I hear former Cabinet Minister Jack Straw in response to yesterday’s report on the Hillsborough disaster has referred to the culture of impunity in the police under the Thatcher government, a culture encouraged as they wanted the police to be a partisan force. Norman Tebbit – that government’s “semi-house-trained polecat” (in Michael Foot‘s phrase) – has responded to Straw’s remarks by calling them very, very silly.

Straw seems to have touched a nerve there don’t you think? Tebbit’s is hardly a measured comment. It’s also a deliberate attempt to minimise the effect of Straw’s charge – which has a great deal of substance.

To anyone who, like me, lived in a mining area in the 1980s it was obvious that the police force was partisan. Not only did stories of police officers brandishing banknotes at striking miners through the windows of police vans abound, I was several times prevented from going about my lawful business by a policeman peremptorily directing me back the way I had come. And this was nowhere near an actual coal mine, merely on roads that coal carrying lorries might be intending to use.

It was equally obvious that the then government wanted the police on side. One of their first acts was to ensure that the police got a large pay rise (while the rest of the public services were to endure cuts or freezes.)

And Thatcher herself not only saw the miners as an enemy, she saw football supporters in that light too, or if not an enemy, certainly as undesirables.

Is it any wonder the Yorkshire Police thought that they could get away with distorting the truth of Hillsborough? Football fans, especially in England, more especially from Liverpool, were at the time treated with contempt.

Far from Straw’s remarks being very, very silly, it is Tebbit’s which deserve that label.

My first response when the good lady informed me of Michael Foot’s death was there goes Plymouth Argyle‘s most famous supporter. Come to think of it he was probably the only supporter of their’s I’d heard of.

He was very proud of the fact that he’d been registered for them as a player on his ninetieth birthday. (To play only on the left, of course, never the right.)

Quite what his view would be of the ridiculous advertising campaign for an insurance company that seems to take the Albion’s supporters in vain I dread to think.

His other incarnation (as a politician) reached its peak when he was elected leader of the Labour Party. Unfortunately for him, or perhaps fortunately as I don’t think he ever really wanted to be PM, this was at the time the Thatcher juggernaut was in full swing.

There was a confected furore when he arrived at the Cenotaph for the Remembrance Day observances in 1982 wearing what was dubbed a donkey jacket but was more like a duffle coat. This was taken to be disrespectful of the dead – mostly by those who’d never been within miles of a battlefield themselves. (He had himself volunteered for military service in the Second World War but been turned down due to his chronic asthma.)

The Queen Mother – no left winger – apparently thought differently as she is said to have told him, “Very wise. It’s cold today.”

In all of his utterances he always seemed to be one of the few politicians who are genuine and mean what they are saying.

Michael Foot: 23/7/13 – 3/3/10. So it goes.