Hypocrites, cheats, liars, scumbags and bastards…

That, in a nutshell, sums up what is risibly called politics and the media this week and I do not just refer to South Yorkshire Police.

It has been calumny upon calumny followed by cupidity and casuistry on an industrial scale.

The findings of the Hillsborough inquests jury made damning reading but were no more than the majority of us already knew. The cops screwed up and then in deeply cynical and treacherous fashion conspired to cover it up by smearing the victims rather than accept their own inglorious role in the tragedy.

The verdict has been rightly heralded by the bereaved families as a total vindication of their loved ones after a shameful 27 years of exhausting campaigning.

Smeared and slandered as they were by a combination of the state, the media and the forces of law and order.

But this is not an isolated incident.

The victims of abuse in Rotherham and elsewhere were routinely ignored by the same force.

While the patent illegality, lies and deception employed by the state regarding the policing of Orgreave and other incidents during the ’84-85 miners’ strike has yet to receive the attention it deserves.

Again downright lies, cover-ups and deceptions were used by South Yorkshire Police and other forces across the country — the Met in particular — in an attempt to excuse their egregious behaviour, tarnish the victims and conceal the truth.

This column applauds the Hillsborough families in their dogged determination to expose the truth and reject the filth propagated by the Murdoch press, the FA, Boris Johnson and others regarding the tragedy.

They should not have had to go through this to prove what was demonstrably true.

The verdict is hugely welcome but justice requires accountability and justice has yet to be done in this, as in many other cases involving the state and its apparatus.

It is very easy to single out an individual group for opprobrium but the fact of the obviously egregious behaviour of the South Yorkshire Police should not deflect attention from the equally appalling behaviour of the Greater Manchester, West Midlands and Met forces during the same period — whose own records couldn’t be cleansed with a power hose and an exorcism.

Doctoring, or entirely fabricating, statements was done as a matter of course along with interrogation techniques that would not have looked out of place at Abu Ghraib.

If, as has been claimed with a fair amount of evidence, South Yorkshire Police is rotten to the core, it is far from the only bad apple in the barrel as the continued number of deaths in custody, predominately of young black men with mental health problems, sadly illustrates.

The verdict was front-page news in every paper and lead story on every news station, except unsurprisingly, the Sun — which of course published and perpetuated the lies in the first place only admitting it was wrong over two decades later — and only grudgingly its Augean stablemate the Times after a hacks’ rebellion.

The arrogant disregard for the truth and spectacular lack of self-recrimination were only to be expected from Murdoch’s minions.

So too was the opportunity taken by every other media outlet to attempt to seize the moral high ground, regardless of the state of disorder in their own houses.

The BBC in particular has been playing a deeply crooked game for some time while continuing to eulogise its mythical impartiality.

In the last few weeks alone this column has heard BBC presenters attempt, and fail, to hector an NHS trust manager to say that the junior doctors’ strike would potentially cost lives, ratchet up the anti-semitism row, seeking to brand Jeremy Corbyn a terrorist sympathiser, sneer at a survivor of Anders Breveik’s murderous attacks in Norway because he cogently and articulately explained, repeatedly, why he accepted a court ruling that the neonazi’s human rights were being breached due to his incarceration and believed he should be treated humanely and out-Tory the Torygraph on an almost daily basis.

Predictably the Beeb sought to hold itself up as a paragon of virtue on the issue of Hillsborough and its reporting of the disaster.

Conveniently however it failed entirely to acknowledge its own shameful role in deceiving the public and smearing the victims of another infamous incident of the 1980s.

Many of you will recall that it was the bewilderingly revered broadcaster that colluded with police and reversed the footage of the brutal suppression of the Orgreave pickets to make it appear that striking miners were to blame for the bloodshed.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone and all that… Or, in the case of the BBC, make it look like someone else did.