Sir Keir Starmer and actor Idris Elba met the families of knife crime victims, as Labour announced its pledge to crackdown on the sale and possession of dangerous knives.
The Labour leader has confirmed he plans to introduce legislation known as Ronan’s Law, named after Ronan Kanda, 16, who was murdered with a ninja sword in 2022.
It comes as part of Labour’s “moral mission” to halve knife crime within a decade and to address the “scourge of serious violence”.
The party wants ministers, victims and tech giants to work together to tackle the sale of weapons online and cut knife crime on the streets, while Sir Keir has pledged an annual summit to track progress in meeting the goal of halving knife crime incidents within a decade.
He told reporters – if elected – he would stop the online sale of zombie knives “straight away”, adding: “The government has failed on this issue. We will not fail on this issue.”
Speaking to families, including Ronan’s mother Pooja Kanda, and the parents of Ben Kinsella, who was killed in 2008, Starmer said: “I feel strongly about this. We have to work together to try to reduce knife crime.
“If you are a family suffering from the indescribable grief of losing a child due to knife crime, you’re not going to care whether it’s a Labour or Conservative politician who takes action.”
Pastor Lorraine Jones, whose son Dwayne Simpson was stabbed to death in 2014, said: “We want to work. We want to be around the table because we do have the answers.
“Right now we’ve got patrols in Brixton, volunteers that are patrolling before school and after school, because we haven’t got enough police officers.
“And the most horrible thing is, they’re saying it’s becoming the norm – we don’t want it to become the norm. It is not normal for us to be burying our children, or for five-year-olds to be seeing dead bodies, shrines in our neighbourhoods. It’s not normal.”
George Kinsella said: “We as a family have seen four different Prime Ministers and all of them have promised change, and it’s not happened. I want to see a proper long-term plan, not just a quick fix.”
Speaking to reporters at the knife crime event, Starmer said the parents’ experiences were “difficult to hear and should be difficult to hear. It’s very important that it is heard from beginning to end.”
He said: “When I was chief prosecutor, if a bereaved family wanted to come and see me I always said yes, and listened to what they told me. Some of the big changes we brought about in criminal justice were because of conversations like that.
“Nobody should be comfortable listening to those stories… we’re going to do something about this. We’re going to fix this. We can’t fix it in the true sense they would like, which is that it should never have happened in the first place.
“But we can do what they’re asking, which is to work with them to make sure we change things in the future.”
Commenting on Labour’s announcement, policing minister Chris Philp said: “When Keir Starmer was in charge of the Crown Prosecution Service convictions for weapon possession fell, and knife crime has risen by 20 per cent in Labour-run London.”
He said the Tories had a plan to recruit 8,000 more police officers, adding: “The choice at the election is clear: cracking down on crime with Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives, or back to square one with Keir Starmer and the same old Labour who consistently fail to tackle crime.”