Public Office (Accountability) Bill

John McDonnell Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 3rd November 2025 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to all the campaigners, but I want to pay special tribute to the Scouse MPs, who in the last few months put their foot down and said that they were having nothing but the Hillsborough Bill. I thank them on all our behalf.

I want to raise a point about the duty of candour, transparency and frankness, and the duty to operate in the public interest. I would like someone to make it clear from the Dispatch Box that there is a duty to co-operate with the complainants or the victims in the pursuit of truth. I say that not about a historical event, but about an event that is happening today: the Mitting inquiry into the undercover operations carried out on a number of our campaigns. In that inquiry, the authorities, the police and the intelligence services are belligerently fighting not to tell the truth. I will explain briefly.

Twenty-eight years ago almost to the day, my constituent, a young Asian lad named Ricky Reel, went on a night out with his mates in Kingston upon Thames. He went missing and never came home. We now know that he was racially abused. A week later, we found his body in the river. The police inquiry was appalling, and we begged for police resources to be applied. They were applied, but we discovered later that they were applied to surveil our campaign. We had undercover police officers surveilling our campaign, not investigating the case. We were told, “Don’t worry, we weren’t really surveilling you. You were collateral damage.” It was a collateral invasion of privacy, we were told.

Then we met workers who were being blacklisted, so we set up the Blacklist Support Group. We discovered that the police and the intelligence services were surveilling those workers and providing information to employers. Some of those workers never worked again in their life.

Then, of course, we worked with the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. We discovered a hero: a police officer called Peter Francis, who was part of the unit that undertook the surveillance. He said what actually went on, and he blew the whistle. He is now giving evidence to the Mitting inquiry. My constituent Mrs Reel is also giving evidence, as are the Lawrences and other campaigners, but the police are refusing to attend. They claim to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. They claim that they are so unwell that they cannot provide the evidence. As a result, we will not get to the truth unless there is an overpowering duty in this legislation that forces them to co-operate.

People have said that this is about class, but it is also about race. The Lawrence family were surveilled. Why? So that information could be provided to the media to discredit them. In the Ricky Reel campaign, it became farcical. We went to visit the Metropolitan police and said, “You’ve now admitted that you were surveilling us. We would like to see the documents about that surveillance.” We were each given our own copy, but it was redacted to such an extent that there was maybe only a sentence or a word visible. To be frank, we fell about laughing. We got up to take the copies out, but we were told that we could not, and the reason why was that we might have put them all together and made sentences. That is how bad the situation was. We have still not got to the truth—to the full files—and we are still calling for another investigation, so this Bill is highly relevant. We want a duty that is not just about telling the truth, but about co-operating with those who are complaining and the victims. Until we get that spirit of co-operation, I do not think that we will ever get to the point at which we can hold officials and others to account.

I am worried about the different way that the intelligence services will be treated. Surveilling the blacklisted workers involved a rare mixture of police, special branch and others. I would like to see the intelligence services held to account under this legislation. It almost gives them a private guarantee that even whistleblowers will never be heard in public in a way that allows us to expose what goes on. There will be a lot more to say about this legislation, and we will need to amend it.

My final point has already been made by my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham and Chislehurst (Clive Efford). I remain angry about The Sun. I remain bitterly angry about its role and what it did. We were promised Leveson part 2, but we have dropped it, and I do not think there is any justification for that. If anything good comes out of today’s debate, maybe it will be the Government reconsidering introducing Leveson part 2 and legislation that prevents newspapers acting as The Sun did. I have to say, if social media had existed back then, can you imagine how horrendous it would have been?

[Several hon. Members rose—]