Why did it take 34 years for the police to apologise to the families of victims of the Hillsborough disaster? It’s not because the working families were not intelligent. They were shattered with grief but soon started to organise. Lack of wealth meant fundraising for lawyers was hard. Watch on iPlayer the drama documentary with Maxine Peake playing the campaigning leader of the movement for justice for those 97 dead. You can’t say Anne wasn’t articulate. But the establishment, wealth, power and the police were stacked against them.
The result of that independent enquiry was to put the blame squarely on police mismanagement. No ifs & no buts. Theresa May asked the Bishop of Liverpool to make recommendations and his report came out 5 years ago. He is still waiting for the government to respond. I find it hard to accept how unequal and corrupt this country has become. The title of my memoir is
Food of Love Cooking up a life across gender, CLASS and race
But CLASS isn’t talked about enough. I included this in my story.
‘The generation of 1945-1975 was one of enormous class mobility due to changes in government policies and the resulting decline of inequality. In 1945 the richest 0.01 per cent of people in Britain had 123 times the mean national average of income. By 1965 it was halved to 62 times and by 1978 it was at its lowest at 28 times. By 2007, it had risen to 144 times and is rising still. (New Statesman “How Social Mobility Got Stuck” by Danny Dorling July 2013).’
Most of our politicians don’t have a clue about the importance of libraries in upward mobility because they come from homes with books. My story is of a working class girl from Luton who would not have enjoyed the life I’ve had without access to Luton Central Library.
