‘Courage of Hillsborough households is humbling – ensuring no person suffers as they did’
EXCLUSIVE: Prime Minister Keir Starmer pays tribute to the Hillsborough families for their decades-long fight as he says a new law will mean such a shameful episode can never happen again
Keir Starmer with Hillsborough campaigner Margaret Aspinall at Labour Conference in Liverpool(Image: Liverpool Echo)
I don’t think I could have done it.
I have a football-mad teenage son. I go to games with him and his sister.
But I do not think I have the same courage in me that Margaret Aspinall has shown, over the decades, fighting for justice for her son, James.
That’s the first thing that humbles you when meeting the Hillsborough families – how much they have endured.
It’s not just the unimaginable pain of losing their loved ones at a football game – a place of joy and human spirit.
It is also the burden of having to grieve whilst the full power of the British state is deployed to cover up the truth.
I remember Margaret telling me how she had to use the insurance pay out from James’s death to pay for a barrister at the original inquest.
Meanwhile, the state used taxpayer-money to hire armies of lawyers, for the explicit purpose of denying justice.
Like so many stories from Hillsborough, it defies belief. But with this Hillsborough Law, we can make sure that such a shameful episode – and the many others like it – can never happen again.
That it is the thing that really floors you about the Hillsborough families. It’s not about them.
It’s about millions of working people they will never meet. Making sure that nobody else like them, ever has to suffer as they did.
Because there is a class element to this. From Hillsborough to the Grenfell Fire, Windrush, the Grooming Gangs and the Horizon Scandal, time and again the British state fails to see injustice because of who the victims are.
That is why, while it is right this law will always bear the Hillsborough name, it is not just a law for the 97. It is a law for everyone.
And a symbol of a state that the Labour Party, in the proudest tradition of its values, will make accountable to working people.
