Justice, Right and Wrong

 

Memorial at Anfield to the 96 Hillsborough victims

I think this observation from John Cowper Powys is highly relevant to the Hillsborough tragedy - the events of that dreadful day and across the twenty-seven years as the victims’ families fought for justice.  As we are all now fully aware from the details and images that have been released and reported, the bereaved families have suffered unbelievable pain not only as a result of the deaths of their loved ones, but at the hands of the police, media, and politicians who sought to bury their culpability with the dead and cover for each other.

 

In his works, Powys reminds us that we must be aware and vigilant, questioning and sceptical of those in power, of the media, of propaganda, and of government.  We are human beings, individuals with rights under the law.  Sometimes it is necessary to fight for ourselves, to defend ourselves when others abuse their positions of power and influence.  The Hillborough  families’ fight has been a long haul and I salute their tenacity and determination to get justice for their loved ones, and admire the depth of love that drove them, and kept them going for nearly thirty years.  

“No one who has studied at all closely the procedures in our criminal Law Courts can fail to have been struck by the sheer human wisdom, beyond that of any professional psychologists, of our British Judges, these men of super-common sense, whose business is to defend the Rights of the Individual under the Law, if it be necessary against the Government and the Police. (JCP’s emphasis)

Now our home-critics…are inclined to take all this for granted, forgetting the long terrible historic struggle which endowed the Law and it Judicial Interpreters with this tremendous supremacy.

But there is something else; for the Law itself is based upon a less ponderable product, of a far longer, far older, far more tragically-contested evolution.  I refer to the evolution of the human conscience, of the human sense of right and wrong.”

(John Cowper Powys, Mortal Strife)