Keir Starmer has vowed to make tackling knife crime a “moral mission” at an emotional meeting with victims’ families and the actor Idris Elba.
The Labour leader said he would take the “strongest action in a generation” if elected and told campaigners to hold him to account on his progress within six months.
At the Lyric theatre in Hammersmith, , west London, Starmer met the families of victims including Ronan Kanda, who was stabbed to death aged 16 in 2022 in Wolverhampton, and Dwayne Simpson, who was 20 when he was stabbed to death on the street in Brixton in 2014.
Elba, who launched a campaign to tackle knife crime earlier this year, met Starmer one-to-one before they had a conversation with the victims’ families.
The actor said the young people he had spoken to in his work put forward their own solutions to reduce knife crime. “They’re smart, you ask them. I’ve had conversations which are difficult, like ‘Idris, you’re telling people to put away our knives, but what am I going to hold?’
“And I feel like I don’t know what to say to them, because they’re literally holding these out of fear. But they have solutions. Some of them say, listen, if there were tougher sentences, they’d be like, not sure if I want to go to jail for that.”
Speaking about obtaining knives through the post, he said: “Some are saying that there’s too many loopholes – even if you banned it at the Post Office, I could just go and get someone else’s ID and do it.
“They know all the loopholes, so let’s just use your creative minds and go, OK, let’s find ways to help.”
Speaking to the families, Starmer said he had told campaigners to contact him and hold him to account for his progress within three to six months if he becomes prime minister.
Asked what could be done in that timeframe he told reporters: “Well, I think that there are some things we can do very quickly. This question of banning the online sale of knives should have been done years ago.”
The Labour leader vowed to stop the online sale of zombie knives “straight away” and criticised ministers for failing to do so despite repeated promises.
“The government has announced 16 times that they’re going to ban the online sale of zombie knives … Knife crime now is up 81% since 2015.”
Cutting knife crime will be a “moral mission” for the next Labour government, he added.
“We will not fail on this issue. There are other measures, one of the families here – their son was murdered by a knife that was sent through the post by a shop, ordered online in ordinary packaging and picked up by a 15-year-old who didn’t need to show any identification.
“It’s not rocket science. I will stop that straight away and I think it’s so outrageous that that can even happen,” he said.
Asked about the use of stop and search, Starmer said it was “an important tool” but that it was for the police to decide how much to use it.
