From 3h ago
Keir Starmer is starting his LBC phone-in. He is broadcasting from Hartlepool.
Nick Ferrari, the presenter, starts by asking about the Rishi Sunak announcement about grooming gangs.
Starmer says, on child exploitation, we should do anything possible.
He says, as DPP, he gave the green light to prosecute the Rochdale case. That involved Pakistani men, he points out.
On mandatory reporting, he says he called for that 10 years ago.
That is “a decade lost”, he says.
That is 10 years ago and this government has been in power now for 13 years. That is a decade lost and I think the prime minister and others have to really explain why they have wasted that decade.
On ethnicity, he says “the vast majority” of sexual abuse cases do not involve ethnic minorities.
It is right that ethnicity should not be a bar, and political correctness should not get in the way of prosecutions. But the vast majority of sexual abuse cases do not involved those of ethnic minorities and so I am all for clamping down on any kind of case, but if we are going to be serious we have to be honest about what the overlook is.
And he says it was really instructive for him, when his team asked him for permission to prosecute the Rochdale cases, one of the men they were prosecuting had been arrested but not charged some years before.
He asked why. And what he found was that good faith police officers, and good faith prosecutors, had made assumptions about the young girl victims. Because they had not reported the abuse early, and because they had gone back to the perpetrators, and because they had been drinking, it was assumed they would not be believed.
He says he insisted on a change in approach.
Rishi Sunak has claimed that gangs that groom children for sexual abuse are more common than people are willing to acknowledge. He made the comment at a meeting at the NSPCC office in Leeds, where he was meeting members of the new grooming gangs taskforce being set up.
In a clip broadcast by Sky News, he said:
The fact that grooming gangs are preying on young people … is a huge failing, both morally and practically.
Now, the problem is more prevalent in our communities that people have been comfortable acknowledging. And that’s why as prime minister I vowed a major crackdown to bring the perpetrators of this awful crime to justice.
After summing up how the taskforce will work (the government published details overnight), and confirming that the government will make involvement in a grooming gang a statutory aggravating factor during sentencing, Sunak said that taken together these were “a very significant set of actions”.
There was more news than usual in today’s ‘Call Keir’ LBC phone-in. Here are the main lines.
Keir Starmer accused the government of a “decade lost” for child protection, saying that the government is only now implementing something he proposed a decade ago. He was referring to a law saying professionals working with children should be under a legal obligation to report suspected abuse. The government says today it will implement this. Starmer called for this in 2013, after standing down as director of public prosecutions. (See 9.12am.)
He implicitly criticised Rishi Sunak’s claim that “political correctness” is to blame for minority ethnic grooming gangs escaping prosecution, saying the “vast majority” of abuse cases do not involve ethnic minorities. (See 9.12am.)
He said grooming a child to go into drugs or a gang-related activity should be a specific offence. The current law was unsatisfactory, he said.
At the moment we’ve just got a clumsy way of trying to see whether there’s some other offence. Make it a criminal offence and clamp down on it because it is shocking what happens with young children.
He defended his statement in an interview at the weekend that 99.9% of women do not have a penis. The presenter, Nick Ferrari, said that meant one in a thousand, and that that was too high. Starmer said he was not making a precise, numerical claim. He said he was making the point that for the “vast, vast, vast majority'” of women gender is biological, but that he was also not prepared to ignore the fact that some people are trans. He said he was trying to set out “a common sense, respectable, tolerant position”. Starmer used the 99.9% figure in an interview with the Sunday Times published yesterday. In its report it said:
According to the 2021 census, 262,000 people in Britain — 0.5 per cent of the population — stated that their gender identity was different to their sex registered at birth. Of those, 48,000 — 0.1 per cent — identified as a trans woman.
He said “almost nobody” asked him about trans issues when he was campaigning. He said:
As we go around the country campaigning, I talk to thousands and thousands and thousands of people and they want to talk to me about the cost of living crisis, they want to talk to me about the fact they can’t pay their bills, they want to know what they’re going to do about their council tax. Almost nobody, but nobody, is talking about trans issues. And I do sometimes just wonder why on earth we spend so much of our time discussing something which isn’t a feature at the dinner table or the kitchen table or the cafe table or the bar.
He said Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP who says she has been marginalised in the party because she speaks up for women’s sex-based rights in the context of trans issues, was an “important voice” in the party. He denied a claim that he had not spoken to her since 2021.
He said that “of course” Brexit was a factor in the delays experienced by travellers at Dover at the weekend. In an interview yesterday Suella Braverman, the home secretary, said Brexit was not an issue. But Starmer said:
Of course Brexit has had an impact. There are more checks to be done. That doesn’t mean that I am advocating a reversal of Brexit, I am not. I have always said there is no case now for going back in.
He said the government should “get a grip”. He said:
Once we left, it was obvious that what had to happen at the border would change.
Whichever way you voted that was obvious. Whichever way you voted you are entitled to have a government that recognises that and plans ahead.
Yet again we have got to the first big holiday of the year and we have got queues to the great frustration of many families trying to get out to have a well-earned holiday, and I think my message to the government, their message, would be get a grip.
He said he did not regard Jeremy Corbyn as a friend. When it was put to him that he had described him as a friend in January 2020, Starmer said that was a reference to the fact that they had worked together. He said Corbyn was never a friend “in the sense that we used to visit each other or anything like that”.
He said Labour would reconsider the smart motorway programme if it won the election. He said the party had already caused for a pause in the rollout of smart motorways. He went on:
We’ve seen the safety problems with these schemes. We need to look again at them in my view.
The NSPCC and experts on grooming gangs have warned ministers against framing the issue as one based around ethnicity, warning this could hamper efforts to tackle a crime that a Home Office report said was carried out predominantly by white men, Peter Walker reports.
Parents in England face another wave of strikes and school closures after teachers belonging to the National Education Union decisively rejected the government’s pay offer, Richard Adams reports.
Q: Would Labour get rid of smart motorways?
Starmer says there are clearly safety problems with them, so Labour would look at this again, he says.
And that’s the end of the Q&A.
Ferrari ends by asking Starmer about his comment at the weekend that 99.9% of women do not have a penis.
Q: Does that mean one woman in 1,000 has a penis?
Starmer says he does not want to get into a debate about numbers.
He says “biology matters”. Women have won many rights, and he does not want to see those rolled back, he says. He says his comment at the weekend was acknowleding that there are a small number of people who are transgender.
He says “almost nobody” asks about trans issues when he is out campaigning. He asks why the media spends so much time discussing a question that does not feature in ordinary conversations.
Q: When will Sue Gray start working for you?
Starmer says the committee deciding when she can start, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba), is still looking at that.
Starmer says grooming a child to go into drugs or gang related activitity should be a specific offence.
At the moment this has to be prosecuted under other offences, he says.
Q: Will you renationalise water companies?
Starmer says he has looked at this. But renationalisation would cost an awful lot of money. He says he would rather spend the money training doctors and nurses.
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