Masters of cover-up: How the Establishment closes
ranks to protect its own and deny the people the truth
By Stephen Glover = PUBLISHED: 23:14, 14
September 2012 | UPDATED: 17:47, 17 September 2012
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=162573#162573
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2203524/Hillsborough-disaster-cover-How-Establishment-closes-ranks-protect-own.html
All his life, STEPHEN GLOVER has believed in
Britain’s great institutions. No more. The sad
lesson of Hillsborough is how the Establishment —
judges, police chiefs, civil servants — closes
ranks to protect its own and deny the people the truth
Cover-up, lies, obfuscation and incompetence:
these are the defects in the police and ambulance
service revealed by this week’s damning report
into the 1989 Hillsborough disaster in which 96 people died.
It has taken 23 long years to establish the
shaming truth, which is that senior police
officers manipulated evidence to hide police
failings while attempting, with great success, to
blacken the good name of the innocent people who needlessly perished.
Evil is a strong word, but some of the things the
top brass of South Yorkshire Police are alleged
to have done — the doctoring of 116 statements to
remove criticisms of the force; the imputation of
excessive alcohol consumption where none had
taken place — would appear to warrant such a description.
Prosecutions and civil actions will doubtless
follow as some of the guilty are finally brought
to justice, and there will surely have to be a
new inquest. At last everyone seems to be united in condemning the authorities.
Senior police officers and politicians beat their
breasts. David Crompton, current chief constable
of South Yorkshire Police, tells us his force is
in a ‘very different place in 2012’, the
implication being that what has happened could
never happen again because the police have changed.
But couldn’t it? Have they? I wish I could
believe it. Alas, I don’t. Hillsborough has been
a classic institutional cover-up which has only
been brought to our notice because of the heroic
persistence of the relatives of those who died.
The Establishment mindset — to hide wrong-doing
and ineptitude and never say sorry until it is too late — has not altered.
As a young journalist I believed in the integrity
and good sense of most of our institutions. Of
course, there were bad apples and stupid
mistakes, but there were enough good and honest
people in charge to come clean and own up when things went badly wrong.
After a succession of scandals over recent years,
it grieves me to say that I no longer believe
this is true, and I don’t suppose it ever was.
One episode after another has revealed a familiar
and melancholy pattern of skulduggery and concealment.
Nearly all the institutions which I was taught to
revere as a child have turned out to be
self-serving, incompetent or dishonest — the
police, Parliament, the Church, the civil
service, government, the City and, I regret to say, some parts of the Press.
A dear and distinguished friend of mine blames
the relentless media for hollowing out one
institution after another, and lowering them in
the public esteem. I’m afraid he’s wrong. The
media have simply shone lights where they used
not to be shone, and illuminated practices which
all of us had hoped did not exist.
In a way, the most shocking thing about
Hillsborough is that no one is really very
surprised. The police have lost much of the
respect they used to command. I was certainly
brought up to trust them, and can remember
throwing aside in disgust a book by George Orwell
in which he doubted the decency of the police.
But maybe he was right. Of course, there are many
brave and conscientious police officers. It’s
their bosses I worry about — people like the then
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair, who
tried to block an independent inquiry into the
shooting in cold blood by one of his officers of
the young Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005.
Look at Parliament. When I was a boy, I believed
there were few more honourable letters to have
after your name than MP. Even when I was in the
Commons press gallery 30 years ago I still
looked up to parliamentarians, though I was
beginning to learn they did not always tell the
truth. That was long before the more recent MPs’ expenses scandal.
Of course many MPs were innocent of any fiddling,
but just as many weren’t. In fact, 389 of them —
more than half the Commons — were asked to pay
back money to the taxpayer amounting to more than £1 million.
A hard core were straightforward crooks, and
three MPs (and two peers) went to prison. But the
majority were simply greedy, claiming for items
they should have purchased themselves. It was
depressing that some of the miscreants were
privileged and supposedly gentlemanly Tory MPs who should have known better.
Have things improved? I’m not at all convinced
they have. Recent figures show that in 2011/12
MPs’ expenses rose 26 per cent to £89.4 million,
which is close to pre-scandal levels. First-class
rail travel, supposed to be exceptional, is again
becoming the norm. Fifty MPs have even been
allowed to claim for expensive iPads. Why?
As with the police over Hillsborough, endemic
wrong-doing among MPs remained secret for many
years, and was ultimately exposed as a result of
the efforts of outsiders, in this case the Press.
But it’s not just the institutions of the State
that have let us down. As the son of a clergyman,
I was brought up to believe that, come what may,
the Church could be trusted. How wrong I was, and
how saddened my father would have been to read
about the cover-up of hundreds of paedophile
cases in the Roman Catholic Church.
His own Church of England has also betrayed its
congregations, albeit on a smaller scale. A
recent internal report into the Diocese of
Chichester disclosed a familiar picture of senior
clergy being slow to act in sexual abuse cases,
putting the Church’s reputation before the
interests of children and their families. If you
can’t trust a priest, whom can you trust?
Then there are the bankers. Some of them, such as
the Royal Bank of Scotland’s disgraced former
chief executive Fred Goodwin, showed recklessness
and greed while behaving as if the banks were
their own private property. Here it is hard to
believe that their predecessors of 50 years ago
were as rapacious and blindly egotistical.
Most of all, we have been disheartened by the
lies and evasions of government. I believe that
Tony Blair manipulated the evidence in taking
this country to war against Iraq. It is perfectly
true that most observers thought Saddam Hussein
had weapons of mass destruction. What Blair did
was to exaggerate the potency of weapons that
turned out in any case to be fictitious.
His response to the growing case against him was
a classic Establishment ruse — to appoint a
friendly judge, in this instance Lord Hutton, and
give him a narrow brief. Nine times out of ten a
judge-led inquiry will obligingly come up with
findings which suit the government of the day.
That was the case with Lord Hutton, though his
implausible exoneration of Mr Blair may possibly
be reversed by Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry, which
has yet to deliver its verdict. This is being
impeded by the Coalition’s refusal to allow it to
publish relevant Cabinet papers. As ever, the
Whitehall mandarins who stand behind every
government live in fear of openness and candour.
The repeated failures of judge-led inquiries
implicate the judiciary in the secretiveness that
disfigures so many of our institutions. Another
example is the clean bill of health Lord Chief
Justice Widgery handed out to the Army after the
‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre in Londonderry in 1972.
It took nearly 30 years for the full truth to
emerge after a further — and absurdly prolonged —
inquiry. Lord Savile judged that the Army
overreacted and lost control, and in all probability had fired the first shot.
Despite this finding, I should say that the Armed
Forces remain for me one of our few national
institutions not to be tarnished by secretive
double-dealing and cover-ups. In clinging to this
view I hope I am not being simple-minded.
Hillsborough itself offers further proof of the
inadequacy of judge-led inquiries. We should
probably not be too critical of Lord Justice
Taylor’s initial investigation since he was not
given full access to the thousands of documents
examined by the independent panel which has come
up with the withering report about the South Yorkshire Police.
Nonetheless, the Taylor Inquiry was far from
grasping of the extent either of police
incompetence at Hillsborough or of the subsequent
mendacity. So was a subsequent report produced by
Lord Justice Stuart-Smith in 1998.
In fact, it has taken the independent panel,
chaired not by a judge but by the Bishop of
Liverpool, the Rt Rev James Jones, to get at the
truth of what really happened. Among the nine
members on the panel there wasn’t a single
judge and only one lawyer. Most unusually, there
were two journalists, one of whom has experience of investigative journalism.
Isn’t there a lesson here? Judges are
Establishment figures who seem generally loath to
produce reports critical of government or state
institutions, which is doubtless why governments are so eager to appoint them.
Let’s hope that Lord Justice Leveson, who is
currently writing a report into media ethics,
shows he is a free spirit rather than an official
stooge. I say that as someone who condemns the
News Of The World’s phone-hacking, as well as The
Sun’s egregious misreporting in 1989 of what happened at Hillsborough.
But in a country beset with secretive and
sometimes dysfunctional institutions, we surely
need a free and independent Press that dares to
expose their shortcomings, as happened in the case of MPs’ expenses.
The all-important question is why our
institutions should behave in this way and resist
being accountable. My tentative suggestion is
that they have been reluctant to adapt to the
democratic age. They retain a conviction that they know what is best for us.
There is a sense in which politicians, the police
and the civil service still regard us almost as
serfs with limited rights. The NHS offers a good
example. Its intentions are entirely benevolent
but it can also be high-handed and inefficient.
Patients are often treated with indifference, and sometimes with contempt.
The police and ambulance service at Hillsborough
were supposed to be serving the best interests of
the fans, but as a result of incompetence only
let them down. Then they strove to cover up their
mistakes without consideration for those who had died or their relatives.
What they had not counted on was the endurance
and hunger for justice of the families of the
victims. I am speaking of brave hearts such as
Trevor Hicks, chairman of the Hillsborough
Families Support Group, who lost two daughters in
the tragedy. Year after year he and others like
him campaigned for a terrible wrong to be
recognised, only to be rewarded with insults, indifference and stone-walling.
One of the most moving responses to the report
came from Becky Shah, whose mother died at
Hillsborough. She said: ‘I have mixed feelings. I
am relieved that Liverpool fans, survivors and
the dead have been exonerated, and the city of
Liverpool, too. But I was a young woman of 17,
who lost her only parent at Hillsborough, and the
fact that it has taken more than half of my life
to get justice is absolutely outrageous in a democratic society.’
She’s right, of course. It is outrageous. But it
is also inspiring that ordinary families should
have taken on the authorities in the direst of
circumstances and, with the help of some good and
brave people, finally prevailed.
There’s good cause to be disenchanted by the way
the police and so many of our other institutions
cover up their mistakes and wrong-doing. I’m
certainly not naive enough to believe that the
wall-to-wall apologies mean that something like this can’t happen again.
But the strength and determination of the
families on behalf of those they love does give
me some hope. It is a kind of victory. And maybe,
just maybe, the people who oversee our
self-serving institutions will begin to hear the
message that the people have had enough.
--
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"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic
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Fear not therefore: for there is nothing covered
that shall not be revealed; and nothing hid that
shall not be made known. What I tell you in
darkness, that speak ye in the light and what ye
hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops. Matthew 10:26-27
Die Pride and Envie; Flesh, take the poor's advice.
Covetousnesse be gon: Come, Truth and Love arise.
Patience take the Crown; throw Anger out of dores:
Cast out Hypocrisie and Lust, which follows whores:
Then England sit in rest; Thy sorrows will have end;
Thy Sons will live in peace, and each will be a friend.
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--
Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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