News of today

[nineveh_uk]

I've been following the revelations of the Hillsborough inquest today. As this article puts it, 'It wasn't about football in 1989, it isn't about football now.' It's about vested interests failing in the moment, in the following 26 years (including the inquest in which the South Yorkshire Police kept trying to claim it wasn't their fault), in favour of protecting the incompetence and prejudice of their own against people they considered scum. While prosecutions for events on the day seem distant, I wonder what scope there is for charging with perjury those people now clearly shown to have lied and to have known that they were lying.

On a very different note, Opera North has announced its 2016/17 programme, and I think I might have to move to Leeds. Billy Budd* and Rosenkavalier (production I've already seen) in the autumn, a concert Turandot in the spring, and best of all, Rimsky-Korsakov's The Snow Maiden in the winter. I admit that I want to see The Snow Maiden for Saga of the Exiles-related reasons rather than operatic ones, but I suspect that I shall not be alone in booking a ticket because of that.

Comments

[naraht]

Ooh, "Billy Budd". I travelled to Manchester a few years ago to see Opera North's "Turn of the Screw" at it was well worth it.

[nineveh_uk]

I saw an excellent Billy Budd that WNO toured to Liverpool, but it was about 20 years ago now (eek!). Opera North have an excellent record with Britten, so I anticipate a good production. They're actually touring to Edinburgh, but not at a very convenient time for me.

[sonetka.livejournal.com]

I'd never heard of Hillsborough before seeing the news stories yesterday and I ended up watching a lot of stuff about it on Youtube because I was completely unable to visualize what had happened; I've only been to baseball and hockey games and had never seen fenced-off pens like the story was describing. The video footage from the beginning of the game was terrifying; the pens don't look particularly unusual until you look again and think wow, there are a LOT of people in there, and even though a lot of them were screaming, so was everyone else because it was a sports game. I can't even imagine what that must have been like to be trapped in there.

The thing I don't understand is how the ticketing system worked; if you had a ticket that would let you into a pen, didn't it specify which one to prevent everyone from jamming into the ones in the best positions? I mean, something like "Standing room only, Pen D" or did they just have a general standing-room only ticket and it was assumed that stadium staff and/or police would direct you to the appropriate one? Did the police who opened the exit gate just assume that someone would be in there to direct people or did they fail even more dramatically than that and not bother to go in there and control traffic even though they knew they were supposed to?

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

The police failed even more dramatically than that: they effectively sent fans into the already crowded area. Basically, if you can think of a way that the police command fucked up at Hillsborough, they did it.

There weren't tickets for individual pens* but for the terrace as a whole, so normally you get to the ground and people informally sort themselves out, with assistance from police controlling access as central pens (with the best view) filled up. At Hillsborough, the problem actually starts outside the ground, with the area before the turnstiles being dangerous in itself when there were large numbers of fans trying to get in - there had been problems before, so the police knew about this** and how to handle it. So the exit gate was opened to protect the people outside the ground by getting people in more quickly, except the exit gate was directly opposite the tunnel to the central pen, and obviously people who are being funneled in a packed ground and see a route to go straight in front of them will take it. On previous occasions when the particular gate had been opened, police had first closed the tunnel to prevent this. On this occasion they didn't, and thus people naturally went into it, into the already full pens, and of course they couldn't stop doing so, because they had people being funneled in behind them. And then the police, who were thinking crowd control rather than crowd safety, didn't grasp what was actually happening for far too long.

*Why pens existed is a lengthy story in itself!

**Except the bloke who usually policed it had been moved, and his replacement had literally not bothered to go and look at the ground.