A common thread goes through all the justice campaigns of the last half century and beyond.
It links Hillsborough to Grenfell, the scandals of unnecessary Covid deaths to contaminated blood, and joins nuclear test veterans to the Peterloo massacre which was covered up by the authorities in 1819.
It’s how the state protects itself when it knows it is culpable.
Every family who has lost a loved one in any one of those scandals knows how it goes. Ministerial denials, missing paperwork, untruths, victim-blaming.
As Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram puts it, “denial, obfuscation, cover up, smears”.
His fellow North West mayor, Greater Manchester’s Andy Burnham, puts it another way.
“ It is too hard to get the state to tell the truth at the first time of asking,” he says.
“We need to level up the scales of justice in this country in favour of ordinary people.”
The mayors’ Hillsborough Law aims to do exactly this – to build a bereaved families and survivors’ charter that prevents other families going through the hell the families of the 97 have endured for more than three decades.
This week, the campaign brought together different people fighting the state in every corner of the land.
They are asking for those in power to be compelled to tell the truth, and for parity of legal funding.
“I could give 1,000 reasons why we should all support the Hillsborough Law,” says Margaret Aspinall, the Liverpool mum who has never stopped trying to bring to justice those who caused her son James’s death at the 1989 FA Cup semi-final.
She focused on one reason – ‘duty of candour’ – a duty to tell the truth that campaigners want to see enshrined in law.
“It’s a disgrace that we even have to say this,” she says.
Margaret said she frequently wondered how history could have been different had police officers been compelled to tell the truth at the Taylor inquiry into Hillsborough, way back in 1989-1990.
“They weren’t under oath,” she says. “Is that why we got the wrong verdict all those years ago?”
The Champions League final in Paris, where Liverpool fans were tear-gassed against metal railings, is at the forefront of her mind.
“Look what happened in Paris,” Margaret says. “Exactly the bloody same. Pardon my French.”
Burnham may be better known for taking on Hillsborough when he was the Labour Secretary of State for Sport.
But he used his final speech as an MP in Parliament to argue for justice for those affected by the contaminated blood scandal.
“We say we don’t want the pain the Hillsborough families went through happening to others – but it is,” Burnham says.
“We have unaccountable power in this country. Pain and suffering is being repeated.”
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He spoke about the courage of people with haemophilia and other bleeding disorders who were infected with HIV and hepatitis viruses in the 1970s and 1980s and still face a cover-up.
“Then you hear that Covid documents are being destroyed,” he said.
“If the Government had implemented Bishop James’ recommendations in 2017, the struggle of the Grenfell families would have been lessened. That’s one reason alone to enact this law.”
Wednesday’s meeting comes five years after Bishop James Jones, who chaired an inquiry into Hillsborough, wrote a damning report called The Patronising Disposition of Unaccountable Power.
The Government has implemented none of his recommendations.
“It is an affront to natural justice to not enact the Hillsborough Law,” Bishop Jones says.
“State agencies are lawyered up, while the families are defenceless”. He adds: “At the moment police can withhold or even destroy vital evidence.”
Labour MP Ian Byrne was 17 when he went to watch the semi-final at Hillsborough.
He had left early when the girlfriend he was watching the game with started to feel uneasy, but witnessed Liverpool fans crushed to death.
His father was injured in the tragedy. Next day Byrne awoke to find Liverpool fans had been branded murderers.
Now he has vowed to take the Hillsborough Law through Parliament with fellow Merseyside MP Maria Eagle, who has campaigned for many years for a Public Advocate Bill “to torpedo the cover-ups”.
They want to see all parties include the law in their manifestos. “An election may be imminent,” Byrne says.
More than a few tears were shed at Wednesday’s meeting as the bereaved and survivors shared the pain of how battling the state for the truth has scarred and re-traumatised them.
“Not much makes me cry after what’s happened to me, but this has today,” says Hannah Brady of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice.
“I’m so proud to be here. I remember learning at school about Hillsborough and contaminated blood as though it was history.
“We never think these things will happen to us.”
Ed Daffarn from Grenfell United called for “parity of arms” between victims and the state.
Jason Evans, from blood campaign group Factor 8, said: “Ours is a campaign of many sick and dying people. The fight has harmed people even more.”
Steve Purse, whose dad David was a nuclear test veteran, said the Government’s tactic was “Delay, deny and wait for the truth to die.”
He explained he fought on because “my son, Sasha, deserves the truth”.
As Pete Weatherby QC, who led the Hillsborough justice legal team, says, there is “something depressingly familiar about all these stories”.
But there is something else too.
The campaign to change the law has threaded together diverse justice campaigns, bringing together people who uniquely understand each other’s pain.
Parents who have lost children.
Children who have lost parents. People who just simply want the truth.
Together these families are unstoppable.
A coming together of the most extraordinary grassroots campaigners in the country.
Andy Burnham was also struck by the power of the event.
“The power of all these justice campaigns as they come together is undeniable,” he says.
Kye Gbangbola, still seeking the truth about what happened to his seven-year-old son Zane, summed it up perfectly.
“Many injustices,” he says. “One struggle”.
