Labour leadership: Keir Starmer vows to protect Portsmouth families from financial ruin after coronavirus crisis

Speaking to The News during an online event last night, Sir Keir, who is the bookies’ favourite to take over from Jeremy Corbyn on Saturday, said he would battle to hold the government to account.

And in a pledge to Portsmouth, the former Brexit spokesman said he would fight to prevent another decade of cuts and recession as a result of sweeping financial measures put in place to tackle the pandemic.

He said: ‘Portsmouth is a thriving city. I have been here three or four times and seen the innovation that’s going on there and it absolutely needs to be supported.

‘We have got to make sure that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past and decide the only way out of this, over the next decade, is to go through the sort of cuts we have had in the last decade.

‘That will not help people in Portsmouth or anywhere else.’

The Labour contender pledged to build on work to safeguard incomes of families during the health crisis and promised to address ‘gaps’ still in the system.

He added: ‘We need to take this in stages. We pushed the government to support people who might lose their job by putting an income guarantee scheme in.

‘We have pushed them on self-employment. Now that’s not a scheme which is good as it should be but it is a step in the right direction.

‘There are gaps still at the moment with people who are either on contracts of employment or are self-employed.

‘So there’s the shoring up that needs to be done and that’s very important in Portsmouth and across the country.’

He criticised the government for the level of tests being rolled out nationwide for Covid-19 and said it 'desperately needed to be improved’.

‘We need to ramp up that testing because we need to have a viable exit strategy from the situation we’re currently in and testing is an integral part of it,' he said.

Sir Keir also called for a radical rethink in how parliamentary business was dealt with and appealed for more digital debates at the Commons to be staged.

‘It is wrong that parliament is in recess for the best part of a month. Parliament should be sitting at a time like this,’ he said.

‘We need to be much more innovative about how parliament sits. If it can’t sit physically, or all MPs can’t be in the same room, we need to think about how we can work virtually.

‘The select committees are doing work virtually and we need to think about how parliament can do that too.

‘But it is very important that whoever is leading the Labour Party on Saturday is out there on the front foot, holding the government to account from the get go.’

He added he would look to bolster Labour’s reputation after a crushing defeat in December’s election.

‘This is a question of trust; people have lost trust in the Labour party as a force for good and a force for change and we need to restore that trust,’ he said.

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