I AM not a fan of football. But I remember exactly where I was when I first heard about Hillsborough. It was April, 1989. I was driving alone around the east end of London looking for a flat to rent. I ended up lost somewhere around Brick Lane, going the wrong way up a one-way street, under what felt like an unseasonably darkening sky. For company, I had the car radio.

As news began to filter through about the disaster unfolding at Hillsborough, I stopped the car outside an old Victorian brewery and sat there, increasingly aware that something truly awful was happening. I remember that each time Leppings Lane was mentioned, I had a mental picture of nursery rhyme lambs leaping over a fence in a primrose spring meadow. This bucolic, childlike image jarred brutally against the mounting alarm in the voices of the football commentators, as the scale of the disaster began to emerge.

I remember hearing the flat futility of my own voice as I shouted at the car radio: "Jesus Christ, get them out, get them out." But the police didn’t get them out. Instead, they kept the helpless and dying fans penned in like animals, causing the unlawful killing of 96 individuals. When the ambulances came – all 44 of them – the police kept them out too, thus preventing the life-saving emergency treatment of hundreds of casualties who were laid out on the pitch.

It was an awful day. And things got worse in the weeks and years that followed as South Yorkshire Police insisted on blaming the victims themselves for the disaster. Their blame-game was shored up by sordid defamation of the dead and injured, conspiracies, lies and a massive cover-up of the truth that took 27 years to unravel and finally expose. Families of those killed and injured in the disaster had to fight to clear their names. It cost millions of pounds and was the longest trial in UK judicial history. All because South Yorkshire Police didn’t want to take the blame. Their determination to blame the victims was institutionalised, boosted by the power of the Thatcher government and media. The consequences of wrongful blaming on this scale were catastrophic for the bereaved families of Hillsborough, drawing out their agony and loss across three decades.

Why are people so adept at blaming others? We all do it to some degree. A classic way of blaming is to project our own bad stuff elsewhere. We feel bad about something and can’t bear it, so we put the feeling into someone else in order to get rid of it. Although this may sound unhealthy and unfair, it is commonly used as a way of dealing with uncomfortable or distressing feelings.

As social beings, we are very aware of our social identity. One way of defining ourselves is to compare ourselves with others in order to position ourselves on the social hierarchy. Part of this social comparison involves blaming others so that we emerge higher up the pecking order. By making others less good or less worthy, by implication, we make ourselves look better, thus giving us more control over our social environment and status. This is a relatively soft and subtle technique but ultimately not very edifying and it hinders growth in our relationships with others.

Making sense of random events is another reason why we blame others. If we don’t know what caused something to happen – particularly if the outcome is negative – human nature is such that we will want to pinpoint the cause and assign blame in the hope that it will make the aftermath more bearable. Traditionally, natural disasters were perceived as acts of God, a kind of divine retribution with its own unique logic. This perception has changed over time since advances in science and technology can now explain what our ancestors could not.

Regardless of advances in psychology, science and technology, people still can’t resist the blame game. Whether it is to defend our own good reputation or sense of self, or whether it’s to stop ourselves feeling bad or ashamed, the impulse to blame is alive and kicking, like a kind of psychic kink in the human personality structure.

But the kind of blaming indulged in by figures of authority who possess real power, such as the South Yorkshire Police, seems to me to be something more akin to real badness. They could have put their hands up at any stage and said "guilty" and in doing so they would have diminished, even helped heal, some of the protracted pain experienced by the bereaved families of Hillsborough. But they didn’t. They carried on to the bitter end. Even when the judicial processes rubbed their face in it, there are still those among them who insist they smell of nothing but roses.