The truth about Hillsborough has of course always been known. What happened yesterday was that it finally became incontrovertible. I fear, though, that the context of Hillsborough is in danger of being forgotten – that context being that the 1980s was an era of moral panic about the working class.

Back then, football fans were mostly working people. It cost only £2 to get into a first division game in the mid-80s, and the influx of fashionable middle-class men talking about “the footie” was a post-Gazza, post-Hornby phenomenon. Such fans were the object of fear and contempt by the police and Tory party: Thatcher tried to impose ID cards onto them. Here’s how When Saturday Comes described the attitude towards fans then:

The police see us as a mass entity, fuelled by drink and a single-minded resolve to wreak havoc by destroying property and attacking one another with murderous intent. Containment and damage limitation is the core of the police strategy. Fans are treated with the utmost disrespect. We are herded, cajoled, pushed and corralled into cramped spaces, and expected to submit passively to every new indignity.

However, football fans were not the only object of class-based moral panic. Thatcher famously described miners as “the enemy within”: not, note, people with mistaken ideas but an enemy, comparable to warmongering fascists. And there were panics about “new age travellers” and “acid house”.

Now, there is – sad to say – an ugly truth here. These panics were not wholly unfounded. Crime was high in the 80s, and football hooliganism was a genuine problem; Heysel happened just four years before Hillsborough. However, a pound of fact became a ton of moral panic and class hatred.

It’s in this context that we should interpret the slanders against the Hillsborough victims by Tories such as Irvine Patnick, Bernard Ingham and Kelvin Mackenzie. Their fear and hatred of working people had reached such feverish heights that they were prepared to believe them capable of robbing the dead.

In all these cases, the police were brutal enforcers of this class-based hatred – and unlawfully so. After the battle of Stonehenge in 1985 Wiltshire Police were found guilty of ABH, false imprisonment and wrongful arrest. And after Orgreave South Yorkshire Police – them again – paid £500,000 compensation for assault, unlawful arrest and malicious prosecution. As James Doran says:

The British state is not a neutral body which enforces the rule of law - it is a set of social relations which uphold the rule of the capital. Law is a matter of struggle - ordinary people are automatically subject to the discipline of the repressive apparatus of the state.

All this poses a question. Have things really changed? Of course, the police and Tories have much better PR than they did then. But is it really a coincidence that the police still turn up mob-handed to demos whilst giving a free ride to corporate crime and asset stripping? When the cameras are off and they are behind closed doors, do the police and Tories retain a vestige of their 1980s attitudes? When Alan Duncan spoke of those who aren’t rich as “low achievers”, was that a minority view, or a reminder that the Tories haven’t really abandoned their class hatred?

Many younger lefties might have abandoned class in favour of the politics of micro-identities. For those of us shaped by the 80s, however, class matters. And I suspect this is as true for the Tories as it is for me.