Of course, everyone who was touched by the disaster in some way deserves a whole lot better than to see potentially vital information in its narrative buried away under the guise of the Official Secrets Act.

There is no national security question at work here, the complete absence of any danger that we may come under nuclear attack as a result of these documents being made available for public digestion.

It was Mrs Thatcher herself who first floated the suggestion that not just Liverpool, but all English clubs should withdraw or be withdrawn from European competition. The FA and UEFA took the bait, and the rest is history.

Banning Liverpool for a period of time was probably the right decision, but dragging Wimbledon, Oxford United and Luton Town (all of whom would have qualified for Europe in the ‘banned years’) into the equation made no sense whatsoever.

This context is important, since while her antipathy for football and its supporters was obvious to anyone with a functioning brain, the police could be seen as an organisation that had served her well, particularly during the miners’ strike.

So those two questions. that may or may not be answered by disclosure of Cabinet Minutes and Thatch’s discussions with senior police officers, are as follows:-

1. Did the government seek to approach the immediate aftermath of Hillsborough from a starting position that was sympathetic to the police?

There are two versions of the Hillsborough story. One, peddled by the police and repeated to disgusting effect by the Sun and its notorious editor Kelvin McKenzie – went like this :-

Drunk football fans, many of whom did not possess match tickets, impatiently attempted to access the Leppings Lane end of the ground and forced the police to open a gate that had no turnstiles. This then caused the fatal crush, after which those same alcohol-fuelled scousers decided to pick-pocket the dead, urinate on ambulance crews and essentially exaccerbate the scale of what was unfolding.

Alternatively:-

Chief Superintendent David Duckinfield and his right hand man Bernard Murray could see at around 15:05 from the control room that the Leppings Lane end of the ground had become dangerously overcrowded. The perimeter fences that had caged supporters in stadia like animals at a zoo did not help, but they were basically caught in the headlights and failed to do their job. The tragedy could have been avoided, or the scale of it at least reduced, had effective police action taken place earlier. Both Duckinfield and Murray are mightily fortunate to have later been cleared of manslaughter.

The first Taylor report (not the one that recommended all-seater stadia, but back to that very shortly) appeared to find much more credence in the latter theory.

But were the government determined to see the police exonerated and Liverpool supporters at least partially blamed for the tragedy, regardless of the facts?

The second question is more potentially controversial.

2. Was the idea suggested at an early stage that terraces would be blamed for the disaster, with all-seater stadia pushed as the solution?

I ask this because many have attempted to make a connection between football terraces and all manner of problems, from hooliganism to the tragic events that occurred at Hillsborough, Ibrox and other grounds. All of this is, when one thinks about it, deeply irrational and on some levels quite offensive.

Many football fans, myself included, have stood up at matches and never once thought of starting a fight, invading the pitch during the game or joining the English Defence League.

Moreover, despite what some might tell you, terracing is not inherently dangerous, as the Germans have proved by offering safe, modern standing capacity to their supporters.

Possibly the best analogy is with the crackdown on handguns after Dunblane.

Such was the nature of the emotive response to the tragedy that the extreme solution suddenly made some sort of rational sense, while those who perhaps saw what was being proposed as the step too far that it was were cowed into guilty silence.

Here’s something that many readers may not know – at the time of the tragedy, Hillsborough was one of many stadia in the top two divisions not in possession of a current and valid safety certificate.

The legislation to cover ground standards, namely the Safety at Sports Grounds Act, was in place and had been updated as recently as 1986 in the wake of the horrendous Valley Parade fire of the previous year.

It simply was not being enforced or adhered to, with terraces oversubscribed, the fences at grounds remaining a potential hazard and many stadia falling into disrepair having not seen a penny spent on them by their clubs in several years.

Perhaps this is one area in which supporters, more keen to see the signing of a new midfielder than watch the game in an arena that did not represent a death-trap, may be as culpable as the directors and chairmen who pursued on-field glory above all else.

All-seater stadia are the norm now in both the Premier League and Championship, so one suspects that a return to some form of safe standing at matches is little more than a wild fantasy.

The changing dynamics and character of football to include the middle classes, women and families owe a lot to the reccommendations of the second Taylor report in particular, and in many respects these shifts have been more good than bad for the game as a whole (jokes about prawn sandwiches aside).

However, attracting a new clientele to matchday appears to have involved both pricing out the one that made it a spectacle in the first place, while depriving them of the opportunity to not just spectate, but participate, as those who inhabited the Kop, the Kippax and the Stretford End undeniably did.

My thoughts on the subject are that, at least hypothetically, the options of both seating and terracing should be available at football grounds to all those who wish to take them. Such a reasonable compromise driven by common sense appears to have been taken away from both the clubs themselves and their supporters, which is a great shame.

Among the many questions surrounding the way in which the establishment handled the Hillsborough disaster, one blind spot may be whether the government themselves decided to steer the conversation in the direction of all-seater stadia, conveniently apportioning blame in the direction of concrete steps that could not answer back.

This piece is an edited version of an article which first appeared at Outspoken Rabbit.