Keep signing for Anne Williams

LFC fan website Red and White Kop sent this email to all its users today and what it’s asking isn’t very much in terms of effort but is massive in terms of potential impact. Please have a read, click those links and see if you can make that little bit of a difference that just helps enough.

Today we take the unprecedented step of sending out a mass email asking for your help. We do this out of a sense of urgency because Anne Williams is in a Southport Hospice and dying. That is the stark, hard-hitting reality.

This woman, who has endured incredible loss, despair and injustice for 23 years and fought all the way, may die before she sees the inquest for her son that she has fought for. The European Court of Human Rights dealt a slap in the face, around the time of the 20th anniversary, with the now-hauntingly apt phrase “out of time”.

Help us do our damnedest to ensure that, when it comes to at the very least ensuring Kevin’s inquest takes place, Anne does not once again find herself “out of time.”

How can you help?

– Sign the petition: We are a third of the way there in a short space of time, but read the intro to this email again. Take it in again. Anne is dying. We need to reach 100,000 signatures as a matter of absolute urgency. This will maximise publicity through the medium of Parliament. Don’t underestimate the significance of that! – https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/40925

– Encourage people you know to sign the petition: Has your family all signed? Have your friends? Have you asked around the workplace for signatures? UK citizens can sign – even ex-pats. Get on it.

– Encourage people you don’t know to sign the petition: There are a number of ways to do this, such as tweeting celebrities the petition link and asking them to retweet it, posting on different forums with a message about the petition and a link, emailing websites and seeing if they’ll put the story on their front page and writing to journalists in newspapers (with the obvious exceptions) to see if they will publicise the story and the petition.

Will it help? This is what Anne had to say on the matter:

Anne Williams ?@annewilliams96
“Your support is keeping me going Thank You, I never failed Our Kevin the corrupt British legal system did, 3 Attorney Generals in the past.
Keep the petition going it will have to be debated if it reaches 100,000 thank you everyone for supporting me, JUSTICE FOR ALL.”

– Email your MP: There is some positive political will behind Hillsborough related causes at the moment, so let’s take advantage of that. Visit www.writetothem.com to find out who your MP is.

New email templates are in production for those who struggle to put their feelings into words and will have been added to the main post here: http://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/index.php?topic=299593.0 by the time this email goes out.

– Email those involved in the inquest process: As above, there will be email templates and email addresses for those we need to contact.

It is worth noting that while not all of these actions can be taken by those who live outside the UK, some of them can. There is no excuse not to be part of this action. You could do everything on this list in less than an hour. We would like to leave you with a thought.

Fast-forward a short period of time and imagine opening the Liverpool FC Forum to the following thread:

“RIP Anne Williams”

Distressingly this is something that is likely to happen sooner rather than later, and unfortunately it is an inevitability, not a possibility.

What we can do though, when the time comes, is change the tone of what is written inside that thread and how we feel about the situation; a change from wishing we had done more and lamenting that Anne really was “out of time” to thinking that at least she saw Kevin’s inquest before she passed away.

Act Now!

YNWA – it’s more than a song.

If you’ve already signed, ask your family if they’ll sign too. Help them to sign it – if they’re not sure how to do it talk them through it or maybe offer to sign it on their behalf. You need a valid email address for everyone who signs but you can always set up a free email address for them for this purpose. Make sure that the link you get in the email sent after signing is clicked – otherwise the epetition system will ignore that signature.