Public Office (Accountability) Bill

Gordon McKee Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 3rd November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Gordon McKee (Glasgow South) (Lab)]

On a sunny spring afternoon, Linda Howard watched her husband and son walk down the path from her house. Even now, decades later, she can recall the details of that morning with perfect clarity. Young Tommy pestered his dad to let him join him at the football match. His mum did not want him to make the trip to Sheffield, but she saw the anticipation in his eyes, and was unable to say no and break his heart. As she said goodbye and watched them walk down the path, Tommy turned to wave one more time. She did not know it in that moment, but it would be for the last time, because her husband and son were heading to a disaster. Their lives would be cruelly taken in a tragedy caused by a failure of care, control and courage, and an instinct not to act, but to look away, as the crisis deepened.

Ninety-seven people lost their life in the Hillsborough disaster, and thousands more lost trust because of the events that happened afterwards. The same instinct that led to inaction on that day led to deceit in the days that followed. The fans of Liverpool football club were smeared as a gang of drunks. The grotesque implication was that the dead were somehow responsible for their own demise, and grieving mothers, brothers, fathers and sisters were treated by the police not as bereaved family, but as accomplices to some indescribable crime. They were taken to a gym hall and forced to look through photographs of the dead to find out the fate of their family. Hillsborough was not just a collapse of a crush barrier; it was the collapse of trust. It was a moment when public officials saw their fellow citizens not as people to be protected, but as problems to be managed.

I am ashamed to say that this is not unique in our history. Just ask the grandmother who came to this country on a boat, and contributed for decades, only for the state to turn around and tell her she was no longer welcome in her own country; or the tenant who warned that their building was unsafe, but found their home engulfed in flames before anyone would listen; or the local businessman who held together a community, but who found that the output of a faulty computer system was treated with more deference by the authorities than his own word and honest reputation. These are not isolated stories; they are the same story. This was described by the Right Rev. James Jones in his report as the

“patronising disposition of unaccountable power”.

That posture has no place in a just Britain, because power without accountability is not strength, but corruption. In a true democracy, the state exists to serve the working-class widow on the Wirral just as much as the chief constable of a police force. The binding promise of justice in a democracy is that, together, we belong to a country to which we each contribute, and by which we are treated equally. It is the promise also of the movement to which I belong, which 100 years ago said that working men and women no longer required a patronising disposition; instead, they required representatives of themselves to bestow power on the powerless, and to impose on all of those who hold state authority a duty of candour. That is what the Bill does. It instils in the public contract an immovable commitment that the truth shall sit above all else, regardless of consequence. The people of this country do not demand perfection. They understand the inevitability of mistakes, but what they cannot accept is a state that obscures the truth from its own people.

We cannot bring back the victims of Hillsborough, and we cannot erase the years of pain or decades of denial, but we can make sure that no grieving family ever again has to fight their own Government for the truth, so that when the next mother watches her son walk down the path, she knows that if tragedy does rear its ugly head, her country will stand with her, not against her, in the fight for justice.