{"id":161320,"date":"2025-09-16T17:33:13","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T17:33:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/161320\/"},"modified":"2025-09-16T17:33:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T17:33:13","slug":"the-hillsborough-law-really-matters-and-not-just-to-liverpool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/161320\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hillsborough Law really matters \u2013 and not just to Liverpool"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this month, a bus carrying survivors of the Hillsborough disaster back to the stadium where 97 Liverpool supporters were crushed to death at the FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest in 1989 broke down near the summit of the winding road, called Snake Pass, that connects Manchester to Sheffield.<\/p>\n

It was part of a visit organised by the Hillsborough Survivors Support Alliance (HSA) and, for some of those on board, it was the first time they were returning to the scene of British football\u2019s worst stadium disaster.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With the group adrift in the vast remoteness of the Peak District and struggling for phone signal, a motorist from Rotherham kindly offered a tow to Sheffield, only for the rope connecting the vehicles to buckle at a roundabout near Barnsley.<\/p>\n

The delays meant that one passenger \u2014 a 57-year-old man, whose last experience of Sheffield was as a 21-year-old student when he escaped the Leppings Lane terrace, a stand allocated to Liverpool fans in 1989 \u2014 caught only a fleeting glimpse of Hillsborough from the taxi taking him to the train station. He could only conclude that fate was getting in the way of his visiting a place where his life changed forever.<\/p>\n

Peter Scarfe, the chairman of the HSA, has led a lot of these trips over the years. Sometimes, they have involved just one person who was seeking closure following therapy, but was reluctant to do so as part of a wider group.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Fans remember those who died at Hillsborough (Paul Ellis\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Those visits serve as a reminder that Hillsborough does not belong to the past, and why today\u2019s news that a Hillsborough Law will shortly begin to pass through the UK parliament<\/a> is so important. Scarfe told The Athletic that while the law might offer \u201csome comfort\u201d to those who are still tormented by the disaster, it also has the potential to create a \u201clegacy which means people haven\u2019t died in vain.\u201d<\/p>\n

The most important parts of the new legislation relate to legal descriptions around \u201cduty of candour\u201d and \u201cparity of arms.\u201d\u00a0In real terms, this means that public officials will face criminal sanctions if they do not tell the truth during investigations into disasters. It also means that the state cannot simply outspend grieving families at inquests. Instead, they will have access to publicly funded representation and a legal duty will be placed on public bodies to ensure costs are proportionate.<\/p>\n

To some extent, the first part especially enshrines the sort of rules you\u2019d impose on a reception class. Though it seems extraordinary they are not in place already and it says much about Britain\u2019s attention span when it comes to small details that are hugely significant, it is nevertheless a step in the right direction for any person interested in the standards of public servants and the organisations they serve, as well as their own safety, even if it does not relate to their attendance at a football match.<\/p>\n

David Lammy, the deputy prime minister, suggested in a column published in the Guardian on Monday night that those responsible not only for Hillsborough but other UK national scandals such as the Grenfell Tower fire, where 72 people were killed in an inferno which ripped through a west London tower block, and the treatment of the \u2018Windrush generation\u2019, where many immigrants into the country from Commonwealth were denied their legal rights,\u00a0had \u201cescaped justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite it being confirmed at a second round of inquests in 2016 that the victims of Hillsborough had been \u201cunlawfully killed,\u201d only one person was subsequently convicted of a criminal offence and that was Sheffield Wednesday\u2019s club secretary, who was fined \u00a36,500 on a health and safety charge. It was Lammy\u2019s conclusion that anyone linked to each of these events had been \u201cbetrayed by the institutions supposed to protect them.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

As recently as April, however, it seemed as though the Labour party, led by the prime minister Sir Keir Starmer, were rowing back on their commitment to deliver a law that had been promised at his party\u2019s autumn conference held in Liverpool last year.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Tributes laid at Sheffield Wednesday\u2019s Hillsborough stadium (Christopher Furlong\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

A watered-down version had been presented to campaigners and, as another Hillsborough anniversary came and went in April, with Starmer missing his own deadline, he was confronted at Westminster by a Liverpool Labour MP, Ian Byrne, who represents West Derby, a suburb to the east of the city centre.<\/p>\n

Byrne, a Liverpool season ticket holder, suggested that the \u201cfailure to introduce a law worthy of the name will be seen as a continuation of the betrayal of families and survivors of Hillsborough and all those affected by state cover-ups.\u201d<\/p>\n

The timing of the government\u2019s announcement that they are pushing ahead with meatier legislation may not be entirely coincidental. Labour are back in Liverpool later this month for their party conference \u2014 doing so, having failed to deliver on their promise, would have been politically catastrophic. Add in the general sense of malaise around the Labour government, which has spent much of the last few months mired in scandal and plunging in the opinion polls, and it became even more unthinkable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Though this development eases some pressure on Starmer, the events of the last year explain why campaigners, though happy things have finally started moving, remain cautious.<\/p>\n

From here, the law will be looked at not only by the House of Commons but the House of Lords, the UK parliament\u2019s upper chamber, a setting that will test whether the establishment really wants to change.<\/p>\n

It is not just Hillsborough survivors and Liverpudlians who should be watching whether the government\u2019s words are matched by their actions.<\/p>\n

(Top photo: The Hillsborough memorial at Anfield; Justin Setterfield\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this month, a bus carrying survivors of the Hillsborough disaster back to the stadium where 97 Liverpool…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":161321,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[3450,1084,403,99,1794],"class_list":["post-161320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-liverpool","tag-premier-league","tag-soccer","tag-sports","tag-sports-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}