Brendan O’Neill castigates Liverpool FC and their refusal to play a game on the anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, but says that all of Britain is suffering from an advanced case of Mourning sickness:
In many ways, the reaction to Hillsborough was the prototype for later outbursts of emotional correctness, from the weird weepy reaction to Princess Diana’s death in 1997 to the media hysteria that greeted the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007. In all those instances of public mourning, in all the Shared National Experiences of ostentatious grieving, the rules and rituals set in motion after Hillsborough have come into play. Thou must make a public performance of sorrow. Thou must never deviate from the emotional script. Thou must not question why we weep, year in and year out, and just get on with weeping. Thou must wallow in one-off tragedies forever and severely chastise anyone who says “Life moves on”. Those are the stifling, speech-restricting, thought-policing, miserable, mawkish rules of emotionally correct modern Britain, and they were written and made gospel on the back of the Hillsborough disaster 22 years ago. God help anyone who deviates from them, as Davies has discovered: he has received hate mail and death threats for daring to question the grief gospel.
Some people attribute the enforced emotional sensitivity over Hillsborough to the peculiar touchiness of Liverpudlians. Liverpool is “self-pity city”, we are told, where they love nothing more than to play the victim card. Perhaps. But if that is true, then we are all Scousers now. Mourning sickness and emotionally correct hysteria are widespread in twenty-first-century Britain, stretching from Liverpudlian housing estates to the London eateries of the Guardian-reading set. It can be glimpsed in everything from the hunting down and imprisonment of an offensive drunken tweeter who refused to go along with the “Pray for Fabrice Muamba” trend to the broadsheets’ haranguing of Jan Moir for not being sufficiently mournful following the death of Stephen Gately. The post-Hillsborough era is one of extraordinarily restrictive emotionalism and censoriousness.
Davies has now repented for his sins, making a public apology for his comments and offering to make a donation to the Hillsborough Justice Campaign — the modern equivalent of doing penance. He shouldn’t have apologised. We need more upfront, unapologetic criticism of the backward modern idea that there is a correct way to feel, a correct way to grieve, and even a correct way to think.
