David Anderson
Main Page: David Anderson (Labour - Blaydon)Department Debates - View all David Anderson's debates with the Attorney General
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your Chairmanship, Mrs Main, on what is a busy day for you. I congratulate the hon. Member for City of Chester (Stephen Mosley) on the forensic way in which he went through the detail.
I want to stand back a little, and to be dispassionate. I want to work out, coming from the other end of the question, why the Attorney-General might not support Mrs Williams’s case. The facts according to the coroner were, as we know, first, that the death was accidental; secondly that it resulted from traumatic asphyxia; and, thirdly, that Kevin, along with everyone else, was dead by 3.15. Mrs Williams’s e-petition has asked for the opening of a new inquest under section 16 of the Coroners Act 1988. Her case is that Kevin did not die until 4 o’clock and he did not die from traumatic asphyxia. She has evidence to back up her case, and she claims that people who were helping Kevin well after 3.15 are prepared to testify.
If we are going to be told today by the Attorney-General that he does not accept that case, we can apply three simple tests. Is Mrs Williams simply wrong? Is she misguided? Or, God forbid, is she deliberately misleading us out of her understandable need for justice for her son? If the Attorney-General cannot answer yes to at least one of those questions, how on earth can he justify anything other than agreeing to reopen Kevin’s inquest or some other form of process that will allow her to get justice? Whatever obstructions are put in the way of the Attorney-General in trying to reach that justice, he should knock them out of the way. He should also not allow the inbuilt bias that has a long history in this nation, of the establishment closing ranks to protect its own. Why things happened as they did has been mentioned, to an extent, by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram). I do not intend to go into that, but I suggest that if facts come to light as a result of this case that show even more overwhelmingly that people did not do the things they should have done as public servants, it is not too late for them to be called to account. That is something that the nation should pursue.
The Government have made some very positive statements about transparency. As recently as 19 December, the Deputy Prime Minister said in a speech to Demos:
“The third characteristic of an open society is the sharing of knowledge and information. In a closed society the elite think that, for the masses, ignorance is bliss: But in an open society there is no monopoly of wisdom. So transparency is vital.”
I could not agree more. According to the coalition programme for Government of May 2010 the Government believe
“that we need to throw open the doors of public bodies, to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account.”
Today the Attorney-General can show whether his Department will live up to those fine words. He can show the people of this country that justice is more important than secrecy. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton is right. This is about families—dads, mams, brothers and sisters; but it is also about us as a nation, and what sort of country we want to live in.