Maria Eagle
MP for Liverpool Garston · Labour · United Kingdom
“There is concern about this news among my constituents who work at JLR Halewood and those who work in the supply chain in the whole of the north-west of England.”
“We must bear in mind not only the inequality of arms, but the length of time taken to get through the legal actions, even if they proceed swiftly and well.”
“That was not a legal action; it was about transparency, freedom of information and being open. I know that the right hon. Gentleman has his frustrations about the fact that his well-intentioned health reforms are not operating as he would have wished.”
“Before he leaves the Chamber, I say to the right hon. Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt) that I agree very much with what he said about transparency and its importance. He made the point that lawyers are sometimes a problem. Obviously, the legal system, in which I used to be a participant, is adversarial.”
“Although such powers are not in this Bill, because it is too narrow in scope for them to be included, I hope that my new clause 1 on producing a report within 12 months of the passing of this Bill on how the Independent Public Advocate is working and the impact of the Act’s provisions on increasing public confidence—a public advocate with…”
“She was right in the end. She knew absolutely what had happened to her son, because she went and found out. She knew that the inquest verdicts were wrong, so she wanted to focus on that. But on the whole the families kept together and were able to decide how they would go forward.”
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“I see references in the explanatory memorandum and the impact assessment to the SSRO hoping to produce it in parallel with these regulations going through Parliament, but that really is not satisfactory for those parliamentarians seeking to scrutinise the regulations to see whether they will work or whether, to begin with, there will be a big problem in implementing these proposals and the rules within them. I do not blame the Minister personally for that, but it is undesirable that we do not have sight of the statutory guidance, at least in draft form. I accept that the impact assessment suggests that on average there were only around 60 qualifying defence contracts between 2016-17 and 2022-23, and that 10 qualifying subcontracts a year made use of the regulations.”
“Can he tell us when we will see it? I do not blame the Minister personally for this, but there has been a trend during this Parliament, which I think started with some of the Brexit and covid statutory instruments, of parliamentarians being expected to scrutinise things without having all the relevant documentation—in this case, the statutory guidance, which will be a big part of how well this regime works—to hand, or without its having even been written. Certainly, given the Government’s response to the consultation, it seems likely that the statutory guidance will be heavily relied upon by those trying to use these regulations on both sides, in the Department and in industry, to understand how these concepts are to be applied. I would be interested to know when we will see the statutory guidance.”
“For instance, “Additional clarity will be provided in the SSRO’s statutory guidance” and “any necessary additional clarity on its practical application” will be “provided through Statutory Guidance.” But we do not have the statutory guidance in front of us. Those of us in Parliament who are looking at the regulations and trying to scrutinise them cannot see the statutory guidance or even draft statutory guidance. It is now 6 March and the Minister has set out that the regulations are going to come into force from April—a mere three weeks from now. I commend him for his ambition. Given that the consultations have been going on since 2019 and there have been three Prime Ministers and five Ministers for Defence Procurement in that time, at least he has got there and produced the regulations, but we cannot see the statutory guidance.”
“If flexibility means one can get better value for money, that is all well and good, but I am slightly concerned about the increasing complexity. Stakeholders who responded to the consultation asked for greater clarity. They seemed to be asking, “How are these things going to work in practice?” In the Government’s response to the consultation, they rely a lot on the statutory guidance. The response states: “It is likely that the Statutory Guidance will develop further,” and that “additional clarity” will be in statutory guidance. It states the same in respect of a number of the concerns raised by consultees.”
“Certainly there were concerns expressed by those who responded to the Government’s consultation on the regulations. Although there were only 10 responses, two of them were from industry bodies and so might be thought to represent a broad range of the industry that has to deal with this regime. One was from the Single Source Regulations Office, which—whatever one might say about it—knows its stuff in this regard. Only seven were from supplier companies directly. On looking at the Government’s response to the consultation, there are a lot of concerns about complexity and lack of clarity, particularly in respect of the new ways of dealing with pricing. The Minister is moving from one pricing mechanism to seven different pricing mechanisms, so that is by definition increasing complexity.”
“The Minister is the fifth Minister for Defence Procurement in this Parliament and the original consultations on the regulations began in 2019 with his predecessor minus four, as it were, so the Department has been working on this for some time. Does he have anything to say about what appears to be increasing complexity when one of the aims is to try to increase simplicity? Notwithstanding the positive things that might come out of that increased complexity, it seems to me that the regime is more complex. Sometimes, increasing flexibility does mean increasing complexity; those are perhaps two sides of the same coin. I would be interested to hear the Minister say something about how the new regime will tackle the increasing complexity.”
“Anything that seeks to improve and increase assurance on value for money by enabling contracts that currently have to be exempt to be brought under the scheme, and perhaps by introducing better reporting—although we are not dealing with the reporting aspects of the changes today—has to be a good thing. The compartmentalisation will mean that one can get assurance on individual parts of a contract in a way that perhaps is not possible under the current regime. It seems like good idea to aim for these improvements. However, on reading through the regulations, there seems to be increasing complexity, in addition to their having taken quite a long time to get to this stage.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Murray. I am sorry to have caused you a bit of fuss when you arrived in the Committee Room this morning. I thank the Minister for putting forward the rationale behind what appear on paper to be fairly complicated changes to the single source regulations. The policy objectives set out by the Minister and referred to in the impact assessment seem sensible. The aim to increase the flexibility of the single source regime, making it simpler and quicker to use, seems like a good idea. The aim to increase assurance on value for money is certainly a good idea; as the Minister set out, we are talking about 575 contracts worth £90 billion, and parliamentarians need some assurance on value for money in respect of all that.”
“Given that the Minister has shared it with industry, might it not have been an idea to share it with the Committee, so that we could determine whether we are relatively happy with it?”
“They send a message, just as over the past 14 years the Government’s hollowing out of our armed forces, creating a recruitment crisis and shrinking the Army to its smallest size since the Napoleonic era, send signals to our adversaries. Labour believes that defence procurement can strengthen UK sovereignty, security and economic growth. Defence procurement reform will be a top priority for a Labour Government to ensure that our troops have the kit they need to fight and to fulfil our NATO obligations.”
“How does the Minister’s announcement today tackle the waste, poor value for money and delays that appear endemic in the current MOD procurement system? He says the new integrated procurement model will be implemented this year in respect of new procurements, but when does he actually expect to see better value and faster, less wasteful procurements? He talks about procurement anchored in pan-defence affordability, but his 10-year equipment plan is already £17 billion over budget. What adjustments will be made on that? The long-standing failures on procurement in the MOD matter in an increasingly dangerous world.”
“It leaves our forces in the field having to use the ageing Bowman system for another decade. As the Minister said in his statement, he has just announced the invitation to negotiate on the new medium helicopter. It has taken him since September 2022, when that announcement was first expected, and three subsequent delays to get the announcement finally made. Why has it taken so long and how will his integrated procurement model prevent delay after delay to expected invitations to negotiate? He expects the contract to be signed in 2025. Does it really take three years to invite negotiations and write contract specifications? Will his new integrated procurement model speed that up, or will it slow things down at the front end?”
“The MOD’s Command Paper refresh, which sets out the policy for acquisition reform, does not even tackling waste or value for money, so how would the Minister’s proposed changes stop what happened to the E-7 Wedgetail procurement? That programme, vital to enabling the UK to meet our NATO commitments, was cut from five planes to three by a ministerial decision to save money, but the changes mean that the RAF gets only 60% of the capability it wants while paying 90% of the original price. The Minister mentioned Morpheus. How would his proposals stop cost overruns, such as those that occurred in the Morpheus communication system procurement? That £395 million contract, awarded in 2017, was cancelled just before Christmas having delivered nothing at a cost of £690 million.”
“Time and again, this Government have been criticised for poor performance on defence procurement. There have been 17 National Audit Office reports on procurement in the MOD since 2019, four reports by the Defence Committee and eight reports by the Public Accounts Committee. They have all been critical—some highly critical—of this Government. It is right that the Minister proposes some changes—we welcome that. He mentioned Ajax; can he explain how his proposals would have stopped the disasters of the Ajax procurement? That was supposed to see vehicles in service in 2017, but now they will not be on operational deployment until 2026. More than £4 billion has been spent, but just 44 vehicles have been delivered to date. That is 70% of the budget spent for 7% of the vehicles ordered. That cannot be described as good value for money.”
“Let me begin by thanking the Minister for his statement and for early sight of it. Defence procurement matters. It provides the vital kit that our forces need to fight, as well as supporting hundreds of thousands of UK jobs. We need to get this right as a nation, both for our national security and for economic growth. However, defence procurement is a mess. It needs deep and major reform. The Public Accounts Committee describes it as “broken and repeatedly wasting taxpayers’ money.” It has been a mess for the last 14 years. Since 2010, the Conservatives have wasted £15 billion of taxpayers’ money through mismanagement of defence procurement programmes; £5 billion has been wasted in this Parliament alone. With 46 of 52 major projects not on time or on budget, this Government are failing British forces and British taxpayers.”
“The Government have delayed producing the information required for the invitation to negotiate for the new medium-lift helicopter four times since September 2022. Can the Minister explain what has caused this 18-month delay? Given the reports last week about his Department freezing capital spending until at least the new financial year, when will the Government get their act together to get this competition under way? Can he promise that the delay will not push back the delivery date for this vital capability for our forces?”
“Let me make clear that AUKUS pillar 1 and pillar 2 have Labour’s full backing. However, we are concerned about whether the Government’s current focus on implementing AUKUS is sufficient and we want more UK leadership for this national endeavour. The latest list of ministerial responsibilities, from October 2023, does not even mention AUKUS or Australia, although it does mention the USA. Ministers have agreed that pillar 1 should have only a part-time official responsible for its implementation. If AUKUS is not even in his job description and his officials are working on it part time, how can we take the Minister seriously when he says it is important?”
“If the Tory party and the Government tried to do that rather more successfully than they have managed in 13 years, they might get some credit from the Opposition and from the nation, but there is precious little evidence that there is going to be any of that.”
“Almost a year after the current Prime Minister promised again to stop the boats, 30,000 more people have arrived. Hotel usage is going up, and not down as the Home Secretary claimed; it is at 56,000 at the moment, 10,000 more than when the Prime Minister promised to end hotel use. Criminal gangs are not being deterred. Convictions for people smugglers have dropped by 36% since 2010 and the criminal gangs are making more money than ever. The backlog of undetermined cases remains at 165,000, despite the PM’s promise to abolish the backlog of initial asylum claims by the end of this year. It is folly to continue with this farcical failed joke of a policy when what is really needed is competent, good administration. Why not put the money being wasted on this policy into dealing with the actual problem?”
“So there we have it: the policy is a Tory shibboleth, which has become an article of faith for some elements of the Tory party—the “five families”, as I think they have called themselves, somewhat menacingly. We see the Tory psychodrama unfolding yet again to decide the fate of the latest unelected Tory Prime Minister to be threatened with defenestration by some of the more right-wing elements of those five families. The country deserves better. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) set out in her excellent speech, time and again the Government go for gimmicks and infighting over basic competence and good administration. It is four years since the Tories promised to end boat crossings in six months.”
“It beggars belief that the Government’s response to the loss of their policy in the Supreme Court is to ask this House to legislate just to declare, “It’s all fine anyway; let’s carry on.” As others have pointed out, even if we were to start sending asylum seekers to Rwanda as a result of this Bill’s passing into law, the policy is designed for a few hundred people at the most, or less than 1% of people arriving in the UK. The permanent secretary at the Home Office was very clear when he said there was no evidence that it would work as a deterrent, whereas most of what we hear from Conservative Members is that that is the very purpose of the legislation—it is supposed to be a deterrent.”
“The narrow range of claims allowed are those based on “compelling evidence relating specifically to the person’s particular individual circumstances”, and even those sorts of claims are excluded in some circumstances relating to refoulement. Excluding courts, by Act of Parliament, from considering relevant evidence; excluding them from taking account of judgments and laws, including domestic legislation; fettering their judgment as the Bill seeks to do; and giving Ministers power to ignore injunctions—taken together, that is tantamount to undermining the rule of law. It is certainly not respecting the rule of law, as I would expect parliamentarians in this place to do—and certainly as I would expect the Government of the day to seek to do, if they wished to uphold our international reputation.”
“Given that the evidence that has already come forward, which the Supreme Court dealt with in its judgment, led the Court to say unanimously that it was not a safe country, it is worrying that we seem to think we can simply legislate to change the facts. The Bill allows a very narrow range of claims, and this comes to the heart of the argument between those on the Government Benches who wish to beef it up even further to exclude any kind of legal challenge, and those, perhaps on the one-nation side of the Conservative party, who are trying to put a line in the sand to say that they will not accept any further amendments.”
“It is perfectly reasonable to legislate if the Supreme Court strikes down a policy, but one normally legislates to change a policy, not to purport to change the facts, or to say that the facts, which have not changed, are other than what the Court found them to be. That is the first thing that made me feel queasy. The Bill goes on to try to prohibit any legal challenges that may argue that Rwanda, having been deemed safe in this way, is in fact unsafe. It says that every decision maker “must conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country”, notwithstanding any evidence that may come forward to the contrary.”
“Speaking as a lawyer— [Interruption.] Yes, there are still one or two of us left. I must say that I felt quite queasy reading the Bill. It is not the kind of thing that I would expect this Parliament to be considering. I detected the same queasiness among some of the lawyers who have spoken from the Government Benches, including the former Justice Secretary and the current Chair of the Justice Committee. Apparently, they too found reading the Bill a queasy experience. I agreed with the former Tory Law Officer, Lord Garnier, who used to be in this House, when he called this Bill political and legal nonsense. It designates Rwanda as a safe country, but by doing so it seeks to reverse a conclusion of the Supreme Court on the facts.”
“As the Lord Chancellor knows, I still think that the independent public advocate’s powers need to be beefed up As the Lord Chancellor knows, I still think that the independent public advocate’s powers need to be beefed up to include an ability to compel transparency and be a data controller in order to torpedo attempts to cover up—what went wrong at Hillsborough was a cover-up, as much as anything. Will the Lord Chancellor reconsider his apparent unwillingness to legislate to make it clear that this House and our nation require accountability, require candour and require public authorities and those who work for them to act in the best interests of those bereaved in the appalling public tragedies that have occurred and will continue to occur?”
“Bishop James called his report “The patronising disposition of unaccountable power”—the key word is “unaccountable.” Thirty-four years after 97 men, women and children were unlawfully killed at a televised event, for which the public inquiry interim report pinned the blame on the police within four months, no one has been held accountable for what happened at Hillsborough, and now nobody will be. Accountability is key here. Although culture change is good, we need legal change, too. The failure to legislate for a full duty of candour for all public officials or to put the charter for families bereaved by public tragedy into statute is inexplicable.”
“New clause 14 is much better than the Government’s provision in the Criminal Justice Bill, which relates to producing codes of practice only for the police. Does my hon. Friend agree that his new clause would be a vital part of implementing a full Hillsborough law, which is what our party calls for?”
“The whole purpose of the legislation that Lord Wills and I proposed was to ensure that things do not go wrong in the aftermath of public disasters, as they have done after Hillsborough and other disasters. One ends up with years and years—sometimes decades and decades—of subsequent campaigns, fights and proceedings, legal and otherwise, that end up costing society millions and costing the families their health and often their lives. Stopping things going wrong in the immediate aftermath of disasters is a good aim for public policy.”
“2) Bill—I have been introducing such legislation since 2016, and my hon. Friend the noble Lord Wills has been introducing similar measures in the other place since 2014—but it will be better than originally drafted. I welcome the fact that the Minister has conceded that the Independent Public Advocate will be established as a standing appointment on a full-time basis. It is a shame that he has not seen fit to go a little further to enable the families affected to be the people who call upon the public advocate to act, rather than the Secretary of State. One of the points of my legislation, and that introduced by my noble friend in the other place, was to give the families some agency—some power to act in the earlier stages of the aftermath of a public disaster and affect the way the aftermath is dealt with.”
“I rise to speak in respect of some of the amendments and new clauses in part two: specifically, Government new clauses 22 and 23; Government amendment 60; Government new clause 24; Government amendments 76 to 82; and new clause 14, introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) on behalf of the Opposition, on the Hillsborough law duty of candour. If these new clauses and amendments are agreed to tonight, the Bill will be better than it was when it began its life at Second Reading, and it will be better than it was even after it had been through a monumental Committee stage. However, the Minister will not be surprised to hear me say that it will not be perfect, and it will not be all that I hoped for in my Public Advocate Bill or my Public Advocate (No.”
“May I confirm again that Labour’s support for our nuclear deterrent, which we maintain on behalf of our NATO allies, is total? However, following reports in newspapers about a malfunctioning depth gauge on a Vanguard submarine at sea, can the Minister explain what steps he has taken to ensure that such an incident never happens again?”
“I know that the Lord Chancellor has taken an interest in the public advocate proposals, but does he agree that they need to be strengthened in order to be effective, and that his proposals, as they currently stand, are nowhere near good enough to do the job that I, and others, hope they can do?”
“When the Bill comes back for its remaining stages in this place, which I hope will be before Christmas, I will keep trying to make positive changes to improve it, because otherwise it will be an opportunity spurned. I hope that Government Ministers on the Front Bench will give thought to improving the current proposals because, if they are enacted as they stand, they simply will not be enough to make real use of the lessons to be learned from Hillsborough.”
“However, the Lord Chancellor knows my view is that his proposal is not sufficient to make the public advocate useful in preventing things from going wrong in future in the aftermath of disasters. It will simply be a signposting service for those families who are caught up. A signposting service is all well and good, and it is welcome, but unfortunately it is not going far enough. There is a real opportunity to make sure that families caught up in future public disasters do not have to suffer the same experience as the Hillsborough families, but his public advocate has neither the independence nor the powers required to shift the dial in favour of families or to torpedo cover-ups, which is the whole point. Furthermore, it is to be directed solely by the Secretary of State, which will not give it proper independence.”
“I find that quite shocking. I have been pressing the Government to respond for all that time and there is no conceivable reason for them not to have done so—at least since May 2021, when the last of the criminal trials collapsed. It is now two and a half years since then and there is still no response. I cannot understand what has held them up. The fact that the response has not been published is an insult to Bishop James and the work he did, and it is trying the patience of families and survivors who have already had to wait too long. I keep hearing that there will be a response soon, and I really hope that is true, but I am not holding my breath. The Victims and Prisoner Bill carried over from the previous Session does contain a proposal for a public advocate, which I have welcomed.”
“Thirdly, the law would ensure proper participation of bereaved families at inquest through publicly funded legal representation, and ensure equality of arms by ending the limitless use of public authorities’ budgets to defend their reputations on those occasions, no matter what the circumstances. Fourthly, it will make Bishop James Jones’s charter for families bereaved through public tragedy, which has been voluntarily signed by some, legally binding on all public bodies. The Government have recognised for years that there are things that need to be changed, but I am afraid they have been lamentably slow in doing anything about them. Bishop James Jones’s report, which the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) asked for when she was Prime Minister, was published in 2017. More than six years later there has been no response to it.”
“First, it would establish a public advocate, independent of Government and able to act at the behest of families affected after major incidents to give them a say, and to use the learning from the Hillsborough independent panel process on the huge power of transparency to stop things going wrong as they did after Hillsborough. Secondly, it would place a statutory duty of candour on public servants, not just the police, although I welcome the fact that the Government will legislate for a duty of candour on the police. That can only help to make things better, but by itself it will not be enough to prevent the recurrence of an event such as Hillsborough.”
“That is why I support the more general call for a Hillsborough law to try to prevent what happened after Hillsborough from ever again affecting victims and families who are caught up in public disasters through no fault of their own then find themselves treated with indifference or hostility by public authorities, and their feelings ignored. There have been disasters since Hillsborough, and there will be more, although we must hope to keep them to a minimum. The Hillsborough law aims to rebalance the scales of justice towards families bereaved by public disasters and towards survivors.”
“Yet the police campaign, aided by some newspapers, was so powerful and has been so enduring that we still hear tragedy chanting at football matches, blaming Liverpool fans for what happened. One of the biggest comforts that the families of those who died and survivors who still suffer to this day could have is the assurance that Parliament has taken steps to prevent such problems from occurring in the aftermath of such tragedies, yet we have not done so. That is why I have introduced my Public Advocate Bill, repeatedly blocked by the Government, since 2016.”
“To date, none of the South Yorkshire police responsible for the disaster, or for the subsequent cover-up and campaign of vilification, has been held to account, and now none probably ever will be, while the families of the dead and survivors have endured decades of wrongly being blamed for what happened and feeling that they have to defend the reputations of their loved ones from the ongoing ignorant attacks spawned by South Yorkshire police’s deliberate campaign to shift the blame from themselves. It is particularly difficult for families to feel frozen in time, forever being dragged back to their darkest days as they have to keep repeating to ignorant people what really happened: the findings of unlawful killing at the second inquests, and the findings of the Hillsborough independent panel—the truth of Hillsborough, in other words.”
“We cannot discuss confidence in the criminal justice system and policing without tackling the long and balefully negative influence of the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster, which, although it was more than 34 years ago, has hugely impacted how the police and public authorities are seen across Merseyside and beyond. The impact is widespread and intergenerational, and more needs to be done to tackle it. I had hoped that we would see a Hillsborough law in the legislative programme, to learn the lessons of the tragedy in which 97 people were unlawfully killed by the gross negligence of the police responsible for keeping them safe.”
“Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. The Government have wasted £15 billion through the mismanagement of defence procurement, while failing to deliver vital equipment and overseeing the loss of 30,000 highly skilled jobs in the defence and aerospace industry since 2010. Does the Minister accept that preventing another 13 years of Tory failure is key to increasing the number of UK-based jobs in the defence sector, backing British industry and British military resilience?”
“Does my hon. Friend agree that, as well as giving false hope, the measures would extend the length of time it takes to get the decisions made, therefore extending the agony that people feel while not knowing what a decision will end up being?”
“I always think of these things as public disasters in which a number of people have died—that is my definition—but the Government have chosen to define it slightly differently. No doubt the Minister can enlighten us about precisely how the Government see the interpretation of that phrase. Anything that can give families some comfort that the Secretary of State is acting in their interests, not with unfettered powers and not without having to discuss things with them, would be an advance on the current drafting. For those reasons, I support the amendments.”
“One issue is always the same: the Secretary of State gaining the trust of those affected is an incredibly important part of ensuring that things do not go wrong. The Secretary of State should be required to appoint an advocate, thus removing his discretion. We will have an argument—a discussion—later about whether the advocate should be a standing appointment. On balance, I think it should be, but if it is to be an ad hoc appointment, the Secretary of State should not have discretion about whether to appoint when there has been a major incident. There should always be an appointment. I therefore support amendment 20. There is also an issue about how we define “major incident”.”
“That is why I rise to support amendments 20 and 21, which were tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff North. Clause 24 gives total discretion to the Secretary of State, and there is no requirement about what he should consider in making the appointment and no requirement that he should consult those affected. My experience of having to deal with disasters as a constituency MP does not just include the Hillsborough disaster. There have been others: the MV Derbyshire disaster happened long before I became an MP, the Alder Hey organ scandal was another that I had to deal with, and I have constituents affected by the Manchester Arena bombing. A number of other disasters have happened during my time in this House.”
“That is why I am convinced we as a society must seek to get the aftermath of disasters right. If we can stop things going wrong—as wrong as they have with Hillsborough—we can save a lot of money and a lot of heartache. We can certainly make sure that the families of those killed in disasters, who suddenly face the worst moments of their lives in the full glare of publicity, do not also have to deal with public authorities’ intent on not getting at the truth and finding out what happened to the families’ loved ones, or not supporting them in every way possible, and in some cases trying to blame them for what happened. In all the cases that I have come across, the authorities try to make sure that they do not get the blame. That defensiveness often drives the behaviour of public authorities in the aftermath of disasters.”
“Of course, I had the lawyer’s response and said, “No, inquests have a different purpose”, but I quickly understood what they meant when I saw what had happened. In reality, the cover-up at Hillsborough began on the day and was then pursued at great cost and expense using taxpayers’ money over decades. In fact, at the second inquest, the same points were put by the police lawyers. Even now one hears similar arguments being put: “It was the Liverpool fans; they were ticketless; they were drunk. They pushed their way into the ground and killed their own.” One even hears it in the chants, which, mercifully, the Football Association is now trying to deal with. “Tragedy chanting”, as it is known, is done to Liverpool fans at grounds all over the country. That kind of issue resonates for decades for many thousands of people.”
“One can imagine the state that some of the people are in in terms of their mental health, particularly when there has been a cover-up that has lasted for so many years seeking to blame fans for what happened, rather than an acceptance of responsibility. We must remember that within four months of the disaster, the first interim report of the first public inquiry placed responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the police, which they never accepted and then chose to campaign to overturn. When I first met my constituents as an MP in 1997—I had known some of them before as a lawyer—the first thing they said to me was that the police had used the inquest to overturn the Taylor inquiry.”