Starmer to criticise Tories’ crime record in visit to city

LABOUR leader Keir Starmer will visit Stoke-on-trent today to deliver a key speech setting out how his party would tackle crime, writes Phil Corrigan.

Sir Keir will tell a Stoke-ontrent audience that it is ‘always working people who pay the heaviest price’ for crime, with many working class communities ‘living under its shadow’.

Referring to his previous career as Director of Public Prosecutions, the Labour leader will say that it is ‘unfinished business’ in his ‘life’s work to deliver justice for working people’. Labour says that if it wins power it will aim to halve serious violent crime and raised confidence in the police and criminal justice system.

Sir Keir will commit Labour to four targets relating to police confidence, solving crime, knife crime, and violence against women and girls. He will also berate the Tories for their record on crime, describing it as ‘complacency on another level’.

Stoke-on-trent is a key target for the Labour Party, following the collapse of the ‘red wall’ in the 2019, with the Tories winning all three parliamentary seats in the Potteries. This is probably why Sir Keir has chosen Stoke-on-trent as the venue for a speech in which he will aim to position Labout as the ‘party of law and order’.

He will say: “I grew up working class in a small town, I know how important it is to feel safe in your community.

“If you don’t have a big house and garden, the streets are where your kids play, your community is your family, your neighbours – your eyes and ears.you have to feel a sense of trust, of confidence, of security, it’s what gives you roots.

“But as somebody who has worked in criminal justice for most of my life, I also know that far too often, the inequalities that still scar our society, class, race, gender, find an expression in the very system that is supposed to protect us all, without discrimination. As Chief Prosecutor, the more and more case files I read, the more and more I could see those ugly inequalities at work.

“That’s why the mission today matters to me. I’m proud of my previous work, proud of my record at the CPS – but this is personal. Yes, it’s Labour’s plan to tackle the crime wave gnawing away at our collective sense of security – of course it is. But it’s also unfinished business in my life’s work to deliver justice for working people.”

The Government has previously been criticised, by Labour and others, over the fall in officer numbers since 2010. Recruitment drives have started to turn this situation around. Staffordshire Police had 1,895 officers in September 2022, up from 1,779 a year earlier, but still below the 2,161 in 2010.

Sir Keir will aim to brand the Conservatives as ‘out of touch’ with working class people on crime and policing.

He will say: “It’s like they can’t see the Britain they’ve created, and maybe that’s it.”