Hillsborough

Maria Eagle Excerpts

Wednesday 12th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am sure that the Attorney-General will listen carefully to what my hon. Friend says. As I have said, a number of apologies have been made over the 23 years by police, newspapers and others. I think that what matters is that you have to properly think through what has happened, what went wrong, what was got wrong, what it is necessary to apologise for, and then really mean it when you do so. I feel that it is very important the Government apologise as clearly and frankly as I have today because there is proper new evidence showing that the families were right, that an injustice was done, and that that injustice was compounded by the false narrative that, if we are frank, I think lots of people went along with: we all thought there was some sort of grey area and asked why all this was going on. That is why it is necessary to pay tribute to those MPs, newspapers and family groups who kept the faith and kept campaigning because they knew an injustice had been done, they knew it was wrong and they suffered in the way they did. It is for newspapers to decide what to do themselves, and I think it is important that they really think it through and feel it before they do it.

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

I join others in thanking the Prime Minister and my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition for the way in which they have apologised on behalf of all of us for what has happened over the past 23 years. I know that it will be of some relief to the families. Even for those of us who have campaigned on this issue for many years, this report is profoundly shocking. Is it not indicative of the utter failure of our legal system that it has taken the suggestion by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) and me of a wholly exceptional arrangement to bring out, into the public domain, documents, truths and facts that were already there? This is new evidence only in the sense that it has been published. Does this not have a profound implication for how we deal in future with disasters and things that go wrong? What lessons can we all seek to learn from that?

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Lady makes an extremely important point. It deserves a proper, thoughtful, considered answer, which is what we should try to address in this debate in the House of Commons. As has been said, there was a public inquiry, a coroner’s inquest and, quite rightly, by the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), a judicial inquiry into what had happened, yet these processes did not turn up what the Bishop of Liverpool and his patient panel, with the full disclosure of information, have turned up. We need to ask ourselves why that happened. What needs to change when we investigate these things? I do not have the answers today, but my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary can think deeply about it before the debate in October.