Keir Starmer has personally stood by Labour’s attack ad that accused Rishi Sunak of not wanting to see child abusers jailed, and denied it was playing on racist tropes about grooming gangs.
The Labour leader said he believed it was accurate to say Sunak did not believe “adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison”, based on the “unforgivable” record of the Conservative government.
He told Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme: “This idea that somehow you can ship in a new prime minister – we’ve had five of them now in the last 13 years – that somehow he doesn’t bear responsibility … They have broken our criminal justice system. It is unforgivable what they have done.”
Asked whether it played into racist stereotypes about Asian grooming gangs, given Sunak is the first British Asian prime minister, Starmer said: “No. The vast majority of child sexual offences are not by people of Asian origin.”
The Labour leader also suggested that Sunak follow his example from when he ran the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in taking responsibility both for success and failure.
Starmer said he had accepted credit when the CPS secured big prosecutions, including a case in which seven transatlantic flights had been targeted in a terrorist plot, and “carried the can” when it did not.
“We prosecuted that successfully, got awards for that and I took the credit for that on behalf of the organisation. Where we got it wrong, I carried the can,” he said.
“And what that meant to me – carrying the can – was identifying what the problem was and what we needed to fix it.
“I looked at the problem, analysed what had gone wrong, rolled up my sleeves and fixed it.”
His comments appeared to allude to Starmer’s apology in 2013 over institutional shortcomings by the CPS over attempts to bring charges against child abuser Jimmy Savile. Boris Johnson was, however, forced to retreat from his accusations in 2022 that Starmer was personally responsible for the decision not to prosecute Savile.
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At the time, Johnson clarified: “I’m talking not about the leader of the opposition’s personal record when he was DPP [director of public prosecutions] and I totally understand that he had nothing to do personally with those decisions. I was making a point about his responsibility for the organisation as a whole.”
Mark Harper, the transport secretary, responded to Starmer’s defence of the attack ad by saying that “personal attacks are not very helpful” and calling it “very disappointing”.
“All people in leadership positions should be trying to conduct politics with a different tone,” he said.
Sunak has also made personal attacks on Starmer by calling him “Sir Softy” at prime minister’s questions – an attempt to portray the Labour leader as soft on crime. However, Starmer has sought to make dealing with crime a central part of Labour’s message.
