Business of the House

Maria Eagle Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I agree with my hon. Friend about the importance of our new-found freedoms from the EU to set taxes how we please. We are no longer bound in to a complex agreement with the European Union and can therefore have our own competitive tax system. I am certainly intrigued by his idea that we should have local competition in tax systems, which they have in the United States, where some States have high sales taxes and others have lower sales taxes, and so on. It may be more difficult in a relatively small island, but it is worth noting that VAT is a broad-based tax on consumption designed to ensure the fair treatment of both consumers and businesses, and has been adopted not just in the European Union but by, I think, 170 countries. It may be that going away from VAT would not just be a statement of our Brexit independence, but go against a system that actually works quite well globally.

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

The final criminal trials relating to the 1989 Hillsborough disaster collapsed yesterday, 32 years after 96 wholly innocent children, women and men were unlawfully killed by the negligence of others, primarily the South Yorkshire police, who should have been protecting them. No one responsible has been held accountable by our criminal justice system for those deadly failures. This catastrophic failure of justice seriously compounded the grief, pain and anger of the families, who yet again yesterday had to endure hearing on national media outlets the very slurs that the police statements at the heart of this prosecution were being changed to promote, namely that the Liverpool fans attending the match caused the disaster, something that has been utterly and comprehensively disproved by the 2016 inquest verdict.

Does the Leader of the House accept that the law now needs to be changed to prevent this utter failure over three decades from ever happening again to any families bereaved by public disasters? There will be more families bereaved by public disasters. Will he arrange a statement from the Lord Chancellor and a debate in this House, so that those of us who have proposals to stop this kind of thing ever happening again, for example in the public advocate Bill and the public authority accountability Bill, can again bring them to the House?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The hon. Lady is so right to raise this matter. It is the greatest scandal of British policing in our lifetimes, and the pain is still with those families. The thought of the number of children who were killed is something that makes the whole House grieve. When nobody is held to account for that, it surely indicates that something has gone wrong in our criminal justice system. The hon. Lady is therefore right to say that we must do things that make sure this never happens in future, because though there may be nothing further that can be done in the criminal justice system now, we cannot allow this ever to happen again and have no accountability not just for the terrible events that happened but for the wickedness of the cover-up. The hon. Lady is so right to highlight the cruelty of blaming the families for the misery that was inflicted upon them.

I will of course take forward any ideas the hon. Lady has to the Lord Chancellor. I will seek to get replies to any questions she may have. I cannot, as she knows, immediately promise Government time, but she knows there are other ways of getting debates going in this House. It is worth remembering the early success of the Backbench Business Committee in having a debate on Hillsborough in about 2010, which helped to at least get some answers, if not necessarily the full legal conclusion that many would have liked and felt would have been just.