On Tuesday the APPG on Public Accountability @APPGPA held a meeting in Parliament on “ WHY WE NEED A PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY COMMISSION” https://www.publicaccountabilityappg.com
In expressing support for the enactment of a “Hillsborough Law” (the Public Authorities (Accountability) Bill) I did so because of the systematic way in which public authorities and institutions have failed the victims and then concealed the truth ( https://hillsboroughlawnow.org/)
Having represented families caught up in the Hillsborough tragedy I am painfully aware of the way in which public bodies and officials closed ranks; how “the system” worked against their interests and how justice was denied. https://www.davidalton.net/2012/09/14/hillsborough-twenty-three-years-of-cover-up/ https://www.davidalton.net/2021/07/28/the-death-of-andrew-devine-32-years-after-hillsborough-the-97th-victim-may-he-rest-in-peace/ ; https://www.davidalton.net/2021/06/14/22273/
But during the meeting I also referred to other examples and campaigns in which I have been involved. Marie Lyon was present. She has valiantly led the campaign on Primodos https://www.davidalton.net/2021/12/02/government-urged-again-to-provide-justice-and-redress-for-victims-of-the-drug-primodos/
I was also moved to hear Steve Purse talk about his disabilities which he believes are attributable to the use of British servicemen as “human guinea pigs” in atomic tests in Australia, at Maralinga, and on Christmas Island. Steve is worried that genetically derived disabilities will appear in the next generation too. I shared with him this speech which I made in 1984 making exactly those same points:
HC Deb 19 December 1984 vol 70 cc389-9838910.32 pm
§Mr. David Alton (Liverpool, Mossley Hill)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Edinburgh, East (Mr. Strang) on securing this debate. I agree with some of what the hon. Member for Stockton, North (Mr. Cook) said. The hon. Member for Edinburgh, East said that he was disappointed that there are so few hon. Members to listen to the debate. As he will recall, I initiated two previous debates on this subject, in July 1983 and March 1984, one of which took place at 4.31 am, and the other at 3.49 am, when there were about half the number of hon. Members who are present tonight. Statistically, that is an improvement, and I hope that the Minister will bear that in mind.
I think that the Minister will accept that this issue will not go away, even though some would suggest that our Government will procrastinate and draw the matter out. The Australian Government cannot be accused of that, and, acting as a stalking horse against our Government, they have ensured that this matter will run and run. Our Government have become rather besotted by the ludicrous new doctrine of inherited culpability. The Government worry too much about the sins of their forefathers. No one is accusing them of having been involved in the events 30 years ago. An all-party group is deeply interested in this subject, and the Government will know that the group thinks not that the Government were involved in the terrible events of those days but that they have done insufficient to make information available, and have tried to cover up for the sins of those who went before them.
I should like to contrast the approaches of the Australian and British Governments in dealing with this matter. First, I shall examine the remedies that are open to aggrieved service men and their families. The hon. Member for Stockton, North rightly referred to section 10 of the Crown Proceedings Act 1947, with which the Minister will be familiar. When hon. Members have regularly suggested that that legislation should be amended to allow people in the position of these service men to sue the Government, the Ministry of Defence has always maintained that that would lead to a reduction in morale and discipline among our service men, and for that reason the Act could not be amended. I refute that idea. Although I accept that that legislation was introduced to cover the second world war and that in wartime it cannot be right that a Government should be expected to recompense the relatives of loved ones who are aggrieved because of injuries sustained, nevertheless, in peacetime different criteria apply.
It is ironic that in Australia service men who served cheek by jowl with our service men in those tests have had the right to take their Government to court, and in one case have gained redress in the courts, while our service men have been denied that privilege. that is ironic, especially in view of the dubious reason given, that that course would lead to some loss of morale or discipline among our men. It would therefore appear that the Australian Government have a far greater respect for the rights of their service men than we have for ours. I suggest that that fact points to the need for a bill of rights or at least the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights in our statute books. If that were done, any Government who acted in this way would be in breach of their obligations.
390The second contrast between the way in which the British and Australian Governments have tackled this problem concerns the availability of information. As the hon. Member for Edinburgh, East said, the Australians have established a Royal Commission. It is ironic that we should have the same Queen but that different ground rules should apply. It is a paradox that the Australians should have established a Royal Commission but that what is good enough in Australia is not good enough here.
In Britain, secrecy is the order of the day, and that fact obviously points to the need in the dying moments of this year for freedom of information legislation. It is one of the tragedies of this year that we have not moved towards providing greater access to information for our citizens. Far too much of this country’s business is done in a hole in a corner, and we are plagued far too much by the national obsession for and disease of secrecy, of keeping knowledge from people who have a right to know.
When the Minister intervened during the speech of the hon. Member for Edinburgh, East and suggested that the hon. Gentleman should provide the statistics in this debate, that seemed to underline again the extraordinary fact that, because of the way in which the system works, the Opposition are denied access to the information that would have allowed them to answer such a question. The people are really asking only for the right to that information, so that they can come to the type of judgments which the Minister constantly tells them they should make. The Minister tells us that, statistically, what happens here is no worse than it would be for any other part of the population, and all the rest of it. We have heard those arguments repeated from the Dispatch Box.
I do not believe that that charge can be made in this case. The hon. Members for Edinburgh, East (Mr. Strang) and for Liverpool, Mossley Hill (Mr. Alton) have studied this matter. The question I asked the hon. Member for Edinburgh, East involved how many people the hon. Gentleman thought were claiming that their present ill-health resulted from the tests. That information is not available to the Government, so it is not information that the Government can be accused of withholding.
When will that information be available? For 18 months, the Government have been giving us different figures. I suggested: The figures ranged from 13,500 to 20,000 people and they were given in the space of only six months.” — [Official Report, 12 March 1984; Vol. 56, c. 187.] That was the answer given by the Prime Minister. Clearly, if the Government are not aware how many people will be surveyed and how many were involved in those tests, how can hon. Members expect to have any idea of what constitutes a reliable statistical sample or survey?
The third contrast that I should like to make between the way that the British and Australian Governments have handled the matter relates to the sense of urgency shown and the anger that people rightly feel about the issue. Since early October, the Australian Royal Commission has taken evidence from more than 100 veterans and scientists. As we have heard, it is to come to the United Kingdom in the new year to interview another 60 witnesses.
The Royal Commission was established after a Government report asserted that Australia had been kept in ignorance all along about the true nature of the British tests. Why, first having promised the full co-operation of Her Majesty’s Government in the work of that391commission, did the Government decline to send anyone to put Britain’s case until two week’s ago? Why did that change of mind come about? Although I welcome it, I should like to know why, having first said that we would co-operate in the Royal Commission’s work, we failed to send anyone, and why it took so long to change our minds.
Why did the Government deliberately frustrate the attempts of the veterans to gain legal aid in Australia by withholding information which is locked away in British archives?
The chairman of the commission, Mr. Justice James McClelland, has rebuked Britain over what he calls a rather unsatisfactory state of affairs… that there is ultimately a right of British veto. He says: It is most desirable that we should not conduct this commission with our hands tied behind our back. Although I know that 8,500 files have been released, many people in Australia claim that others are still held back. Can the Minister do anything tonight to allay the fears of the chairman of the commission and to refute his damning indictment?
Two incidents that have been revealed over the past few weeks show the Government’s obsession with secrecy. After one of the Maralinga blasts in 1957, officials discovered an aboriginal family who said that they had camped in the bomb crater for two days and drunk water collected there. The family were given showers and sent back to the desert. John Hutton, an Australian service man, has told the commission that 200 soldiers were assembled later and told by a British officer that if anyone let out news of the incident to the media, he would be tried for treason. The men were allegedly reminded that under the Official Secrets Acts they could be shot by a firing squad or gaoled for 30 years if they talked about it. I should welcome the Minister’s comments about those allegations.
I should like to draw to the attention of the Minister the remarks of Paul Malone, who works for The Canberra Times in the press gallery in Parliament House in Australia. I sent this document to the Minister’s predecessor, the Minister for Information Technology, on 21 September 1984. In that document, Mr. Malone says:An examination of the documents written at the time of the tests reveals that many of the published official reports on the subject do not tell the whole truth. In fact in many cases the official reports are misleading. This particularly applies in relation to aboriginal presence in the region at the time of the tests. I have submitted pages of questions to the British High Commission here and have only just received a reply. Most of my questions have not been answered. Although the Commission has had the questions in writing for over six weeks, the response I received today to most questions was simply ‘referred to London’. When the Minister replied to that letter he went to great pains to say that, while he refuted many of Mr. Malone’s allegations, he did not want to pre-empt the findings of the commission. It is amazing that information which might damage the Ministry of Defence is initially withheld. It is then released, sometimes grudgingly, to the Australian Royal Commission. Yet members of the press in Australia and here and Members of Parliament are denied access to the same information.
On another issue in the letter, the Minister says:Although I sympathise with the unfortunate people who are referred to in the newspaper article”— in the Sunday People— 392the article is an example of mischievous reporting, which can only act to spread unnecessary concern among the many thousands of participants and their families involved in the tests. Those articles referred to the genetic effects of the atomic tests on many of the children of service men who were involved in the tests, which were referred to by the hon. Member for Stockton, North.
I shall refer to three such cases this evening. The first is that of Ken Clarke of Wigan, Lancashire. He is 47 years of age. He was with the Royal Air Force on Christmas Island. He suffers from bronchitis but otherwise he is fairly fit. His son John, who is 25 years of age, has had problems with his knees since he was a teenager and has had two operations. His daughter, Janine, is 18 years of age. She has a disease affecting her hip joint and finds it difficult to walk. She says: The doctors do not even have a name for my condition. Secondly, there is the case of Geoff Collins. He is aged 48 years and resides in Wallasey, Merseyside. He visited the Monte Bello islands during service as a Navy radio operator. His 20-year-old daughter has a badly deformed spine and shoulder blades and a congenital abscess of the middle ear, making her deaf. When she was born, doctors thought at first that she was a thalidomide victim, but her mother never took thalidomide. Geoff says: I have the nagging belief that my daughter has suffered because of the involvement with the tests. The third case is that of Desmond Shaw, aged 50 years, of Liverpool, who was on Christmas Island. Five years after returning home he was struck down with an arthritic condition which his doctors were unable to diagnose accurately. He suffers still from this ailment. His daughter, Maria, was healthy at birth but at the age of one year she suddenly blacked out and has been mentally handicapped ever since. She is now 15 years of age and she attends a special school. Desmond’s wife, Mary, says: No one knows what caused Maria’s trouble. The doctors just shrug their shoulders and say, ‘It is one of those things.’ I have mentioned only three such cases, but the Sunday People has evidence that 57 children of British service men who were exposed to nuclear bomb tests have died, been hideously deformed or disabled or suffer crippling diseases. It makes the point in its article that there is no statistical evidence that these deaths, deformities, disablements or cripplings are greater per head of population than the deficiencies which occur in normal circumstances. However, there is a lingering doubt in the minds of many of the families involved. There is a belief among many of them that their children have suffered because of their parents’ involvement in the Maralinga and Christmas Island tests. I should like to know from the Minister what he intends to do to ensure that a survey is conducted to determine what genetic effects there have been on the children of these service men.
The hon. Member for Edinburgh, East has referred to the Minister’s letter of 6 December. Part of the letter reads:All the evidence I have indicates that proper precautions were taken to safeguard the health and safety of those involved in the UK’s atmospheric nuclear test programmes. It is important to note that the standards in use at that time were comparable with those of today. If the right hon. Gentleman reads all the evidence that hon. Members have sent him and the two previous debates on this matter, he will find a document which his Department produced in 1953. The document gives the lie to the suggestion that service men were properly clothed or that proper precautions were taken. One paragraph 393describes what the Army set out to do in the tests. It is a Ministry of Defence document which was top secret. It reads: The Army must discover the detailed effects of various types of explosion on equipment, stores and men with and without various types of protection. So the men who were to be involved in the atomic explosions were to be exposed to the effects of radiation with and without protective clothing to discover what the effects would be on them. That gives the lie to the suggestion that adequate safety standards were set. It is rather reminiscent of all the bravado of the cold war years. It betrays an alarming ignorance of the effects of radiation in those early days.
The Minister says that it will be October 1986 before the survey by the National Radiological Board is completed. I believe that that is an unnecessarily long time to wait. Although I respect individual scientists who are working on the survey, I still believe that a body entirely independent of the Government should have undertaken the task. Service men and their families cannot understand why the survey is taking so long to complete. Perhaps the Minister will tell us what progress is being made.
In summary, I should like to make just five points. The survey should be expedited more quickly. Every assistance should be given to the Australian Royal Commission and our own should be established. All files and documents relating to that period should be released. The Crown Proceedings Act should be reviewed and amended to enable people to take the Ministry of Defence to court if they feel that they have suffered grievances as a result of those tests. Finally, a survey of the genetic effects of radiation on children of test blast victims must be urgently undertaken.
I am grateful for the debate, and to the Minister for being here to reply to the points that have been made.
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How instructive (and depressing) that 40 years later the same questions and the same denial of justice has left the son of one of these veterans (who served our country in our armed forces and who died of cancer), puzzling over the origins and cause of his father’s death and his own disabilities, and wondering what might happen to his own son. This is deeply shocking.
Others at the meeting this week described other examples of a disgraceful lack of accountability as, for instance, in the contaminated blood scandal.
All these tragedies, and others, have things in common.
Which is why a Hillsborough Law is so urgently needed.
Such a law is based on the recommendations of the former Bishop of Liverpool, James Jone, in his 2017 report “The Patronising Disposition of Unaccountable Power”, commissioned by the Rt.Hon Theresa May MP.
Five years later, there is still no Government response to the Report’ s recommendations on a) the duty of candour; b) equality of arms at inquests; c) the appointment of an Independent Public Advocate; d) a Charter for Families Bereaved through Public Tragedy. Although today, Dominic Raab MP, the Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, has promised to bring forward legislation to create an Independent Advocate. It is a welcome first step but we will have to see what powers and resources the Advocate will be given – and it is only one plank of the proposed Hillsborough Law. I have tabled a Question in Parliament today challenging the Government to provide a full and comprehensive response to the Report.
A Hillsborough Law would put an end to what Theresa May described as “burning injustices.”
It would:
- Create a new legal duty of candour on public authorities and officials to tell the truth and proactively cooperate with official investigations and inquiries – bringing to an end the depressingly familiar pattern of cover ups and concealment.
- Ensure victims of disasters or state-related deaths are entitled to parity of legal representation during inquests and inquiries. This will mean that bereaved families can get legal aid, just as public money is used to support KC’s.
In his 122 page report Bishop Jones argues that.
“There are others who have found that when, in all innocence and with a good conscience, they have asked questions of those in authority on behalf of those they love, the institution has closed ranks, refused to disclose information, used public money to defend its interests, and acted in a way that was both intimidating and oppressive.”
He was right.
It is also imperative that the inquest procedure is reformed, to enable families to participate fully and be treated with respect and sensitivity, the report concludes. Public bodies should not be allowed to use taxpayers’ money to outspend the families, and so procure far superior legal representation.
The Report says that Coroners should permit family members to read out “pen portraits”, and display images of their dead loved ones, and public bodies must undergo a cultural shift so that they approach inquests as a place to learn lessons and disclose information honestly, not simply attempt to minimise their culpability.
And there must be a “duty of candour” upon police officers, to ensure that they co-operate fully with investigations.
The campaign for a Hillsborough Law is built on the recommendations of that Report and I fully support it.
