The Prime Minister opened Cabinet by saying this government will
remain relentlessly focused on what matters to working
people around the country. He said that some of the scenes of
police officers being attacked on Saturday, and a march led by a
convicted criminal, were not just shocking but sent a chill
through the spines of people around the country, and particularly
many ethnic minority Britons. He said we are in the fight of our
times between patriotic national renewal and decline and toxic
division. He said the government must heed the patriotic call of
national renewal, and that this was a fight that has to be won.
He said national renewal means thousands of jobs being delivered
across Hartlepool, Nottinghamshire, and Essex with the Civil
Nuclear Partnership being announced this week as part of the
State Visit, and that the visit would deliver further significant
investment and jobs to be announced.
The Prime Minister then turned to the introduction of the
Hillsborough Law today. He said he had an emotional meeting with
families this morning, including Margaret Aspinall. He said he
wanted to meet her at the door to show the people of Liverpool
are as important as any international leader. He said he had
known her for 15 years and knows first-hand the injustice that
the families have carried, both in terms of the grief of their
loss and the injustice piled on injustice since. He said the
lesson of Hillsborough speaks to the experience of families
affected by other scandals from Horizon to Windrush and Grenfell,
and that each of these has one thing in common - which is
ordinary people not listened to because they were not respected.
He said righting that wrong is important to who we are as a
government. The Cabinet discussed that the Bill is as important
as any that a government has brought in, and the Deputy Prime
Minister said there were parallels with the women who
campaigned for equal pay in Dagenham and those who campaigned for
race equality in Bristol, in that it is about tipping the balance
back in the favour of working people and the Government being
insurgents against injustice.
The Prime Minister turned finally to international issues and
updated on his call with the Arab Quint yesterday, where he said
we were at a real moment of risk for diplomacy in the region
following the Israeli attack on Doha. He said that Russia sending
drones into Poland, following their attacks on the British
Council, the European Council and Ukrainian Government buildings
in Kyiv, marked a widening of Russian aggression and a degree of
recklessness not seen until now. He updated that the UK had sent
Typhoons to Poland in support.
