Adam pwme
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Andy Burnham the UK’s next Prime Minister, about Hillsborough and the blood scandal in Parliament
I pay tribute to them this evening, but let's not forget also in this list, and I know they have support from across this house, the servicemen who served this country in the post-war period in the South Pacific, our nuclear test veterans, Madam Deputy Speaker. How often in this house do we praise our veterans, and how in this case have we left those veterans without truth and justice in terms of what happened to them all of those years ago, and I think this house needs to hear their call for a special tribunal, Madam Deputy Speaker, entirely consistent with the aims of the Bill we are passing tonight. This Bill advances all of these just causes, and the campaign for truth and justice does not stop here, indeed it accelerates from here.
I hope it ends the cover-up culture that has failed so many ordinary people in this country. We can never forget that for 20 years an entire English city was crying injustice, correctly, and yet this place ignored them for all of that time. We cannot forget that, and we cannot take away the hurt that that caused.
We cannot forget that postmasters and mistresses serving communities up and down this country were branded as petty thieves and carried that stigma with them for years. Likewise, those who were infected by infected blood and were blamed that they had brought it on themselves through their lifestyle, we can't forget that, Madam Deputy Speaker. Let's finish where I started, that the Liverpool supporters were blamed for harming their own fellow supporters at a football match.
That is what was done, that was left to stand for all of those years. These families here tonight had to live with that for all of those years. Imagine what that must have felt like.
We have had a situation in this country where people suffer the trauma of the initial bereavement, the incident that took their loved ones away. Then they are re-traumatised by the behaviour of the state. We can't take that hurt away tonight, but we can put decency back at the heart of the British state, and that is what this Bill does.
I finish again by praising the Prime Minister for making it happen, and this truly is his legacy.