When I was in Liverpool last week, I noticed many taxis decked out like the ones below.

Inside the taxi I got from the airport was a sign saying, “Please don’t read the Sun in my cab, it WILL cause offense”.

Rupert Murdoch’s “The Sun” newspaper is hated in Liverpool because of the terrible, hurtful lies it printed about Liverpool football fans in 1989, four days after ninety six fans were crushed to death while attending a football match at Hillsborough in Yorkshire.

Here’s what they published:

They went on to say

“drunken Liverpool fans viciously attacked rescue workers as they tried to revive victims” and “police officers, firemen and ambulance crew were punched, kicked and urinated upon”. A quotation, attributed to an unnamed policeman, claimed a dead girl had been “abused”, and that Liverpool fans were “openly urinating on us and the bodies of the dead”

None of the headlines were true.

In 2016, after a twenty seven year long campaign, a Coroner finally returned a verdict that the supporters were unlawfully killed due to grossly negligent failures by police and ambulance services to fulfill their duty of care to the supporters. The inquest also found that the design of the stadium contributed to the crush, and that supporters were not to blame for the dangerous conditions

Two days later, lawyers acting for hundreds of people affected by the disaster launched proceedings against the South Yorkshire and West Midlands forces.related to the:

“cover-up and actions intended to wrongly blame the deceased and Liverpool Football Club supporters for the tragedy, for which there has still been no proper admission or apology”. 

The Sun has been a pariah publication in Liverpool since 1989. The recent Coroner’s report has reinforced the hatred for Murdoch’s paper.

Today I saw Ed Milliband, the former Labour Party Leader, asking for assurances that Murdoch’s Twenty First Century Fox will not be given approval to buy Sky, home of Sky News, while Parliament is in recess. He pointed out that the deal was refused already in 2011. He made the point that Murdoch’s companies are still under investigation for corruption. He did not receive anything but bland procedural answers.

If Parliament is given the opportunity to discuss this deal, which would give Murdoch yet more control of what news gets pushed in the UK, would do well to remember the lies told after Hillsborough. The North remembers. MPs should too.