One clear theme from the Hillsborough inquests is the ways in which inquests can act to frame who and what can be mourned.<\/p>\n
My Facebook and Twitter timelines were initially filled with people sharing the bare facts. Unlawful killing. 96 deaths caused or contributed to by actions of the police, the ambulance service, the stadium managers.\u00a0 #Justiceforthe96. Later comments praised the families, their tenacious campaign in the face of official disinterest and resistance, and their lawyers, a group of the best and brightest legal minds who take on public interest work for minimal financial reward, unrelenting hard work and the occasional victory in the public interest. By Wednesday and Thursday, the conversation had moved to criticise the Murdoch-owned press for their reaction<\/a> to the outcome, to praise Andy Burnham\u2019s speech<\/a>, and to consider the wider implications of the conclusion, for individual officers and for the campaign<\/a> for an inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave. The national media followed a similar pattern, with particularly powerful interventions by sportswriters including James Lawton<\/a>. And critically, this was not a discussion solely about the rights and wrongs of policing and official culture in the 1980s, but was a debate inseparably linked to contemporary politics, including the stage that the EU referendum has offered to the outgoing Mayor of London.<\/p>\n Boris Johnson may have apologised for the comments<\/a> published in the Spectator while he was editor in 2004, but the callous discussion of \u2018mawkish sentimentality\u2019 and offhand reference to \u2018the deaths of more than 50 Liverpool football supporters\u2019 (not inaccurate, but the phrasing suggests either incredibly lazy fact checking or deliberate downplaying) remains a low in the debate about the appropriateness of public expressions of grief. While the resharing of the article now is inextricably linked to Boris\u2019 heightened profile as leading member of the Out campaign, it is fundamentally linked to a continued and real sense of anger that the Establishment (for what else does the Spectator represent?) should be able to recast and dismiss the Hillsborough families as trapped in self-pity, inappropriately continuing to grieve publicly about the deaths of their family members, as if this was a chosen path. The article called for the need for a \u2018sense of proportion about what constitutes a tragedy\u2019 and that there was a need to \u2018cut out the cancer of ignorant sentimentality\u2019 in relation to public responses to death.<\/p>\n In comparison, Judith Butler, reflecting on the September 11 attacks, wrote about mourning as a submission to transformation \u2013 a transformation in which the mourner is changed, possibly forever, and which could not be ‘charted or planned. One can try to choose it, but it may be that this experience of transformation deconstitutes choice at some level. I do not think, for instance, that one can invoke the Protestant ethic when it comes to loss. One cannot say \u201cOh, I\u2019ll go through loss in this way, and that will be the result, and I\u2019ll apply myself to the task, and I\u2019ll endeavour to achieve the resolution of grief that is before me.’ (Butler, Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence<\/em>, Verso, 2004, at 21)<\/p>\n Butler calls for attention to the ways that grief is differentially produced; exploring \u2018how certain forms of grief become nationally recognised and amplified, whereas other losses become unthinkable and ungrievable\u2019 (2004, xiv).\u00a0 In later work, she develops this thesis, arguing that the legitimacy of loss is organised through a process of framing, in which alternative accounts are delegitimised and official versions are created. In this account, the \u2018frame does not simply exhibit reality, but actively participates in a strategy of containment, selectively producing and enforcing what will count as reality\u2019 (Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?<\/em> Verso, 2010, xiii).<\/p>\n Using Butler\u2019s terms, the events of the last 27 years are revealed as a contest over this question of framing; whether the deaths of the 96 were framed as grievable, or dismissed as the deaths of, or at the hands of, drunken hooligans who had in some sense brought it on themselves.\u00a0 Different key moments in that contest can be identified, from the initial news reports and the infamous<\/a> Sun front page, through the interim<\/a> and final<\/a> Taylor reports in 1989\/90, to the report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel<\/a> in 2012. Others have set out accounts of the long fight the families have endured (see the excellent David Conn<\/a>), so I will not repeat it here, but in that process the initial inquests and the recent re-hearing played a critical central role, and the outpouring of social media responses is now part of that exercise in framing, built upon the conclusions and processes of the re-heard inquest.<\/p>\n The first inquests (heard in two parts in the early 1990s) closed down the possibilities of a full investigation, eventually concluding that the deaths were accidental. The process it followed to reach this flawed conclusion was vital; after the widely reported police accounts of a catastrophe primarily caused by drunken fans was dismissed by Lord Justice Taylor, the public evidence in the initial inquests acted to re-establish and re-legitimise this myth that the fans were partly at fault. It was this lie \u2013 an easy trope which fed the Spectator\u2019s dismissal of the Hillsborough campaign and which survived for decades (see, for example, Jeremy Hunt\u2019s 2010 \u2018gaffe\u2019<\/a>) \u2013 which has been nailed by the recent inquest. It means that Trevor Hicks, a father of two who died at Hillsborough, can now \u2018grieve properly<\/a>\u2019.\u00a0 Far from families and a city caught in a cycle of self-pity, the injustice perpetuated by the first inquests meant grief could not begin for some of the families. The dead were left ungrievable in the public sphere. The recent hearings in Warrington acted to reframe their loss, to legitimise their grief, and overturned a framing of their campaign as mawkish, inappropriate and merely sentimental.<\/p>\n