Starmer expected to defend his record on rape gangs in Q&A after health reform speech – UK politics live updates | Politics
Starmer expected to defend record on rape gangs after health reform speech
Good morning. Prime ministers like to focus on what they think is important and there are few issues more important in the UK than the state of the NHS. On his first proper day back at work after the Christmas holidays, Keir Starmer is giving a speech on this, and Andrew Gregory has previewed it here.
I’ll be covering the speech, and reaction to it, in detail as the day goes on.
But prime ministers also have to communicate via the media, and for years they have had to deal with the fact that that British papers have their own agenda, and are largely hostile to Labour governments. Social media is even worse. And that is why Starmer is expected to find his post-speech Q&A dominated by questions about a child abuse scandal from about 20 years ago.
Part of the coverage has been driven by false and absurd claims about Starmer and Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister. Politicians, and journalists, normally work on the basis that they can ignore loudmouth idiots and that they should only pay attention to figures of authority. But, with Donald Trump about to become US president again, what happens if the figure of authority is also a loudmouth idiot – or at least presents as one? The current Oldham rape gang controversy has been stirred up by tweets from Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and leading Trump ally, but it is an early indication of some of the problems Trump’s social media outbursts are likely to cause when he returns to the White House.
Over recent weeks Downing Street has generally said little or nothing about Musk many inflammatory comments about Starmer on X, the social media platform he owns. Other ministers have stuck to the same line, although at the weekend Wes Streeting, the health secretary, described Musk’s attack on Phillips as “appalling”. (Whether this was encouraged by No 10, or just freelance retaliation, was not clear.)
Today Starmer himself is expected to hit back, not so much by attacking Musk personally, as by defending his own record dealing with child abuse cases when he was director of public prosecutions. In a report in the Times, Steven Swinford says:
The prime minister is expected to respond to [Musk’s claim that he was “complict in the rape of Britain”] on Monday as he holds a major press conference about his plans to cut NHS waiting lists. He is expected to say that he gave the “green light” to prosecuting paedophile gangs in Rochdale in 2013 and highlight the fact he introduced reforms to the way the Crown Prosecution Service handles child abuse cases. He also introduced a national network of specialist prosecutors to look into child abuse and sexual exploitation.
The prime minister is also likely to issue a forthright defence of Phillips and the work she has done in tackling violence against women and girls. Both Labour and the Tories have said that Musk’s comments about Phillips are inaccurate.
Chris Mason, the BBC’s political editor, has had a similar briefing. Speaking on the Today programme this morning, he said he expected Starmer to say that the debate about how child abuse cases were handled should be “grounded in verifiable facts”.
We’ll hear Starmer’s own words soon. Here is the agenda for the day.
10am: Keir Starmer delivers his speech on the elective reform plan, the proposals to ensure the NHS in England hits its target of ensuring that by 2029 92% of patients don’t have to wait more than 18 weeks for an operation. But he is also taking questions from the media, and is expected to be asked about a range of issues that have been in the news over the holiday period.
2.30pm: John Healey, the defence secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
After 3.30pm: MPs debate a backbench motion calling for the government to investigate ways of seizing frozen Russian assets in the UK and using them to fund Ukraine.
4.30pm: MPs hold a debate in Westminster Hall on the petition saying there should be a fresh general election.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
Key events
Starmer declines to respond to Musk's suggestion 'tyrannical' UK government should be overthrown
Starmer is now taking questions.
Q: [From Hugh Pym, the BBC’s health editor] By focusing on cutting waiting lists, are you downgrading other health targets. And will A&E lose out?
Starmer says just because the NHS is prioritising waiting lists, that does not mean other areas are being neglected. “We can walk and chew gum,” he says.
Q: What do you think of Elon Musk calling for the tyrannical UK goverment to be overthrown? [See 9.54am.]
Starmer replies simply:
In relation to that, I don’t really have any comment on the particular comment that was made this morning by Musk.
Starmer is now summarising some of the measures in the elective reform plan.
Here is the summary from the news release.
Further measures include:
Using the NHS app to give patients greater choice and control over their treatment. This includes making sure patients can get better access to information via the app, such as the details of their appointments, results and waiting times, and use it to book appointments in the location of their choice, with information about waiting times and patient satisfaction.
Preventing unnecessary referrals. GPs will be funded to work with hospital doctors to get specialist advice before making referrals, so that more patients get the care they need without being referred onto the waiting list.
Giving patients choice over non essential follow up appointments as part of a drive to free up around 1 million appointments a year for those who need them.
Making more appointments available in the community instead of hospitals. More treatment for five specialties with particular pressure on waiting lists will also be made available outside of hospital through targeted reforms, including Ear Nose and Throat services, where around 30% of referrals currently made to secondary care could be provided in the community.
Making convenience for patients a priority through the roll out of innovative ‘collective care’ approaches, for example, one stop clinics where patients can be assessed, diagnosed or reviewed on the same day; where appropriate, offering group appointments where patients with long term conditions may benefit from being supported together; opening ‘super clinics’ which bring together a wider range of clinicians to oversee patient care under the oversight of a consultant, increasing the number of patients seen in a day.
Driving up patient experience through a set of national standards for elective care. We will publish minimum standards that patients should expect to experience in elective care, including giving patients a shortlist of providers to choose from and clarity on how long they are likely to wait. In turn these standards will make it easier to identify where performance is falling short and how to improve it.
Starmer says he wants to see NHS services organised around patient control.
He says the recent pilots for Martha’s rule are showing how this can make a difference.
It’s about a shift in the balance of power away from passive deference to doctors and towards patients being able to get that second opinion, play a greater role in deciding their care and their treatment.
The early results of Martha’s rule are in, lives of some of the sickest patients in our care transformed, extended and saved and so it’s a rule that’s now being recognised as potentially groundbreaking in its innovation.
Starmer says there was a record £25bn investment in the NHS in the budget.
And this will fund “40,000 extra appointments every single week”, he says.
But the money must be tied to reform, he says.
Let me be crystal clear, that money will be used, not as it has been in the past as just papering over the cracks. That’s the definition of the sticking plaster politics that we were elected to change.
This is the year we roll up our sleeves and reform the NHS.
Starmer reminds the audience that his wife and sister work for the NHS, as his mother did. And he says, if it had not been for the care his mother got from the NHS for her Still’s disease, “I wouldn’t be standing here in front of you today”.
He says every family in the country has a story like this to tell about the NHS.
Starmer says there is “no institution more important for the security of our country than the National Health Service”.
But he says the public are not happy with it because of the state it has been left in.
So 2025 is about rebuilding Britain, and rebuilding our NHS is the cornerstone of that, and that’s why I wanted to come here to make this speech this morning.
We will, of course, protect the principles we all cherish, that you work to every day – care free at the point of use, treatment according to need.
But, to catapult the service into the future, we need an NHS that is reformed from top to bottom.
Starmer gives speech on how NHS will cut waiting lists in England
Keir Starmer is delivering his speech about the elective reform plan now.
Here is the Downing Street news release sent out overnight previewing what he is announcing.
One problem for Keir Starmer is that, while he can ignore Elon Musk, he cannot ignore Donald Trump, and it is not clear what Trump himself thinks of Musk’s social media vitriol about Starmer, the Labour government and the UK. There at least five possibilities.
1) ‘Great stuff, that’s what I think too.”
2) ‘Elon’s going over the top, but if the socialist Labour government is frightened I agree, that might not be a bad thing.’
3) ‘Elon’s going too far, and he has forgotten who is really the boss.’
4) ‘Elon’s going too far, and it is not helpful because it might undermine relations with an ally.’
5) ‘What tweets? Who cares?’
The answer is probably a mixture of 2), 3) and 4), with occasional moments of 1) and 5), but I’m afraid I don’t actually know. If I find anyone who does, I will post what they say here.
Elon Musk is, if anything, escalating his social media on Labour. In the last few hours, in his feed on X, he has been posting more comments about the child abuse scandal in the UK, adding Gordon Brown to his list of villains, and running a poll on whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government”. More than 270,000 people have responded, and currently 68% are saying yes.
How should a PM respond to this sort of lunacy. In his recent book, On Leadership, the former Labour prime minister Tony Blair offers a reasonable answer. He says:
The public reads it, creates it, but also has an innate sense that the description I have just given of it [that a lot of what is on social media is hateful and false] is essentially true. Therefore, they buffet politicians with it, and at the same time want politicians to be strong enough to withstand it and treat it with the respect it deserves - which is often not much.
Never underestimate the degree to which people crave leadership. Back to Moses again. The Israelites simultaneously hated and craved his leadership. If you remember, they reached the promised land (though, yes, I know, he didn’t).
In the social media world, strength as a political Leader, always important, becomes even more so. The worst the people can think of you as a Leader is that you are bullied - or bulliable, if there is such a word. Even some of those who agree with the criticism being made don’t want to see you bend. The more ferocious the onslaught, the more the reward for staying upright.
Surf the wave of every passing current of Twitter opinion, and you may enjoy spasmodic popularity, but you will ultimately be disregarded as a Leader. People want a sense not that someone is indifferent to what social media is saying - it can be revealing an important truth – but that you as a Leader are prepared to be the rock on which the wave breaks, not be swept away by it.
Child abuse inquiry chair declines to back calls for new Oldham probe, and says her recommendations should be implemented
The Conservative party and Reform UK have both been calling for a public inquiry into the Oldham child abuse scandal. They have been saying this in response to a report last week saying the government had rejected a request from Oldham council for a national inquiry. Given that there have been other inquiries into what happened in Oldham, as well as a seven-year, all-encompassing inquiry into child abuse in Britain, the case for a new inquiry might seem weak. But the story has attracted a lot of attention in part because Elon Musk has been endlessly posting inflammatory tweets about this on X.
Prof Alexis Jay, who chaired the national child abuse inquiry, has not backed calls for a new inquiry into what happened at Oldham. As the BBC reports, in a statement she has instead called for the “full implementation” of the recommendations she set out in her own report. She says:
Our mission is not to call for new inquiries but to advocate for the full implementation of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse’s recommendations. A child protection authority is critical to this process.
Labour say it will implement the recommendations from the 2022 report “at pace”. In a statement yesterday the party said:
The Conservatives spent years dragging their feet and failing to implement the recommendations in Prof Jay’s report, which they praised for its thoroughness. The hypocrisy of Tory politicians is shameful and disrespects the victims of these vile crimes.
Now is the time for action and delivery. This Labour government will act at pace to implement the Jay recommendations to protect young girls from horrific sexual abuse. We will protect women and girls where the Tories failed.
Starmer expected to defend record on rape gangs after health reform speech
Good morning. Prime ministers like to focus on what they think is important and there are few issues more important in the UK than the state of the NHS. On his first proper day back at work after the Christmas holidays, Keir Starmer is giving a speech on this, and Andrew Gregory has previewed it here.
I’ll be covering the speech, and reaction to it, in detail as the day goes on.
But prime ministers also have to communicate via the media, and for years they have had to deal with the fact that that British papers have their own agenda, and are largely hostile to Labour governments. Social media is even worse. And that is why Starmer is expected to find his post-speech Q&A dominated by questions about a child abuse scandal from about 20 years ago.
Part of the coverage has been driven by false and absurd claims about Starmer and Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister. Politicians, and journalists, normally work on the basis that they can ignore loudmouth idiots and that they should only pay attention to figures of authority. But, with Donald Trump about to become US president again, what happens if the figure of authority is also a loudmouth idiot – or at least presents as one? The current Oldham rape gang controversy has been stirred up by tweets from Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and leading Trump ally, but it is an early indication of some of the problems Trump’s social media outbursts are likely to cause when he returns to the White House.
Over recent weeks Downing Street has generally said little or nothing about Musk many inflammatory comments about Starmer on X, the social media platform he owns. Other ministers have stuck to the same line, although at the weekend Wes Streeting, the health secretary, described Musk’s attack on Phillips as “appalling”. (Whether this was encouraged by No 10, or just freelance retaliation, was not clear.)
Today Starmer himself is expected to hit back, not so much by attacking Musk personally, as by defending his own record dealing with child abuse cases when he was director of public prosecutions. In a report in the Times, Steven Swinford says:
The prime minister is expected to respond to [Musk’s claim that he was “complict in the rape of Britain”] on Monday as he holds a major press conference about his plans to cut NHS waiting lists. He is expected to say that he gave the “green light” to prosecuting paedophile gangs in Rochdale in 2013 and highlight the fact he introduced reforms to the way the Crown Prosecution Service handles child abuse cases. He also introduced a national network of specialist prosecutors to look into child abuse and sexual exploitation.
The prime minister is also likely to issue a forthright defence of Phillips and the work she has done in tackling violence against women and girls. Both Labour and the Tories have said that Musk’s comments about Phillips are inaccurate.
Chris Mason, the BBC’s political editor, has had a similar briefing. Speaking on the Today programme this morning, he said he expected Starmer to say that the debate about how child abuse cases were handled should be “grounded in verifiable facts”.
We’ll hear Starmer’s own words soon. Here is the agenda for the day.
10am: Keir Starmer delivers his speech on the elective reform plan, the proposals to ensure the NHS in England hits its target of ensuring that by 2029 92% of patients don’t have to wait more than 18 weeks for an operation. But he is also taking questions from the media, and is expected to be asked about a range of issues that have been in the news over the holiday period.
2.30pm: John Healey, the defence secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
After 3.30pm: MPs debate a backbench motion calling for the government to investigate ways of seizing frozen Russian assets in the UK and using them to fund Ukraine.
4.30pm: MPs hold a debate in Westminster Hall on the petition saying there should be a fresh general election.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
