Hillsborough disaster shared tribal grievance against the rest of society. The deaths of more than 50 Liverpool football supporters at Hillsborough in 1989 was undeniably a greater tragedy than the single death, however horrible, of Mr Bigley; but that is no excuse for Liverpool's failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon. The police became a convenient scapegoat, and the "Sun" newspaper a whipping-boy for daring, albeit in a tasteless fashion, to hint at the
Life imprisonment in England and Wales petition as an attempt to boost its sales on Merseyside, which had plummeted five years earlier due its controversial reporting of the Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 Liverpool F.C. supporters were killed at an FA Cup semi-final. In June 1997, the House of Lords ruled that Howard had acted unlawfully when setting the 15-year minimum terms. This ruling also signalled the end of the Home Secretary's powers to set minimum terms for offenders who committed their crimes before the age of 18. In November 2002, following a European Court of Human Rights ruling that the Home Secretary could no longer