Cumbrian Shootings

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd June 2010 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure and a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Benton. I thank and pay tribute to the hon. Member for Copeland (Mr Reed)—I will call him my hon. Friend—for bidding for and getting the debate. I also pay tribute—not out of form, but out of sincerity—to my neighbour, the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart). He has stepped out of line in a courageous way and made a maiden speech in an unconventional place and an unconventional manner on an issue that genuinely matters. I am sure that that will be noted by many.

There are not words to describe the horrors of 2 June and what followed, but there are words to describe the response of the community—compassion and solidarity, above all others. As the hon. Member for Workington (Tony Cunningham) and the hon. Member for Copeland said, that response defined and continues to define what happened. The hon. Member for Copeland in many ways embodies that spirit, not just by showing leadership in his community on the tragedy that we are debating, but in his response to the other tragedies that took place only days earlier.

There has been talk about London journalists. I am more used to reading Tony Parsons’s comments about 1970s pop culture than what he writes about modern tragedy in west Cumbria. However, he and other journalists who went there, whose conduct we will perhaps talk about in a moment, came away staggered by the strength of the communities and their response. London journalists make it their business in their line of work to visit the scene of dreadful tragedies. I am not trying to create a league table of community response, but without a doubt they have been staggered by the tremendous solidarity shown in the communities of Cumbria—not just those that were directly affected, but communities throughout the county.

Craig Mackey, the chief constable of Cumbria, who has been a policeman for 25 years, said that the event was by far the most hideous thing he had ever had to deal with—and he has seen some pretty hideous things. As has been mentioned by the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border, NHS staff and experienced police officers had never seen a gunshot wound, never mind several of them in one day. It needs to be said that they dealt with things with stoicism, compassion and professionalism. We expect the emergency services to be outstanding, and they were, under extreme pressure. In many cases they put themselves in harm’s way to provide assistance to stricken people. They dealt with physical and emotional traumas on that hideous day. The police, national health service staff—ambulance drivers, paramedics, doctors and nurses—mountain rescue teams, volunteers and others put themselves in harm’s way to provide assistance when it was important.

My constituency was not touched directly by the shootings, although the towns and villages of Ambleside, Coniston, Grasmere and Hawkshead were put on lockdown for much of that day, as it was feared that the gunman could arrive on the streets at any time. Cumbria is a huge county, but it feels small after such an incident. Connections emerge all over the place. My 25-year-old brother-in-law will not mind my saying that he is a rookie policeman, and for him it has been a baptism of fire; and a close friend of mine happened to be on the campsite at Boot where the final shootings took place. Even aside from such personal connections, if you kick one Cumbrian we all limp; and there is a sense of solidarity and standing together that shines through.

To echo the comments of most of the hon. Members who have spoken, a knee-jerk response from legislators would not be sensible. That does not mean that there should be no response; but hard, tragic cases make bad law, without a shadow of a doubt, and the laws passed in response to previous tragedies have clearly not prevented subsequent ones. We should not jump to conclusions. There is always a sense—which I share—that something must be done; we feel powerless. For now, at least, that something is to support the community and help it to recover. Lessons must be learned thoroughly. It goes without saying that there will be no trial, and that is why a full—and I would say public—inquiry is crucial, on terms set, as has already been said, by the community. That should not be to point the finger at anyone other than the culprit—not the emergency services or anyone else—but an inquiry is necessary to enable us to learn lessons from the tragedy.

There are some lessons that we should not learn. Like the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock), whom I welcome to the House, I represent a good chunk of what is rightly Lancashire, but some of the patronising stuff written in the media focused on Cumbria being a pitifully small county with a police force that cannot deal with its problems. That is nonsense. Recently there was a proposal to merge Cumbria and Lancashire police forces; that would be the wrong lesson to learn. It would not help the grieving communities to put their police headquarters in Preston rather than Penrith.

Finally, I endorse the comments of the hon. Member for Copeland about the reaction of elements of the media. The media must leave families to grieve and to recover in dignity and peace. We must not, in future, allow them to turn such tragedies into a mawkish circus.