YP Comment: Theresa May lays down the law on Hillsborough

Yet the tables were turned when Theresa May used her setpiece speech to tear into the police over the Hillsborough disaster while praising the courage of all those who fought to overturn a 27-year miscarriage of justice.

A powerful passage spoken from the heart by the one Home Secretary prepared to face up to this terrible injustice, it spoke volumes that those present listened in stunned silence rather than acknowledging all those who showed up the police’s failings, culminating in last month’s inquest verdict of unlawful killing.

If the police are under the view that this will be the end of the matter, they’re very much mistaken. A Home Secretary not for turning, Mrs May described how “the poison of decades-old misdeeds” has seeped down through the years and created a damaging and corrosive culture which has betrayed the public’s trust. The uncompromising message and delivery made for difficult listening.

Though she did not name-check Orgreave – calls for an inquiry into the police handling of this totemic event in the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike have been growing following The Yorkshire Post’s exclusive revelations that the same South Yorkshire officers investigated this flashpoint and the Hillsborough tragedy five years later 
– Mrs May does, on this evidence, appear minded to order a fresh probe and should seek to do so at the earliest opportunity following today’s State Opening of Parliament.

Justice delayed is justice denied and some of the unanswered questions about the Hillsborough cover-up, and “doctoring” of police statements, appears to date back to Orgreave and a growing body of evidence, again disclosed by this newspaper, that the Thatcher government was prepared to turn a blind eye to any malpractice on 
the part of the South Yorkshire force.

Significantly Nick Timothy, the Home Secretary’s former chief of staff, is among those to endorse a new review. Immediately prior to Mrs May’s speech, he wrote: “Getting to the bottom of cases like Orgreave is the only way in which we can make sure that the police really are the public and the public really are the police.”

However new inquiries do take time – time which the police, and the embattled South Yorkshire force in particular, do not have on their side. In this regard, the onus is on the policing profession winning back lost trust by upholding the highest standards of integrity at all times. As Mrs May told delegates: “Justice: it’s what you deal in. It is your business. And you, the police, are its custodians.” Wise words, this message needs to be heard loud and clear by all ranks.

Get Leeds moving: Time for new direction of travel

FIRST the Leeds trolleybus plan hit the buffers because the £250m scheme was botched from the outset. Now consultants have delivered a scathing verdict on City Connect, the £30m “cycle superhighway” from east Leeds to Bradford. Given how poor planning, and weak scrutiny, has beset both schemes, these questions now need reconciling: What is the area’s transport strategy and who is responsible for its delivery?

Flawed decision-making, and mismanagement, appears to be fuelling a transport crisis which has left Leeds gridlocked and derided as one of Europe’s most polluted and congested cities – “get it right in the first place” is the only mantra that matters. Like the rest of the county, Leeds is home to global investors who have contributed much to the area’s resurgence.Their pride in their city remains palpable, but they – and others – are hamstrung by a pre-historic transport infrastructure and the serial failure of council leaders to implement a travel blueprint so Leeds can become a European superpower capable of attracting the next generation of global business talent.

However it does not inspire confidence that many of the same executives and councillors responsible for the trolleybus fiasco, which saw £72m of taxpayers’ money go to waste, are the same people who have presided over City Connect’s troubled journey alongside counterparts from other bodies.

Leeds Council chief executive Tom Riordan, and senior councillors like James Lewis and Keith Wakefield may not like this, but perhaps they need to ask themselves whether they are the best qualified people to drive transport policy forward – or if they need to headhunt the country’s top civil engineers in order to get their city, and region, moving again.

The response from Leeds Civic Hall’s upper echelons to this point, and also the issue of accountability, is now awaited with interest by all those held up on a daily basis by a dysfunctional transport policy which lacks direction and credibility.