The Public Office (Accountability) Bill, also known as the ‘Hillsborough Law’, was introduced to Parliament last Tuesday. The Bill will, in theory, impose a statutory duty of candour on state agencies and public officials, compelling them to tell the truth and fully cooperate with investigations. It will also ensure that all bereaved families will have access to legal aid at all inquests in which the state is involved.
Desperate for some positive news coverage, and perhaps scrambling to establish a legacy beyond one of complicity in genocide, Keir Starmer, our beleaguered and repeatedly disgraced Prime Minister, and his unembarrassable Deputy David Lammy (who has, very belatedly, sponsored the Bill), are shamelessly centring themselves in what is potentially a landmark moment in British legal history. Pay them no attention. The Hillsborough Law, if and when it is passed, will be a victory for the inspirational, indefatigable families of the 97 Liverpool fans killed by the British state. Its reintroduction now should be credited to them. It should also be credited to one of the Labour Party’s few remaining effective left wingers: Ian Byrne, himself a Hillsborough survivor, whose father was one of over 700 people injured on that day. Byrne has been campaigning for legislative change since he first entered Parliament. Now, with the Labour leadership collapsing both morally and electorally, they have decided to yield.
The Hillsborough football stadium disaster in April 1989 was the result of a catalogue of failures by South Yorkshire Police, under the command of Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield. 766 people were non-fatally injured, and 94 were killed at the scene. Three subsequent deaths brought the number to 97: 14 year-old Lee Nicol spent two days in intensive care before being declared dead; 22 year-old Tony Bland, 18 at the time of the disaster, never regained consciousness and spent almost 4 years on life support, which was removed at his family’s request in 1993; and Andrew Devine, who went to the match as a healthy 22 year-old, died in 2021, at the age of 55, as a result of the life-altering injuries he sustained that day.
Even as the incident unfolded, the police were feeding stories to a willing press, defaming Liverpool fans and doing their best to shift the blame and ensure that justice would never be done. This determined cover-up campaign, amplified and intensified by the Murdoch press, has meant – as Byrne told the Pro Revolution Soccer podcast – the families “have never had time to grieve”.
Instead, they have spent over three decades organising, campaigning and demanding justice, as well as educating others (including schoolchildren) about Hillsborough and what the state is capable of. When the inquest, overseen by a coroner felt to have close police connections, returned a verdict of accidental death, the families kept up the pressure, despite being repeatedly stonewalled and fobbed-off by the state. It took 27 years before a second inquest confirmed what had been obvious from the beginning: that the 97 people who died at Hillsborough were unlawfully killed, and that the thousands of Liverpool fans present that day bore no responsibility for what had happened.
Finally, some recognition – but still no justice. In the wake of the second inquest, Duckenfield and 5 other people were charged with criminal offences including gross negligence manslaughter, misconduct in a public office, and perverting the course of justice.1 All but one were either acquitted or had their charges dropped.2 At the second inquest, Duckenfield had pantomimed contrition; during his subsequent criminal trial, his defence reiterated his old claims about “crowd behaviour” to absolve him of responsibility. The message was clear: if the police can do that, they can do anything, to anyone, at any time. They can lie, and lie, and lie again. And, under the current law, there’s a very real chance that they can get away with it.
Exacerbating this structural inequality was the question of money. Legal representation comes at a cost; the state, with all its resources, has far greater capacity to protect itself than do ordinary people. Until December 2012, when then-Home Secretary Theresa May, of all people, introduced the ad-hoc Hillsborough Families Legal Representation Scheme, the families were forced to devote time and energy to fundraising efforts in order to keep their fight for justice going.
The Hillsborough Law would change all of that. Its two key commitments are a duty of full candour – public officials will have to tell the truth – and the expansion and codification of the legal representation scheme, meaning that victims of state failures will have the same access to high-quality legal representation as the state itself. Initially brought before Parliament in 2017 by Andy Burnham (then the MP for Leigh), it stalled at the second reading after the 2017 General Election was called, and was not reintroduced.
Following his election, in 2019, as MP for Liverpool West Derby, Byrne took up the cause, speaking powerfully in Parliament about his own experiences of the disaster itself, and the subsequent, corrupt police ‘investigation’ at the hands of West Midlands Police. With Byrne’s support, the families of the 97 pressured Starmer’s Labour Party into including a commitment to the Bill in its otherwise meagre 2024 manifesto. Once elected, Starmer pledged, repeatedly, that the law would be in place by April 15 2025, the 36th anniversary of the tragedy. The families spoke movingly to the press of fresh hope, of relief, of some measure of justice finally achieved.
Then, weeks away from Starmer’s self-imposed deadline, things began to go wrong. A draft version of the Bill was circulated to campaigners, who raised serious concerns about the watering-down of key provisions, including the duty of candour, and the commitment to full legal aid for victims and their families. It was, Byrne told Pro Revolution Soccer, “a concoction of words which [didn’t] do anything to change the culture of cover ups”. A meeting between Starmer and the families was arranged for March 27 – and then cancelled at short notice. This was followed, a week later, by a letter from then-Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood, informing the families that the Government would miss the deadline for the law’s introduction. The families and campaigners described it as “a betrayal”.
Byrne began to hear whispers that the Government were planning to go ahead with the bowdlerised Bill, against the explicit wishes of the campaigners, and in spite of repeated promises made by Starmer – in person – to the families. Something, he realised, had to be done. With just the slightest hint of a twinkle in his eye, he told Pro Revolution Soccer that he managed to secure a ten-minute reading for the original, full-strength Bill “through nefarious means”.3
“That,” he continued “was basically saying to the Government: ‘Back that Bill or come up with something which is worthy of what we’ve been fighting for’. And the frustrating thing for us is, that is there; it is ready to go, supported by the families, supported by every campaign group we have talked about who are fighting for justice, who have been victims of the State cover-ups… they all support [the original version of the Bill]. So the Government should just implement that. But they won’t, because there is huge pushback from the establishment, from the people that want to continue lying, and continue that culture.”
Ten-Minute Rule Bills are easy for governments to shrug off, and, predictably, the Government declined to give Byrne’s a second reading. He nevertheless kept up the pressure, raising the issue over and again. In a Westminster Hall debate led by Byrne on September 3, MP after MP lined up to reiterate their support for the Bill. Mired in scandal, with conference looming, and in Liverpool of all places, the Government desperately needed some positive headlines. As John McDonnell cautioned, if the Government failed to keep its promises on the Hillsborough Law, “it should not expect a welcome from the people in Liverpool.”
And so, as if by magic, the Government found a way to compromise—for the time being, at least. On Tuesday September 16, the Public Office (Accountability) Bill was (re-)introduced. Speaking at a rather awkward-looking meeting with Starmer on Tuesday, veteran campaigner Margaret Aspinall called the legislation “a legacy for the people of this country”.
But the fight is not over.
Speaking after the Bill’s reintroduction, Byrne described Lammy’s speech as “the beginning of a journey”. There will, he said, be “vested interests who will try to de-fang this”.
It is not hard to see why. The Hillsborough Law is bigger than Hillsborough. If it is passed in the form that the families demand, it will mean that institutions and their representatives will face criminal sanctions if they attempt to cover up the facts behind disasters such as Hillsborough, Grenfell, and indeed the ongoing genocide in Gaza, over which Lammy himself has questions to answer. It has potential implications around the contaminated blood scandal, the COVID-19 inquiry, the Horizon Post Office scandal, Orgreave, and perhaps even Bloody Sunday. (It remains to be seen how the Bill will interact with whatever replaces the shameful, truth-repressing Legacy Act, which the Government has stated it intends to repeal.)
What happened – what was allowed to happen – at Hillsborough, and the organised cover-up that followed, tells us something about how the British state works. Through their struggle for justice and accountability, the families have shown us the ways in which the state controls, withholds, and manipulates information at will in order to protect itself from the consequences of its actions: the disasters it inflicts upon those it considers disposable – particularly, as Byrne has repeatedly emphasised, working class people. Accountability requires that ordinary people are empowered to challenge the state when it harms them. It also requires that state personnel do not tell lies or conceal the truth. That we need legislation to guarantee this basic principle of public service is, in itself, a damning indictment. If the smooth running of the state is ensured by this control and manipulation of information, then we need to make the state run differently. The proposed law is, as Byrne told Pro Revolution Soccer, about “rewiring the state so it’s fairer,” so that its institutions and officials cannot “continue… to tell lies with impunity… to cover up mistakes”.
It isn’t much to ask; but the demands of the proposed law will, inevitably, be seen as a threat by those who seek to uphold and benefit from the present state of things. And rightly so: it is a threat, and so it should be. For this reason, there will be many, many people with an interest in weakening its provisions; and they will probably do this under the guise of being ‘practical’ and ‘realistic’, of ‘delivering a workable bill’. “Our job,” Byrne told New Socialist on Thursday, is not to allow those who wish to water it down to succeed. We have commitments from the Government, but we will be watching it like a hawk, line by line.”
This is not a case of grassroots campaigners bravely making their case, and the benevolent leader deigning graciously to listen. It is in the interests of Starmer, Lammy, and the rest of this deeply unpopular government to present themselves as heroes, to make themselves look good; to magnanimously “pay tribute” to the families and campaigners whilst keeping a keen eye trained on their own personal legacies. This is as transparent as it is shameless. There will be attempts to paint this in sentimental shades: as vibrant, tireless ‘activism’ taking place in ‘communities’, of the sort that might provide the impetus for political change, but that remains distinct from ‘real’ politics, which happens elsewhere – in back rooms, in WhatsApp chats, in Parliament, between officials and those in the know.
In truth, the ‘real’ politics is what has been happening for the past 36 years: ordinary people, victimised by the state, refusing to sit down and shut up, dedicating their lives to serious, committed, unglamorous political work. These are people who have been fighting since long before either Lammy or Starmer were elected to Parliament. If they have been tireless, we must ask ourselves who has been exhausting them. If they are indefatigible, who has been trying to defeat them? Once the glow of conference has faded – once the headlines and plaudits are yesterday’s news – Starmer may find he has an uphill battle on his hands, should he attempt to compromise on the central demands of the original Bill. After such a long struggle, the families are hardly likely to accept anything less than justice – on their own terms, not his.
The struggle continues; and the left should treat it as a priority. As Byrne has pointed out, what happened at Hillsborough has implications for us all:
State cover ups are predominately against working class people who haven’t got access to justice and basically just get pummelled into giving up. And that is why all the Hillsborough stories are so sad, but also so inspirational. Those families who survived just never gave up.
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Charges were brought against Duckenfield (gross negligence manslaughter); Norman Bettison, then an inspector with SYP, who later received a knighthood (four counts of misconduct in a public office) and Graham Mackrell, the secretary of Sheffield Wednesday FC (health and safety related offences). Three SYP personnel were charged with perverting the course of justice: Chief Superintendent Donald Denton, Chief Inspector Alan Foster, and police solicitor Peter Metcalf. ↩
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Mackrell was found guilty of failing to provide sufficient turnstiles at the ground’s Leppings Lane entrance, and was fined £6,500. ↩
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Ten-Minute Rule Bills are a way for backbenchers to draw attention to issues. The process by which members are granted the right to present a Ten-Minute Rule Bill is convoluted, and operates on a first-come-first-served basis, which can make it quite easy for those who oppose the raising of the issue to game. All you’d have to do, in theory, to prevent a member from being allocated a slot would be to detain them on other business so that they cannot visit the Public Bill Office to apply for a slot in time. ↩