Keir Starmer
Main Page: Keir Starmer (Labour - Holborn and St Pancras)Department Debates - View all Keir Starmer's debates with the Cabinet Office
(1 day, 10 hours ago)
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Catherine West (Hornsey and Friern Barnet) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The whole House will be very concerned to hear about the dreadful stabbings this morning in the borough of Barnet. As the Member for Hornsey and Friern Barnet, I am very worried about this repeated violence against the Jewish community. I want to reach out to the whole House to say that we condemn these alleged attacks and wish the police, the council and all the community services the very best in solving this and bringing to justice the perpetrators of these violent crimes.
The Prime Minister
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. I thank my hon. Friend for raising this issue, which I learned about before Prime Minister’s questions. It is deeply concerning to everyone in this House. There is now a police investigation, and we all need to do everything we can to support that investigation and be absolutely clear in our determination to deal with any of these offences, the like of which we have seen too much recently.
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. As you know, I am the secretary to the National Union of Journalists parliamentary group, and I raised earlier this week a point of order concerning the role of the US agency APCO in undertaking the investigation of journalists for Labour Together, which resulted in the smearing of those journalists. I explained that as a result of concern about the reach of APCO’s investigation, a number of hon. Members have submitted subject interest requests to the company and to Labour Together. There has been a delay in the response from Labour Together to those requests, but APCO has confirmed, in a very redacted form, that information on MPs was being collected.
I referred this week to information from a whistleblower —a freelancer involved in the Labour Together inquiry—indicating that APCO had instructed this person to destroy files and material related to the inquiry. Only hours ago, we had it confirmed online by the Financial Times that tapes exist that include conversations by APCO’s head of media relations for Europe, Tom Harper, discussing the deletion of an email account and saying
“they will be able to see that through digital forensics or something like that”
with regard to references and this inquiry. He also refers to processes to “muddy the waters” and the audit trail.
I can also report—[Interruption.] I am sorry for the delay. I can also report that evidence was submitted to the inquiry being run by Sir Laurie Magnus, the Prime Minister’s ethics adviser, by Paul Holden, one of the journalists and victims of the smears, but evidence was not supplied by the Cabinet Office to the secretariat to the Sir Laurie Magnus inquiry.
On behalf of the NUJ parliamentary group, I express our concern—[Interruption.] This is important. The NUJ parliamentary group is concerned about the smearing of journalists. We need to know what surveillance, if any, was taking place of hon. Members and for what purposes. We call again for an independent inquiry into the role of APCO and Labour Together in this issue.