Justice for Christ's Sake: A Personal Journey Around Justice Through the Eyes of Faith

By James Jones

'Read this for the chapter on Hillsborough alone' JEREMY VINE

'Makes a powerful plea for the "earthing" of God's vision of justice' BARONESS HALE

'A plentiful source of comfort, strength and, most importantly, hope' ANDY BURNHAM

For twenty-five years, Bishop James Jones has been working on the frontlines to try and create a more just and merciful world. In Justice for Christ's Sake, he reflects on the work he has been a part of and the ways in which justice and faith go hand in hand.

With touching honesty, he tells of his time as a Bishop and his role on three key independent panels into matters of national conscience - including chairing the panel that investigated the Hillsborough Disaster of 1989, when ninety-six Liverpool football fans tragically lost their lives. All the dimensions of justice that James has experienced - environmental, social, racial, political and judicial - are vividly conveyed, as he offers up the lessons he has learned in his search for a better, fairer way to live and how the answers might be found in the teachings of Jesus.

Justice for Christ's Sake is a remarkable and fascinating Christian memoir, that offers a unique perspective on some of the most significant inquiries of the last three decades. It is a book that encourages us all in our longing for justice, with insight born from first-hand experience, and will leave you with a better of understanding of events that have shaped conversations on justice in Britain.

Most of us long deep down for a fairer world, however selfishly we may act on occasions. James Jones reassures us that we are not alone and that we can all be part of the fight for justice for Christ's sake.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9780281086269

James Jones

James Jones (1921–1977) was one of the most accomplished American authors of the World War II generation. He served in the U.S. Army from 1939 to 1944, and was present at the attack on Pearl Harbor as well as the battle for Guadalcanal, where he was decorated with a purple heart and bronze star. Jones’s experiences informed his epic novels From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line. His other works include Some Came Running, The Pistol, Go to the Widow-Maker, The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories, The Merry Month of May, A Touch of Danger, Whistle, and To the End of the War—a book of previously unpublished fiction.

Book preview

1

Hillsborough

I always hesitate to talk or to write about Hillsborough. It feels to me as if the only ones who have the right and the authority to speak about the tragedy are those who lost their loved ones or those who survived the disaster. Although I am among those whose lives have been affected by the trauma of it, nothing in our experience compares with the suffering of the bereaved and the survivors. When, on certain occasions, I have thought it right to speak out, I know there are a few who object to my voice being heard. I know too that by putting pen to paper I risk further alienating them, so I have to be very clear, at least to myself, as to why I am doing this.

As far as I am able to judge, chairing the Hillsborough Independent Panel was the single most important aspect of my work as Bishop of Liverpool from 1998 to 2013. It brought into the sharpest focus, for me, issues that all of us struggle with – the problem of suffering, the pain of loss, living with grief, the corruption of power and the lack of justice in the world. These and other sad life events are made all the more difficult to bear by trying to square them with a belief in God, who seems to have neither the will nor the power to intervene.

In giving an account of my involvement in the Hillsborough narrative, I am offering an account of myself as a Christian pastor trying to marry this tragic story to my allegiance to Jesus Christ and his own experience of injustice on this earth. But I offer it also to the families of the 96 and the survivors of Hillsborough, even knowing that some, for very good reasons, will reject it as irrelevant to their continuing grief and anger. And I offer it to the wider public as the testimony of one human being to another about living in a manifestly unjust world.

There’s a saying from one of the psalms:

Thou desirest truth in the inward being

Therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.

(Psalm 51, Book of Common Prayer)

In these pages, I bare my soul in pursuit of wisdom. It was the families and survivors of Hillsborough who impressed on my inner being the burning imperatives of truth and justice. To change the metaphor, truth is a double-edged sword that cuts inwards as well as outwards. While the families fought publicly for the truth for more than thirty years, rising up and challenging the patronizing disposition of unaccountable power of so many institutions, I found myself for ten of those years going deeper into myself, questioning my own ideas and values, as well as my own involvement in a society that had denied for so long both truth and justice to the families of the 96 victims of the Hillsborough disaster.

Justice first and foremost requires the truth to be established. It is not sufficient for that truth to be known only to those who were there and who suffered. The truth of those tragic events needs to be known generally and to be acknowledged by others to be true. It is regrettable that in our relativistic culture we hear people talking about ‘my truth’ or ‘their truth’ as if it were impossible to be definite and objective about an event. Justice challenges such subjectivism and relativism. It is predicated on discerning and discovering the truth of what actually happened. That is why getting to the truth of what took place at Hillsborough is so essential for the families. It is not just ‘their truth’. The families need to be assured that the nation knows that those who died were ‘unlawfully killed’, that many could have been saved and that the families were let down by the authorities they trusted. This is the truth that they have needed to hear publicly acknowledged. It is the truth that was obscured for decades, and its denial frustrated the grieving families. It is the truth that was finally recognized when the jury returned a determination of ‘unlawfully killed’ at the second inquest in 2016, twenty-six years after the tragedy. Without the truth there can be no justice. Yet, conversely, establishing the truth does not guarantee justice and accountability, as the families have gone on to discover.

Although the determination of the second inquest was that the 96 had been ‘unlawfully killed’, only one person has been convicted, with a fine of £6,500 for a breach of health and safety regulations. For there to be justice, there must also be accountability. Those responsible for wrongdoing should be held accountable. As one mother said to me after the second inquest, ‘Now that we know our children were unlawfully killed, we need to know who was responsible.’ There is a moral logic to this maternal instinct.

I came to Liverpool in 1998. I had just read Blake Morrison’s As If (Granta, 2011), his account of the trial of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the children who had murdered the child James Bulger in Bootle. It gave me the feeling of coming to a people acquainted with grief. Shortly after my arrival, Trevor and Jenni Hicks, who had lost their two daughters, Sarah and Victoria, came to see me to ask me to preside at the tenth anniversary memorial service of the Hillsborough disaster, an event that took place every year in the football stadium at Anfield in Liverpool. They began to tell me about some of the many unresolved issues relating to the tragedy and its aftermath. These were news to me. Significantly, they had not featured in the Church’s briefing for my appointment.

As I listened to Trevor and Jenni, immediately I could see two things. First, the questions they were pursuing appeared reasonable and legitimate; second, they were describing a wound, deep and wide, that had yet to heal. It was the wound not just of a grieving mother and father but also of a whole community that stretched the length and the breadth of the global allegiance to the Liverpool Football Club. Liverpool, as a city, felt the pain, but nearly half of the 96 who died were fans from other parts of the country. The anniversary remembrances bathed the wound year on year, but there was no balm to heal it, for the sore was infected by the lack of truth and accountability for which the families and survivors were campaigning ever more vociferously.

I presided at the tenth, fifteenth and twentieth ­anniversary services with my Catholic colleague Bishop Tom Williams. These gatherings fell into two parts. The first was a service, with prayers and a gospel choir and the lighting of 96 candles that soothed the grief of the families and the crowd; the second part was like a rally, with rousing speeches demanding that the truth be told about the disaster and those who were responsible should be held to account. The language was strident, the tone vehement and the anger in the crowd palpable. The atmosphere at the twentieth anniversary was tense. More than 30,000 filled the stands. The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, had recently said that there would never be another enquiry into Hillsborough. That declaration felt like a betrayal.

When Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, got up to speak, the crowd was silently hostile. He had begun to wade through a speech he’d taken out of his pocket when the silence was pierced by a lone voice shouting, ‘Justice for the 96!’ At that sound, the whole stadium rose to its feet to echo the man’s cry, and thousands began to chant, ‘Justice for the 96!’ If you had gathered the crowd into the stadium beforehand to rehearse the sequence, it could not have been more in unison. Sitting alongside Andy Burnham, I felt the force of the voice of the crowd that hemmed us in on all sides. Andy was clearly shaken and, to his credit, returned to London to persuade the Prime Minister to change his mind about Hillsborough.

I am not privy to all the discussions that took place within Government between Number 10, the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, but a senior civil servant emerged as the pivotal figure who developed the concept of the Hillsbor­ough Independent Panel. Ken Sutton drafted terms of reference that were both politically acceptable to the Government and satisfactory to the majority of the families. They gave the Panel the authority to seek the maximum possible disclosure of all documents relating to the tragedy and its aftermath, to analyse them and to give an account that would add to public understanding.

It was a master-stroke. Ken, with his colleague Ann Ridley, began assembling the Panel, mindful of the expertise needed to act on the terms of reference and in consultation with represen­tatives of the families and survivors so that those appointed by the Home Secretary would have the confidence of those most affected by the tragedy.

Christine Gifford, an expert in freedom of information and data protection, oversaw access to all the material, including the files held by the South Yorkshire Police; Professor Phil Scraton, who had written the definitive account of Hillsborough, oversaw the team of researchers that analysed all the documents; the late Katy Jones, who worked with Jimmy McGovern on the documentary drama about Hillsborough, had personal knowledge of the key figures in the Hillsborough narrative; Paul Leighton, Deputy Chief Constable, guided the members of the Panel in their learning about police documents and procedures; Sarah Tyacke, a former Keeper of Public Records, steered the Panel in creating an archive of all the material; the late Peter Sissons advised the Panel on matters relating to the media, who were themselves implicated in the narrative; Raju Bhatt, a lawyer with vast experience of inquests, guided the Panel in our understanding of the Coronial