Neill Dunne, Liverpool and District Socialist Party
An event was planned for mid-September for a podcast show hosted by Tory broadcaster Iain Dale at the Liverpool Royal Philharmonic Theatre.
This shocked me, as I was aware that he had published a book by Norman Bettison, who was a chief inspector of South Yorkshire Police at the time of the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989.
The Socialist Party has members and I have friends who lost loved ones, and some that survived that fateful day, 15 April 1989.
The Philharmonic has hosted events by Hillsborough justice campaigns in the past and it was assumed it was an oversight.
So, after the shock of learning Dale would be profiting from a show at the venue, while also profiting from endorsing and publishing the repeated lies from Norman Bettison, I asked the theatre to remove Dale, as this would have been an insult to the families of victims, the survivors and the people of the city.
It is now known that Bettison was responsible for organising the altering and tampering of witness statements in the aftermath, with the sole intention of removing blame from the police service, and placing it solely onto the fans that day.
Bettison and his team conspired with media agencies, including Whites news agency, to shift the narrative in the public domain, painting an inaccurate and misleading perception that people from Liverpool are drunken, feckless and violent. This allowed the country to accept the police version of events against the accounts of thousands who had been witness to the disaster on TV and with their own eyes in the Hillsborough stadium that day.
The media printed lies and protected the Thatcher government and police service, who conspired in a cover-up to absolve themselves from any blame. Following governments continued this, until the Hillsborough Independent Panel released the evidence in the past decade and the truth was released.
The damage caused by Bettison’s team and the politicians and journalists who’ve helped them have allowed a city to be criminalised.
I have been called an online troll by Dale in the aftermath of this and he has attacked the Royal Philharmonic for showing no backbone over the issue. I believe it is the actions taken by the Philharmonic, in cancelling the event, that shows courage and backbone to not allow money-obsessed individuals to profit from insulting and causing distress or torment to the people of a city. We will never forget.
