Dear John,

If there’s one thing that practically everyone in Britain agrees on, it’s that our politics needs a great deal more honesty and accountability. We’re living through a period of profound distrust in leaders, institutions, and in democracy itself. We have been arguing for years now that the UK needs robust and binding reforms to restore decency to public life.

The Hillsborough Law - officially the Public Authority (Accountability) Bill - has been touted as Keir Starmer’s flagship policy to address that crisis.

It would impose a legal duty of candour on public bodies and officials, from police to MPs to local authorities. It was born out of decades of tireless campaigning by Hillsborough families after the 1989 disaster. The Prime Minister has claimed that with it in effect, “injustice has no place to hide.”

But at the eleventh hour, today the Government decided to pull the bill from the Parliamentary agenda. A Government amendment, which would have granted a de-facto exemption to security services like MI5 and MI6, sparked a massive backlash from Labour MPs like Ian Byrne, and now Ministers say they’re taking time to “get the balance right” between security and accountability.

Campaigners, who have fought for decades to see this legislation realised, say that only the genuine bill - the Hillsborough Law - will suffice.

The intelligence carve-out could allow intelligence chiefs to “hide serious failures behind a vague claim of national security,” said the Hillsborough Law Now campaign. “It’s got to be all or nothing”, said Manchester campaigner Ruth Leney. “We can't trust the bill if not everybody is accountable to it.”

As important as national security is, these concerns are valid. Time and again, governments have used security as a convenient excuse to avoid embarrassment and accountability. From intelligence agencies resisting scrutiny over historic abuses, to US administrations citing security grounds to block the release of politically sensitive files - including, as I write this, the Epstein files - official secrecy has too often served the powerful rather than the public interest.

This legislation, if passed in its full form, would create nothing short of a profound cultural shift in Westminster and beyond. It would address the frustration and dissatisfaction people across the country feel with politics, politicians, and institutions. It would serve as a reminder that, in a democracy, the public are ultimately in charge.

While this campaign has gone on a long time, there’s a pervasive sense that politics has changed dramatically for the worse in recent decades. What were once called the ‘dark arts’ of politics - backroom deals and public manipulation - have become almost standard procedure. In times past, duty and integrity alone made lying and deception incredibly difficult in public life.

But those times are gone, and as Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and others have shown us, the ‘Good Chaps’ theory of Government no longer holds. Through repeated scandals and failures to punish wrongdoing, our Government has all but lost the trust of the British people.

The Hillsborough Law, the full thing, represents an opportunity to win a good deal of it back.

Of course, it’s just one part of the broader democratic policy package Britain desperately needs. The dark arts go well beyond the lies and obfuscation of public figures. We need to tackle the massive sums of money buying up politics with robust and binding campaign finance reform.

We need to take on Silicon Valley and the disinformation cesspit that is Elon Musk’s X. And we need to change our broken voting system before it catapults us off a cliff. There will be opportunities in the forthcoming Elections Bill.

That’s what we’re fighting for. For now, though, we wait to see what plans the Government comes back with, and we stand with Ian Byrne and his fellow MPs and campaigners fighting tirelessly not just for justice, but for a sea change in our political life.

Justice For The 97.

All the best,

Matt Gallagher

Communications Officer

Open Britain