This was mine: Dear Mr Johnson and/or The Spectator Having read your recent editorial entitled "Bigley's Fate", I feel the need to complain about the inaccuracies and misrepresentations and flaws within it. There is an interesting piece to be written on manifestations of public grief. It could well be thought provoking, intelligent and examine root causes within society. A hatchet job of an editorial such as this, however, is not it. The essential point is one with which I could agree. How did the death of one man, within tens of thousands, result in a minute's silence at a national football match? You may be correct to target the first day of this as Diana's death. I can agree with your closing sentence: "In our maturity as a civilisation, we should accept that we can cut out the cancer of ignorant sentimentality without diminishing, as in this case, our utter disgust at a foul and barbaric act of murder." You are correct to make this point, but to make this point without questioning why this sentimentality occurred much beyond: "The extreme reaction to Mr Bigley?s murder is fed by the fact that he was a Liverpudlian," and empty baseless attacks on welfarism weakens the article beyond its breaking point. In addition I appear to have missed the editorial attacking football grounds across the country for allowing a minute's silence for the deaths of Soham girls Holly and Jessica. I missed the venomous attack on Soham for being such a self-pitying place. I missed the vile outpouring of prejudice and inaccuracy within an editorial which is so clear within this one. Your misrepresentation of what happened on April 15th 1989 is at best lazy journalism and at worst a gross slur. Hillsborough was investigated by Lord Justice Taylor and he found that there was no culpability whatsoever for "drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon." I can assume quite safely that he had significantly more facts at his disposal than your editorial writer who seemed unsure as to the numbers of the dead on that day, settling for "more than 50", when arguably just less than a hundred is far more exact. Perhaps such articles could be researched to the extent wherein the nuber "96" could be given. Or is that beyond the whit of the Spectator editorial team? Is it, perhaps, that using pre-conceived ntions of the Hillsborough Disaster and what followed it as a stick to beat the people of Liverpool with is much easier than actually constructing an argument or researching into the disaster? Is it that it is much, much easier to simply point at the people of one city than to attack the very group most responsible for the storm of sentamentality that surrounds any and every story? The media. There is no individual group more given over to allow the narrativity of such an event as Bigley's capture to grow. It was the media who stoked the fire, who chose to lead with it on a daily basis. It is the media who encourage such acts of sentamentality, the gutter-press such as The Sun, for which you have such sympathy as a whipping-boy within your editorial, does much much more to create this climate of public grief; does much much more to move public debate away from the nuts and bolts of a situation and closer to the "cancer of ignorant sentimentality" that, clearly in your editorial writer's view, obscures debate and reason. The hawkish aggression of your editorial against Liverpool stops you from having more to say about the growth of "mawkish sentamentality" within the national consciousness and therefore you are guilty of the very thing your editorial seems to lament, an inability to have a clear, transparent process of reason rather than raw feeling. Your editoral is all feeling and no reason; all heat and no light becasue whomever wrote it appears to have such a strong prejudice against Liverpool. No evidence is presented for any of the assertions within the editorial. Nothing to justify the genrification of a city's "psychological state". The tone of the piece would make me suspect that the author has read the disgraceful edition of the Sun, seen Boys From The Blackstuff and Bread and felt that was a more than adequate base from which to write an article. For fear of playing to any degree of psychological profile I would hope that the assertions made within the piece with either be backed with reasonable evidence or they shall be withdrawn within the next edition of your magazine. To have a magazine supposed filled with intelligent debate publish such a leader must be a matter of acute embarrassment. Standards ought to be higher than this for a magazine proporting to be intelligent. Either reach them or apologise for your failure to do so. Finally I would like to invite you or whoever wrote such an article up to Liverpool. The best way to remove your prejudices would be to confront them. I'm sure you would have an excellent time in a lovely city. Yours Sincerely Neil Atkinson
