argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Orlando Attack: UK Security Measures — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: International Affairs
John Derek Twigg (Labour, Centre-left): I want to place on record my condemnation of the terrible attacks in Orlando. It seems that ISIS is being pushed back in certain parts of the middle east and we are seeing fighters fleeing from its strongholds, a number of whom are coming across to Europe, and some may come back to the UK, Given that, is the Secretary of State satisfied that extra measures are in place to deal with this possible influx of additional ISIS fighters coming back to Europe and that co-operation is of a sufficient level with other European countries?
Policing and Crime Bill — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: Law and Crime
Andrew Murray Burnham (Labour, Centre-left): I would like to begin by agreeing with the Minister that some good progress has been made in the course of our deliberations on the Bill. There have been improvements, which we will discuss later, on tackling child sexual exploitation and on the police bail regime—particularly as it applies to those suspected of being involved in terrorism activity. As he has just indicated, there has also been progress on police misconduct, which I will come to However, the Bill presents an opportunity to do much more to improve police accountability, and that is an opportunity that we in the House now need to grab. Today, I want to present a package of proposals that respond to the historic verdict of the Hillsborough inquest, which finally concluded, after 27 years, that, as the families had known from day one, the loss of their loved ones was not an accident and they had been unlawfully killed, but that that fact had been covered up for all those years This package seeks to rebalance this country and to make it fairer. It seeks to rebalance it away from the establishment and in favour of ordinary families. It is a package that will stand as a permanent tribute to the dignity and determination of the Hillsborough families. Knowing them as I do, they would want nothing more than that no other family in the future should go through what they have gone through Let me take the House briefly through this package of proposals. New clause 63 would give bereaved families equal funding for legal representation at inquests where the police are involved. It seeks to establish the crucial principle that there should be parity between the two sides. The reason that is important is that it says very clearly that the public interest lies in finding the truth. That is how public resources should be directed: they should not be directed towards creating an unbalanced contest at an inquest, with public money used to protect vested interests in the public sector.
Policing and Crime Bill — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: Law and Crime
Andrew Murray Burnham (Labour, Centre-left): I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his support. He is absolutely right. I will come on to explain precisely how this would have helped to even the playing field and give the families the chance to get truth at the first time of asking. The original inquest catastrophically failed on that account, and that needs to be very clearly understood as we consider this amendment Amendment 126 seeks to close the long-standing loophole of retirement being used by police officers as a route to evade misconduct proceedings. New clause 64 seeks to hold the Government to their promise to the victims of press intrusion to hold a second-stage inquiry looking at the culture of relations between police and the press. New clause 66 seeks to legislate for a code of practice with regard to the media relations policy of each police force, and to spell out that attributable briefing by police forces, which was so damaging in the case of Hillsborough, is not permitted unless it is in the most exceptional circumstances. Amendments 127 and 128 seek to strengthen the Independent Police Complaints Commission. New clause 67, which will be considered later, seeks to strengthen the offence of misconduct in public office Let me start with the area where there is greatest consensus—police misconduct. I listened carefully to what the Minister said, and I am grateful for the movement that he indicated to the shadow Policing Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), in Committee whereby there should not merely be an arbitrary 12-month period after retirement, because, as we know, police wrongdoing may come to light much later. We are glad that the Government have indicated that they are prepared to move on this matter in the other place and table an amendment to that effect. While I will not press my amendment to a vote, I would still like to press the Minister a little further on this point. He is saying that this should be applied only in the most exceptional circumstances, but that potentially rules out many people who might be guilty of gross misconduct but would not be caught by his "exceptional" test. He needs to reassure the House on this point.
Policing and Crime Bill — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: Law and Crime
Andrew Murray Burnham (Labour, Centre-left): That is a good offer and I thank the Minister for it. I think we can move forward on that basis. I hope we all know what we are trying to achieve—that is, if serious wrongdoing comes to light about an individual who is beyond 12 months retired, it must be possible for misconduct or disciplinary proceedings to be initiated against them. Our amendment says that there should then also be sanctions that are able to be applied against that individual. I say to the Minister that we will want to insist on that point as well If we can agree to move forward on that basis, that is a considerable example of progress that matters greatly to the Hillsborough families, who, as they were continuing their 27-year struggle, felt very aggrieved when they saw individuals who had retired on a full pension and who they felt were beyond reach and could not be held to account. I believe that this should apply retrospectively. Misconduct is misconduct whenever it occurred, and people should be held to account for their actions.
Policing and Crime Bill — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: Law and Crime
Steve Rotheram (Labour, Centre-left): I thank the Minister for coming partly towards the position that we believe should be taken, but can we clarify one point? We are talking about serious wrongdoing—malfeasance and gross misconduct —by police officers. We have mentioned Hillsborough, so many people will spin that with regard to the conduct of officers—ordinary officers—at that disaster in 1989. There are no accusations against many of the ordinary officers, who performed heroically: it was the senior officers who let people down, and then, in some cases, took the opportunity to get away scot free through the cop-out of using ill health—
Policing and Crime Bill — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: Law and Crime
Andrew Murray Burnham (Labour, Centre-left): It was a long intervention, Madam Deputy Speaker, but it was a good one. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) makes a very important point. I do not think that any attempt is being made to blame ordinary policemen and women. That is not the purpose of the amendment. It is important for me to say very clearly to those police officers who are out there keeping the streets safe that this is not an attack on them. The package is about not allowing the misdeeds of the past to taint the present and those police officers who are working today. That is such a crucial point, because if we do not deal properly with such allegations, we allow the situation to contaminate the present and to corrode trust in today’s police service. None of us in this House wants that, so my hon. Friend is absolutely right to make that point, which cannot be stressed enough.
Policing and Crime Bill — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: Law and Crime
Andrew Murray Burnham (Labour, Centre-left): That is right. This is about people who have been guilty of serious misconduct in public office, and it is crucial that they cannot use retirement as a means of evading accountability for that misconduct. The change to which the Minister appears to be agreeing closes a long-standing loophole and frustration for members of the public. It exposes the police to a considerably more challenging regime, but rightly so. Any profession needs to be held accountable to the highest standards. We will work with the Minister to get it right. I believe that we can do so, but I stress that this is about upholding the reputation of the vast majority of police officers, who serve the public with distinction The issue of police-press relations is the biggest area of unfinished business, although, in fact, we have not even really started to make any changes with respect to putting right the wrongs of Hillsborough. As we know, the briefing of the press in those first days after the tragedy caused incalculable harm and damage, not just to the families who had lost loved ones, but to the thousands of people, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton, who had returned from the match in a state of trauma, only to read a couple of days later that the police were blaming them for the deaths of their friends and family That is why feelings are so strong, not just in Merseyside but across the country. It simply cannot be right that a police force is able, unattributably, to brief malicious and unproven information to a newspaper. We need a stronger and more transparent regime for press relations, so that false impressions cannot be put out there with the intention of setting a narrative about a particular incident. Families who are fighting for justice often find that it is very difficult to overturn the false version of events. That was certainly the case for the Hillsborough families.
Policing and Crime Bill — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: Law and Crime
Keith Anthony Vaz (Labour, Centre-left): That promise was made not just to the victims and their families but to the Chairs of three Select Committees in the Prime Minister’s room before the inquiry was announced. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that it is important that we get Leveson 2—perhaps not with Leveson, because he has moved on to do other things, but with somebody else. There is nothing wrong with the Government beginning the process, choosing a chair of the committee and getting the mechanics together. We do not really have to wait until the end of the criminal proceedings.
Policing and Crime Bill — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: Law and Crime
Andrew Murray Burnham (Labour, Centre-left): I wholeheartedly agree with my right hon. Friend. There is a huge amount of unfinished business. These issues are present in so many of the injustices that we have seen, where there has been inappropriate contact between police and press. We await the conclusions of the Daniel Morgan panel, for instance, which might best illustrate some of these issues That is true of other events as well. We remember the way in which the media were manipulated in the case of the Shrewsbury 24, for example. There have been many examples of this over time. Indeed, part 1 of the Leveson inquiry found unhealthy links between senior Met officers and newspaper executives, which led to the resignation of the then Met police chief and others. The issue cannot be left there. Public officials and police officers have also been convicted of offences related to these matters The Minister really needs to provide an explicit answer on this specific point today. He cannot wriggle out of this commitment. It is not the kind of commitment you can wriggle out of, given everything that those people have been through. A promise should be a promise, when it is made to people who have suffered in the way that many of the victims of press intrusion have suffered. I know that the Hillsborough families feel exactly the same. They were the victims of the biggest example of inappropriate police briefing of newspapers—and it was not just one newspaper. People think it was just one newspaper that reported the lies, but many of them reported the lies that were given to Whites news agency in Sheffield, and those lies went round the world. Only this week, I had an email from someone in the United States saying that they were astonished to find out the truth when they watched the recent BBC2 documentary on Hillsborough, and that for 27 years they had thought that the events were the result of hooliganism. It is impossible to exaggerate the harm that those lies caused I say to the Minister tonight that we need a better answer. If he were to stand up now at the Dispatch Box and say clearly to the House that there will be a second-stage inquiry into the culture of relations between the police and the press, I would be the first to say that we would not press our new clause 64 to a vote. However, there is growing suspicion among organisations—Hacked Off, obviously, but others too—and campaigners for justice that they are slowly being let down and that this matter is being slowly slid into the long grass. We have had anonymous briefings from people close to the Culture Secretary and others in Government to suggest that it has already been canned. Well, we on the Labour Benches are not prepared to accept that, so I say clearly to the Minister that unless he can provide a much more direct reassurance, we will push the matter to a vote this evening to force the Prime Minister to honour his own promise—it is not our promise; it is his promise—to the victims of press intrusion and hacking.
Policing and Crime Bill — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: Social Welfare
Marie Elizabeth Rimmer (Labour, Centre-left): These families have suffered enough—we in this Chamber are united on that—so does my right hon. Friend agree that a statement from the Minister today saying that the second inquiry will go ahead would put an end to their suffering? They have suffered enough. Let this be the end.
Policing and Crime Bill — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: Law and Crime
Andrew Murray Burnham (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend puts it very well. That is what I have seen when working with the Hillsborough families, as have others when they have been fighting for justice. Those people are affected not just by the original trauma they suffered, but by how the system grinds them down afterwards, making them fight for everything, not giving them an inch and slowly draining the life out of them. How cruel is that? It is just wrong—is it not?—that the government machine thinks it can operate in that way. As I will move on to say, I spoke today to a family about going to meetings with 14 lawyers sitting around the table and just a couple of family members. That is just not right. We all know it is not right. Any of us who have been Ministers will have seen that style of meeting, and it is just not right. It is time to change it. We should not make these families fight for everything, but support them, and tip the scales in their favour and away from the powerful. Why not do so?
Policing and Crime Bill — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: Law and Crime
Andrew Murray Burnham (Labour, Centre-left): I have a lot of time for the Minister, as he knows, but such people are listening to this debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) is not in her place, but if the victims of contaminated blood are listening to this debate, they will immediately recognise what I am saying. If the victims of organophosphates—sheep dip—poisoning are listening today, they will understand what I am saying. If the people waiting for the announcement about the battle of Orgreave investigation are listening, they will understand what I am saying. There are so many people who have not been given justice by the system, and that just is not right. It really is not right, and that is why I keep saying that we must make Hillsborough a moment of change when we can tip the scales in favour of ordinary families and away from the establishment.
Policing and Crime Bill — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: Law and Crime
Andrew Murray Burnham (Labour, Centre-left): That is a good point. It would be good enough if we got a cast-iron commitment. Ministers have reintroduced a doubt—in media briefings, they have said, "Oh, it probably won’t go ahead now"—and have muddied the waters. If they clarified that tonight, that would be good enough. If they said, "It will go ahead after the proper time has elapsed, given the criminal proceedings that are still outstanding", that would be fine and everyone would understand it. If they gave that commitment tonight, there would be no need for a vote because we would have done our job, but if they cannot give such a commitment, that would be revealing in itself. If the Minister cannot stand at the Dispatch Box and give such a clear commitment, or rather reaffirm it to the people to whom Ministers have already made it, that would be revealing in itself and we would be right to force a vote in those circumstances. In that case, people will not be strung along and left hoping that there will be a Leveson 2 one day; we will have forced the issue so that Ministers are held to account for their promise. That is what we are doing tonight. Ministers have the chance to do the right thing: to stand at the Dispatch Box and say, "Yes, we will do it. We will honour what we said." If they do not do so, we will ask Members of decency and integrity on both sides of the House to stand with us and to go through the Lobby with us tonight to hold Ministers to account for the promise they made Finally, let me turn to our new clause 63 on parity. The new clause seeks to establish the principle of parity of legal funding for bereaved families at inquests involving the police. In introducing it, I want to say that it is very important that people do not see Hillsborough as a one-off belonging to a bygone era. To be honest, many bereaved families still face a very similar experience when they go to an inquest. They often find themselves pitched into an adversarial and aggressive courtroom when they are still raw with grief. They are unable to match the spending of the police or the public sector in what they spend on their own legal representation. Those families find their lives picked apart. They are made to look like they are perpetrators, not victims. That is a very common experience. Many people who suffer it do not have the huge support that the Hillsborough families had. They are ordinary families battling away on their own, with no one else coming to support them. That is why the principle of parity is so tremendously important.
Policing and Crime Bill — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: Law and Crime
Fiona Margaret Mactaggart (Labour, Centre-left): My right hon. Friend’s remarks will be heard by Rachel Gumbs, the daughter of Philmore Mills, who died in hospital while being restrained by the police. Another constituent has raised an issue relating to his mum. Her children were abducted by their father, and she has spent nearly two decades without being able to contact them. My constituent is in litigation against the police, and feels a similar kind of bereavement, as he has been kept away from his brothers and sisters. He hopes that the approach we are discussing could enable people like him, who are taking cases against the police, to get access to some kind of resources. Would that be possible?
Policing and Crime Bill — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: Law and Crime
Andrew Murray Burnham (Labour, Centre-left): That is exactly what lies behind the new clause. My right hon. Friend has just made my point. We will all have examples from our experience as constituency MPs. We know families who have been at inquests that have been highly unsatisfactory experiences, and where they did not get legal support. I will come to a few examples, to show how unfair it is. The public sector spends taxpayers’ money like water on hiring the best QCs to line up in the courtroom and defend its reputation. Ordinary families are scrabbling around, re-mortgaging their houses and doing whatever they can to try to put up some kind of fight against that. How wrong is that Public money should pay to establish the truth. That means that there should be parity between the two sides in that process. It should not be the case that the public sector packs a courtroom with highly paid QCs. That is such an important principle to establish coming out of Hillsborough—to be honest, if there is to be one lasting legacy from Hillsborough, that should be it. I was tempted by the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) to make this point before. The Hillsborough families were represented by Michael Mansfield at the recent inquest. If that had been the case back in 1990, there is no chance on God’s earth that the cruel and inhumane 3.15 pm cut-off time would have been allowed to stand. Have we ever had a situation in this country before where bereaved families have been told that they cannot have information about what happened to their loved ones in their dying minutes? That was the case here. Have we ever had a situation before where only after 27 years are families finally told who gave their loved ones the kiss of life and carried them over the pitch? What an affront to natural justice that is. Yet it was allowed to stand, because those families did not have someone who could challenge it A few weeks ago, Margaret Aspinall, chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, came to Parliament to deliver a very personal reflection on what it was like all those years ago. I am very grateful to all right hon. and hon. Members who attended; I am sure they will agree that it was an intensely moving occasion. Margaret described the indescribable pain and hurt she felt when she was sent a cheque of just over £1,000, which was supposedly compensation for the life of her son James. She said she had to put it towards the legal fund that the group was asking members to contribute to. In itself that was not enough because she had the cost of travelling to the inquest in Sheffield every day. She was living on the breadline and having to borrow money from her family and her mum to make it all work. How can it be right that families in such circumstances, who have not done anything wrong, find themselves in that situation? It cannot be right that they should be scrimping, saving and doing all those things, when taxpayers’ money is being paid for the other side to do them down.
Policing and Crime Bill — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: Law and Crime
Andrew Murray Burnham (Labour, Centre-left): That is extraordinarily unfair, although this Government have made things even more unfair with their cuts to legal aid. People are not getting through and they are not getting funding when they apply in the way that they would have done in the past. They are unrepresented at these inquests, which cannot be right.
Policing and Crime Bill — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: Law and Crime
Kevan David Jones (Labour, Centre-left): I accept that cases such as Hillsborough required a lot of input from lawyers. Asking as someone who has a knee-jerk reaction that we should not be feeding lawyers, is it possible for the Chief Coroner to lay down rules in some of these cases so that if a public authority comes forward with banks of lawyers, the other side should be given legal representation, or the public authority told that those lawyers are not needed?
Policing and Crime Bill — House of Commons, 2016-06-13
Topic: Law and Crime
Andrew Murray Burnham (Labour, Centre-left): The amendment is designed to develop the same effect and to state that there should be parity of legal funding. That is an incentive for the public sector not to spend too much on its own. If it has to fund families as well, that might bring down the legal bill—it might not add any further costs.