Very early on government scientists identified the problem: the farming industry had turned herbivores into carnivores, cannibals even, by grinding down dead animals and adding their remains, in the form of ‘meat and bone meal’, to the feed mix given to living ones. It wasn’t only cattle that were fed cattle; their remains were put into pig and poultry feed too. Thus, even after the meal officially went off the menu for cows thanks to a ban in July 1988, they continued to scoff the stuff due to cross-contamination of feed. In addition, farmers and feed traders continued to use up stocks of infected feed for months after the ban. Lab tests confirmed that BSE could be passed on by a speck of infected tissue ‘as small as a peppercorn’, and British cattle continued to catch the disease at a rate of thousands per week. In the end about 170,000 cows either died of the disease or had to be destroyed once they started showing symptoms, which included tremors, frenzied and aggressive behaviour, and the loss of control over their own hind legs.24 Many more were slaughtered as a precaution.
Vets warned about a possible risk to humans right from the outset. The head of pathology at the Central Veterinary Laboratory reported to colleagues in December 1986 that it could ‘have severe repercussions to the export trade and possibly also for humans, if for example it was discovered that humans with spongiform encephalopathies had close associations with the cattle’. In the same paperwork he also set the tone for the way that officialdom would deal with the threat – in reassuring whispers: ‘It is for these reasons that I have classified this document confidential. At present I would recommend playing it low key.’25 Many years later the government inquiry into the crisis found: ‘Gathering of data about the extent of the spread of BSE was impeded in the first half of 1987 by an embargo… on making information about the new disease public.’26 Just in case that wasn’t clear enough, the inquiry’s chair, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, spelt it out at the launch of his report: ‘We do think, and have found, that there was what you might call a cover-up in the first six months.’27
The same caution was evident in the vets’ official notification to their bosses at the MAFF after the disease was identified in seven separate herds in June 1987. ‘There is no evidence that the bovine disorder is transmissible to humans,’ they wrote. ‘Irresponsible or ill-informed publicity is likely to be unhelpful since it might lead to hysterical demands for immediate, draconian government measures’.28 The news was passed on to the minister in charge, John MacGregor, the following month, with the warning that it ‘would give rise to concern about any human health risks, although there is no reason at all to believe that such risks exist’.29
Unfortunately they were all working on a false assumption: that the new disease was related to scrapie, a similar illness that attacks the nervous system of sheep which had never been passed on to humans since it had first been identified in the early eighteenth century. Because everyone was working on this hypothesis, the disease remained the purlieu of vets, not doctors, for far too long. It was not until March 1988 that anyone even got round to notifying the Department of Health about it. Until then most of the discussions within government were focused on who would pay the bill if a mass slaughter programme had to be introduced. Indeed, MacGregor, who had only just agreed the MAFF’s budget with the Treasury, wrote that he was ‘concerned at the thought of a Government scheme, it runs the risk of reopening the compensation question’,30 while one of his top officials cunningly suggested that ‘we can argue that the Animal Health Act does not say how much compensation should be paid, and in the circumstances, given that BSE-affected animals will have little market value anyway, we would be justified in paying only a small amount.’31
BSE was not like scrapie. Amazingly, the first person to suggest that the government might just want to consider the dangers of infected carcasses entering the food chain seems not to have been within the government at all. Instead it was the aristocratic car collector and gay icon Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, who wrote to the MAFF in December 1987 after a conversation with one of his tenant farmers. ‘I understand little or no research has been done on whether the disease can be transmitted to humans through the consumption of beef from infected animals, and until this is known, it seems quite wrong to me that… there is a substantial financial incentive on farmers to sell a carcass for human consumption, as I understand it is worth approximately £300, as against a price of £50 if sold for pet food.’32
It was the government’s chief medical officer, Sir Donald Acheson, who determined that ‘there was insufficient evidence for him to be able to rule out the risk to human health posed by BSE.’ For this reason he asked that an ‘expert group’ be set up to look into the matter.33 This group, chaired by biologist Sir Richard Southwood, advised in June 1988 that cattle showing signs of BSE should be slaughtered and their carcasses destroyed (despite ‘concerns with respect to public expenditure’).34 But when they released their final report a full year later the only recommendation they made about food was that ‘manufacturers of baby foods should avoid the use of ruminant offal and thymus’ – the latter a gland in the neck which they pointed out ‘can currently be described on food labels as meat’.35
It was far from the only quease-inducing ingredient that would have to be revisited as the BSE crisis escalated. Concerns were raised about ‘mechanically recovered meat’, unappetizing scraps that were pressure-blasted off cows’ skeletons and added to processed products such as pies, sausages and burgers, often along with fragments of spinal cord. Lord Phillips’ inquiry found the ‘MAFF discounted these concerns without subjecting them to rigorous consideration’, and that a ‘breakdown in communications’ meant that no action was taken on mechanically recovered meat until 1995.36 Neither the MAFF nor the Department of Health alerted the DTI to the risk of animal products in cosmetics, where the biggest danger came from ‘premium products such as anti-ageing creams applied to the skin, eyes or mucous membranes, which might contain lightly-processed brain extracts, placental material, spleen and thymus’.37 In every area, there was ‘an absence of a sense of urgency’ and ‘a slow tempo of action’ – it took a full three years to issue guidance to workers in hospitals, laboratories and mortuaries about the danger of handling ‘risk tissues’, with a supposedly ‘fast-track’ warning letter taking fourteen months to be drafted and sent out.38 Despite a specific request in 1990 that schools be alerted to the risk of science lessons that involved pupils dissecting cow eyeballs, no advice went out for two and a half years.39 And when the right thing was done – such as the banning in June 1989 of the bits of cow offal most likely to carry disease, which went above and beyond the recommendations of the Southwood report – it was ‘presented to the public in terms that underplayed its importance as a public health measure’, which meant that people failed to appreciate it when they discovered, much later, that such meaty treats as brains, spleens and spinal cords had been dangerous after all.40
Throughout, the public were being reassured that it was perfectly safe to carry on eating beef. MacGregor’s successor as minister at the MAFF, John Gummer, famously summoned photographers in May 1990 to witness him sharing a beef burger with his four-year-old daughter.41 On the same day Acheson reiterated official advice that ‘beef can be eaten safely by everyone, both adults and children, including patients in hospital’.42 Ironically, he was probably right, but only because the actions taken the previous year had done much to stamp out the risks. As the Phillips inquiry observed a decade later, ‘the possibility of risk to humans was not communicated to the public or those whose job it was to implement and enforce the precautionary measures.’43 Lord Phillips’ panel also noted that there had been ‘a belief in the Health and Safety Executive that action was being taken simply as a response to political and media pressures’.44 When the Health and Safety Executive are dismissing things as health and safety gone mad, you know something has gone seriously wrong.
‘The government did not lie to the public about BSE,’ the Phillips inquiry concluded in 20
00, when over eighty patients, some already dead, some still in the process of dying horribly, had been identified as contracting Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease as a result of eating infected meat many years before. ‘It believed that the risks posed by BSE to humans were remote. The government was preoccupied with preventing an alarmist over-reaction to BSE because it believed the risk was remote. It is now clear that this campaign of reassurance was a mistake.’45
The mishandling of BSE fostered public mistrust of not just politicians, but of officials of all kinds, and of scientists too. Worse, it turned us into ripe targets for overreaction in future health scares. It was just a few short years later that Andrew Wakefield popped up with his bogus theory of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.46 Stopping your children from eating beef burgers because you are worried about the health risk is one thing; stopping them from being vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella has considerably more serious – and potentially more widespread – consequences.
‘I spoke to many policemen in the makeshift mortuary afterwards. They told me they were hampered, harassed, punched, kicked and urinated on by Liverpool fans. I kept quiet about this because I did not want to inflame a delicate situation. But it is a fact that these are the stories they told me and they had no reason to lie.’
Irvine Patnick MP, interview, White’s News Agency, 18 April 1989
It is sometimes said that journalism is the first draft of history. But journalism is essentially the act of recording what your sources tell you, and if those sources are lying through their teeth, you have a problem even before you start typing. There are ways of safeguarding against this danger. The most obvious one is to speak to as many people as possible and check their stories against each other, ‘double-sourcing’, or preferably triple- or quadruple-sourcing, every claim. But you’d be surprised how often multiple, and apparently trustworthy, witnesses turn out to all be passing on the same, unreliable evidence from a single dodgy outlet.
That is what happened to White’s News, a respected local press agency in Sheffield, on the day after ninety-six Liverpool fans were crushed to death. The tragedy had occurred after the gates to Sheffield Wednesday’s football ground at Hillsborough had been opened to allow gathering crowds into the penned-in stands, which were already full. White’s News filed to their newspaper clients a story carrying quotes from a number of police officers who had been at the scene, as well as a local spokesman for the Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers, and local MP Irvine Patnick. What one of those papers chose to do next – pumping up the story beyond all recognition and splashing it on the front page under the headline ‘THE TRUTH’, when it was anything but – is well known. But there was a fundamental problem with the story before it got anywhere near The Sun’s editors, because the police force that was in charge on the day was engaged in a determined cover-up.47
The Police Federation was a wholehearted participant – its representative, PC Paul Middup, said that ‘putting our side of the story over to the press and media’ was his priority following the tragedy.48 And Patnick – he was quite open about this – was only passing on what he had been told by the police themselves. ‘I saw the bruising on their bodies and the state they were in and there is no doubt in my mind it is true,’ he ranted to White’s. ‘All this happened to them and yet they carried on doing their job trying to save lives and now they are being blamed.’49
It was a deliberate effort to deflect the blame from where it truly belonged. In the words of the independent panel set up to study the tragedy twenty years later, ‘from the outset SYP [South Yorkshire Police] sought to establish a case emphasising exceptional levels of drunkenness and aggression among Liverpool fans, alleging that many arrived at the stadium late, without tickets and determined to force entry.’50 The truth – that officers in charge had simply made a series of terrible decisions about crowd control, which led directly to the carnage – was to be hidden at all costs.
Patnick was not the only politician to be drawn into the web of lies. The day after the disaster, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Home Secretary Douglas Hurd visited the stadium and were briefed by SYP Chief Constable Peter Wright and several of his senior officers. There is no record of exactly what they were told, but the PM’s chief press secretary, Bernard Ingham, came away from the subsequent briefing firmly convinced that ‘tanked-up yobs… had turned up in very large numbers to try to force their way into the ground’. In a letter he wrote many years later he said: ‘I have no intention of apologising for my views which are sincerely held on the basis of what I heard first hand at Hillsborough.’51 In another, he argued that ‘To blame the police, even though they may have made mistakes, is contemptible.’52
Certainly Mrs Thatcher, who was predisposed both by her nature and by her gratitude for their loyal service during the miners’ strike of 1984–5 to take the police side in any dispute, was unwilling to condone any criticism of the SYP in the first official report on Hillsborough, which was published by Lord Justice Taylor in August 1989. The evidence offered by police to his inquiry, it would later infamously be established, had been subject to ‘review and alteration’ by colleagues and lawyers on a massive scale, in order to ‘remove or amend comments unfavourable to South Yorkshire Police’.53 Yet the judge still managed to state categorically that fans’ behaviour had played no part in the tragedy. He noted that ‘not a single witness’ had been found to support the allegations of stealing from and urinating on victims which had been made to the media, and suggested that ‘those who made them, and those who disseminated them, would have done better to hold their peace.’54 Taylor laid the blame for the tragedy squarely on ‘the failure of police control’ – and he condemned the quality of evidence offered by senior officers who were ‘defensive and evasive witnesses’.55 ‘It is a matter of regret that at the hearing, and in their submissions, the South Yorkshire Police were not prepared to concede they were in any respect at fault in what occurred…. the police case was to blame the fans for being late and drunk…. It would have been more seemly and encouraging for the future if responsibility had been faced.’56
The prime minister was having none of this. It would, as a senior civil servant pointed out, be likely to ‘sap confidence in the police force’. On a copy of Hurd’s proposed official response to Taylor’s report, Thatcher scribbled: ‘What do we mean by “welcoming the broad thrust of the report”? The broad thrust is devastating criticism of the police. Is that for us to welcome?’ Her office sent a note to the home secretary requesting a change of wording: ‘She considers that the statement should welcome the thoroughness of the report and its recommendations rather than “the broad thrust of the report”, given the criticisms it makes of the police.’57 Most of Taylor’s recommendations were concerned with changes to the design of football grounds, rather than what he had revealed about the police. Such a lukewarm response to the rest of his findings – complimenting a report’s ‘thoroughness’ is but a small step up from complimenting the nice font it’s written in – can only have encouraged South Yorkshire Police in their determination to carry on lying for the next two decades.
‘The Thatcher government, because they needed the police to be a partisan force, particularly for the miners’ strike and other industrial troubles, created a culture of impunity in the police service and they really were immune from outside influences,’ mused former Labour home secretary Jack Straw when the report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel was released in 2012. ‘They thought they could rule the roost. And that is what we actually saw in South Yorkshire.’58
Many people, including Hurd, expected the chief constable to resign after Taylor’s interim report came out. In the end South Yorkshire Police Authority felt confident enough to reject his offer to go, and the force declined to bring any disciplinary charges against any of its officers. When the Police Complaints Authority intervened to say they ought to, the chief superintendent who had taken the fatal decision to open the gate
s was allowed to retire rather than face them.
Patnick was also unconvinced by Taylor’s findings. In 1990, after West Midlands Police had been appointed to investigate the behaviour of their sister force, he continued to lobby on behalf of his local bobbies. ‘I do think that the South Yorkshire police’s evidence was not fully taken into account at the Inquiry,’ he wrote in a covering note for a lengthy package of material supplied by the South Yorkshire Police Federation.59 The material was intended to demonstrate how ‘the police did behave magnificently on this occasion in very difficult circumstances’, and alleged – entirely falsely – that lawyers had prevented the judge from seeing evidence that the whole thing really was the fault of drunken fans.60
In April 2016, the jury at a second inquest into the Hillsborough tragedy determined that all ninety-six victims had been unlawfully killed, and that there had been a series of failings by South Yorkshire Police both before and during the disaster. They also concluded that there had not been ‘any behaviour on the part of the football supporters which caused or contributed to the dangerous situation’.61 In the spring of 2017, the Crown Prosecution Service were considering criminal charges against twenty-three suspects, both individuals and organizations, in relation to the disaster, including manslaughter by gross negligence, perverting the course of justice and misconduct in public office.
The Lies of the Land Page 19