Starmer ends the phone-in by praising Arsenal for its performance yesterday, and saying he hopes the fan who kicked the Arsenal goalkeeper gets banned.
Q: Would Labour support Ukraine even more than the current government?
Starmer says Labour would certainly do as much as the government is doing. He says it might go further, but he says he is not saying that to criticise the government.
He praises Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, for acting in lockstep with Nato on this.
Labour will not play party politics with this, he says.
Q: How do you respond to the Daily Mail claims from last week that you are breaking many of the promises you made when you were running for leader?
Starmer has a lot has changed in the last three years. We have had Covid, and the economy is a lot poorer than it was, he says. Leaders have to respond to the changest that happen, he says. And he says people in the Labour party overwhelming support the changes he has made to the party.
Starmer is now responding to a call from a trans woman from Edinburgh, Amber, who says she was concerned by what he said in his BBC interview yesterday about being opposed to the Scottish government’s bill.
Starmer says he thinks 16 is too young for people to be able to self-certify as a different gender. He would go for 18, he says.
He also says he is worried this issue is being used by the SNP as a “devolution football”, and that it is being used by the government as a “divisive football”.
Q: What do you mean by divisive football?
Starmer says he thinks the government are using this to divide people.
He says he will wait and see what they do. But this issue should not be a politcal football.
Amber says Scottish Labour MSPs voted for the Scottish bill. So what does Starmer say to them. They got amendments to the bill accepted.
Starmer says not all Labour amendments were accepted, “and that troubles me”.
But this is becoming a UK-wide issue, he says. That is why he has to make his position clear, he says.
Nick Ferrari asks about the shooting at Euston at the weekend, which was in Keir Starmer’s constituency.
Starmer says it was awful. He is concerned about the access people have to guns. He says we need to “look again” at whether gun laws are “strong enough”.
He says there are many illegally held guns. But there are also guns that are legally owned, but are in the hands of people who should not them.
Q: So you would make gun ownership tougher?
Yes, says Starmer.
Q: Outlawed completely?
No, says Starmer. He says people like farmers need guns. And he is not opposed to organisations like gun clubs.
Starmer defended his decision to take a donation from Dale Vince, who has also funded Just Stop Oil. Starmer said he was strongly opposed to the tactics used by Just Stop Oil. He indicated he was concerned that, despite what they say, they do obstruct ambulances. When he saw footage of protests like that, he thought it might have been his own mum in the back of that ambulance, he said. (She was frequently hospitalised because of a serious disability.)
Q: Do you support the government’s plan to take new powers to deal with these protests?
Starmer said he was not convinced the police did need new powers.
If the police need legal clarity, they should get a lawyer to give a strong opinion, and test it in court, he said.
Keir Starmer is doing his LBC phone-in, with Nick Ferrari presenting.
Ferrari started by turning to the NHS, and Starmer’s Telegraph article about NHS reform. He introduced the first caller.
Q: You have promised to slash bureaucracy within GP services. How will you do this when the service is already in crisis?
Starmer said the accepted the service was in crisis. His wife works in a big London hospital, he said. Labour would get rid of the non-dom tax exemption to fund extra staff for the NHS, he says.
On bureaucracy, he said there should be more preventative medicine. He said some people could refer themselves to physios, instead of having to go through a GP.
The eight o’clock call to get a GP appointment is a nightmare, he said.
Q: You said yesterday that if you needed internal bleeding, you should be able to refer yourself for tests. How will you know if you have internal bleeding?
(My colleage Owen Jones was one of those particularly outraged by this remark.)
Starmer said he was on TV and trying to be delicate. He was referring to blood you might see when you go to the toilet.
In this case, people should be able to self-refer, he said.
Q: Isn’t there a risk of too many people referring themselves, after consulting “Dr Google?”
Starmer said he accepted you would need to consult on this. But he said the idea had merit.
Q: The BMA says this is unlikely to allieviate pressure on the NHS.
Starmer said he did not want to go to war with the BMA. But reform was necessary, he said. He said he imposed reform as DPP. When he started, they still used paper files.He could not believe that. He started the move towards digitial files. People were opposed to that, but things had to change, he said.
Good morning. It it quite a busy day at Westminster, and there is a lot of news definitely coming: the results of strike ballots that will decide if teaching strikes go ahead, a meeting that could pave the way for the intenstification of Northern Ireland protocol talks with the EU, and the debate on the government’s anti-strikes bill.
But there is also a lot of interest this morning in news that might come today, or maybe later this week. George Parker in the Financial Times, firming up a story reported by the Times last week, says Rishi Sunak “is set to use a constitutional ‘nuclear option’ for the first time by blocking legislation passed by the Scottish parliament that seeks to make it easier for people north of the border to legally change their gender”. Parker says:
One senior government figure said: “There isn’t much disagreement that legally we have to act.” A decision could be taken as soon as Monday and Alister Jack, the Scotland secretary, is said to be fully supportive of the intervention.
My colleague Peter Walker says the final decision has not yet been taken, but that the FT is right about the direction in which the government is heading.
So that may, or may not be, a story for today.
In Scotland most Conservative MSPs opposed the Scottish government’s gender recognition reform (Scotland) bill. But Jamie Greene, the party’s justice spokesperson, was one of three Tory MSPs who voted for the bill in the final vote (it was a free vote) and he has written to Rishi Sunak urging him not to block the bill. As Mike Wade reports in the Times, Greene said:
I fear the UK government’s rumoured moves to block the Scottish gender recognition reform bill will set us back years. This move could be a gift to proponents of independence who may accuse us of tearing up the devolution settlement.
It could be a gift to Labour, as we show to LGBT+ people, their friends and their families, that we are happy to leave the centre ground for others as we fail to live up to our promise to govern with compassion …
We must not treat trans people as a political football. Make no mistake. This could also fuel accusations of riding roughshod over devolution. It may also give the SNP-led Scottish government the welcome gift of a fight.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9am: Keir Starmer holds his ‘Call Keir’ phone-in on LBC.
Morning: GMB officials representing ambulance staff meet to discuss further strike action.
Morning: James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, holds a virtual meeting with Maro? ?ef?ovi?, the European Commission vice president and EU Brexit negotiator, about the Northern Ireland protocol.
11am: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, holds a press conference about the situation in the NHS in Scotland.
11.30am: Downing Street holds its lobby briefing.
Afternoon: The NEU and NAHT teaching unions are due to announce the results of their strike ballots.
After 3.30pm: MP begin debating the second reading of the strikes (minimum service levels) bill.
3pm: Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, gives evidence to the Commons Treasury committee.
I’ll try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions, and if they are of general interest I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.
If you want to attract my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter. I’m on @AndrewSparrow.
Alternatively, you can email me at andrew.sparrow@theguardian.com
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