“I want women to be leading on all fronts,” Sir Keir Starmer tells GH
Good Housekeeping readers have had a chance to quiz Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer about NHS reform, climate change and policing as part of an exclusive, wide-ranging video interview.
In an interview at his House of Commons office, Sir Keir answered questions from readers about the issues they are most worried about.
Questions were collected from members of the Good Housekeeping reader panel. They were put to Sir Keir by Jackie Brown, features director of GH, in the first part of a new ‘Readers ask the leaders’ series in the run-up to the General Election.
The most pressing concern among readers is the state of the NHS, vocalised by one woman who wanted to know how Labour would reduce waiting lists and support staff with better pay and working conditions.
“We have to pick the NHS back up and put it on its feet,” said Sir Keir, whose wife, Victoria, works in a North London hospital. Later, he added: “The Labour Party created it, it’s one of the proudest things that any Government has ever done. But I want it to last for the next 75 years, not just look back fondly on the last 75 or so years. That means we have got to reform it, change it and make sure that health provision is closer to people where they are in their community.”
He talked about low morale among staff, saying: “At the moment a lot of the staff feel they are not respected. They were clapped in the pandemic and now the Government blames them for the waiting lists.”
Sir Keir challenged a criticism from a reader who accused the two main parties of rolling back on net zero promises and said it was a hugely important issue for Labour. “We are custodians of the planet for our children. It is a huge challenge already: it is going to get worse. All of our commitments to net zero have to remain in place - we mustn’t move the dates on that, and we won’t move the dates on that.”
On crime, he outlined plans for 13,000 more police officers, with many more neighbourhood officers doing community policing. “They tend to pick up a lot of information on the ground and that can help with antisocial behaviour. Some people say antisocial behaviour is low-level. It is not low-level.”
He highlighted the tragedies caused by knife crime. “Meet any parent of a young person who has been killed and it is heart-rending. Now I have got a 15-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl it is hard, really hard, to hear these stories.
“First of all you have to ban some of those knives. These Zombie knives you can buy online, that is just ridiculous…You can just put them on a list of things that cannot be bought online. The Government has said I don’t know how many times they are going to do it - they haven’t done it yet. We just need to get on with it.”
Tackling violence against women and girls is another major priority for Sir Keir, who is former head of the Crown Prosecution Service. “I know how pernicious it is. Only one in ten domestic violence, sexual violence cases is actually reported. We have to roll up our sleeves and tackle this. I have said our determination is to halve violence against women and girls under a Labour government.”
Sir Keir is also determined to improve equality for women if he makes it to No 10. “I want women to be leading on all fronts,” he said.
“We [Labour] had a brilliant event for women entrepreneurs, we had brilliant women who were at the top of their game in terms of innovation, business ideas - but we still don’t have that represented across any one of the key professions. We still don’t genuinely have equality…There is so much more work still to be done.”
Hearing about one older reader who was struggling to live on the State Pension, Sir Keir said: “Everybody feels that older people have had it really tough.”
He talked about one 84-year-old woman he met in winter last year when energy bills were soaring. “She did not get out of bed until midday because she didn’t want to put the heating on. When she did get out of bed she had this thermal jacket she wore all day long because she didn’t want to put the heating up very high. That is an awful position to put a pensioner in.”
And he talked about the challenges of dealing with so many international problems.
“It is a more volatile world now than any one of us have known for some considerable period. Whether that is the Middle East, whether it is Ukraine, whether it is Syria, whether it is the relationship with China. The answer I would give is that global leadership matters.
"I feel we need to restore our reputation as a country on the global stage so we are taken seriously, so that we are a genuine contributor to resolving these issues….That requires leadership, it requires us to restore the reputation of the UK so that other countries think the UK is a leader on this, we can pull people together and what we say and do matters on the international stage. Play our full part.”
Further episodes of Good Housekeeping Readers Ask The Leaders are coming soon.
You Might Also Like
