Hillsborough

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Wednesday 12th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. The Leveson inquiry is separately looking at the whole issue of how the press is regulated and how mistakes that are made are properly corrected. I think that everybody, including those in the press, recognises that the current system is not working and needs to be strengthened. There is then the whole question of whether that happens through strengthened self-regulation, independent regulation or statutory regulation, but that is what Leveson is there to look at.

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

I am a very large football fan from a family of football fans, and a number of Members in the Chamber also go to football matches and other sporting events. The hurt and the tragedy of waving loved ones off to a football match, only never to see them again, was compounded by the defamation of their characters afterwards. Will my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister ask the Attorney-General to seek to bring a defamation charge against anybody who was found to have spread these vicious lies? Does he agree that an appropriate starting point to help heal the wounds of Hillsborough would be for tomorrow’s front page of The Sun to feature a picture of the Liverpool football club crest with one word, “Sorry”, written across it in bold?

[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.