Hillsborough survivors and bereaved families hurt by Keir Starmer

Keir Starmer has betrayed the Hillsborough families and survivors again — as he was always going to do — along with all those others who lost loved ones through injustice or state mismanagement causing disasters.

Starmer has never made a promise he wasn’t ready to break and only ever used Hillsborough law for cover and misdirection. While he claimed he would pass the law, which will impose a ‘duty of candour’ on public bodies and officials, in Labour’s first session of government, he was writing for the Murdoch S*n that smeared and vilified the Hillsborough victims.

He was despised and condemned for even saying the word ‘Hillsborough’ because of it.

Yet he still continued to write for that filthy rag again and again. Not just write for it, but attend its parties, chum around with its senior staff, allow its hacks into Labour’s 2022 conference — in Liverpool, the city that lost 97 people in the 1989 Hillsborough disaster — and appointed Murdoch’s pawns as senior advisers.

So, of course, he was always going to break his promise to pass the law in this parliament, and that’s exactly what he has done. But Hillsborough campaigners and other bereaved families are not having it.

Hillsborough: Families have ‘suffered enough’

They have accused him, entirely rightly, of “insulting” their loved ones and them by refusing to introduce the law as he promised. And they are entirely unimpressed with his excuse that he had to delay the law to add an amendment to add security service operatives to those bound by the law. Horseshit.

Passing it now and then adding to it later would be just as easy, and the security services have for years had their arm deeper up Starmer’s nether regions than a vet up the horse that did the shit.

Starmer’s lackeys pulled the bill in January. He couldn’t be clearer that he doesn’t care a fig for the families of those killed at Hillsborough, in the Manchester Arena bombing, victims of the Post Office and Windrush scandals, or any others. They have all signed a letter to Starmer accusing him of protecting those involved in “denial, defensiveness and cover-ups”.

The letter goes on:

The fact that Hillsborough law has still not been reintroduced to parliament is an insult to all of us who have been working so hard to get to this point. It has undermined our trust in this government to do what they said they would and make this legacy project a reality.

We hope that, going forward, you, the prime minister, and your government will listen to the people Hillsborough law is meant to protect and not those it is meant to protect us from. We have suffered enough.

It will be a forlorn hope, unless somehow Starmer is dragged kicking and screaming into keeping that thing to which he is most allergic: a promise.

Featured image via the Canary