Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said he wants to make it harder to buy dangerous weapons online as he pledged to "double down" on efforts to tackle knife crime."Far too many knives are too easily available, whether that's online, whether that's through the post," he said.There are examples of knives "bought online being posted through without any markings, and then people picking them up without any identification, and then those knives being used".It is "just too shocking - that needs to be dealt with".At a summit at No 10, attended by Luther star and knife crime campaigner Idris Elba, Sir Keir said: "Before the election, I made commitments to people around this table and others in relation to a determination to deal with knife crime. And it is a determination."He added: "Now I want to double down on that commitment. It wasn't a commitment said before the election that's then forgotten the other side of the election - I think many people are far too familiar with that kind of politics."
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00:00Nobody around this table needs me to describe again the terrible impact that
00:06knife crime has on the lives of so many in our communities, particularly young
00:10lives in too many cases. And knife crime has gone up, not down, in recent years not
00:15withstanding the steps that have been taken. So we need to deal with that. Today we've
00:20got a number of strands to that which we can explore. I won't go through them in
00:24great detail. Availability is one. Far too many knives are too easily available.
00:31We've met a few times, we've talked about this before your seat in government and
00:36everything you said you were going to do, we're here, we're doing it. So thank you for doing that.
00:41Why am I here? I guess I'm here as a concerned citizen and as a parent.
00:47Five, six years ago I started an organisation called Don't Stop the Future in reaction to a young lady
00:53that lost her life outside of a tube station. I was just appalled. And I used Instagram, I used social media and the effect of that was incredible that people wanted to hear a voice like myself that had a soapbox to use and speak up and say something.
01:11Five years later, six years later though, unfortunately we're still talking and, you know, talk is good, but action is more important.
01:22One of the things that the Prime Minister and I spoke about during this run up to here was how do we make the action points, what does that look like?
01:33It felt that we needed the coalition, we needed joined up thinking, we needed so many different perspectives, parents' perspectives, youth workers' perspectives, charity organisations, governance, policing.
01:50We need all these perspectives to sit round the table and think about this.