLSBOROUGH
THE CLASS CONTEXT
The truth about Hillsborough has of course always been known. What
happened yesterday was that it finally became incontrovertible. I fear,
though, that the context of Hillsborough is in danger of being forgotten
– that context being that the 1980s was an era of moral panic about the
working class.
Back then, football fans were mostly working people. It cost only £2 to
get into a first division game in the mid-80s, and the influx of fashionable
middle-class men talking about “the footie” was a post-Gazza, post-Hornby
phenomenon. Such fans were the object of fear and contempt by the police
and Tory party: Thatcher tried to impose ID cards onto them. Here’s how
When Saturday Comes described the attitude towards fans then:
The police see us as a mass entity, fuelled by drink and a singleminded
resolve to wreak havoc by destroying property and attacking
one another with murderous intent. Containment and damage
limitation is the core of the police strategy. Fans are treated with the
utmost disrespect. We are herded, cajoled, pushed and corralled
into cramped spaces, and expected to submit passively to every new
indignity.
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However, football fans were not the only object of class-based moral
panic. Thatcher famously described miners as “the enemy within”:
not, note, people with mistaken ideas but an enemy, comparable to
warmongering fascists. And there were panics about “new age travellers”
and “acid house”.
June 2016