PMQs: Starmer accuses Johnson of protecting statues, not women

Boris Johnson and Sir Keir Starmer agreed that Sarah Everard’s death must be a “turning point” in the treatment of women at today’s PMQs, temporarily setting aside their differences to call for cross-party co-operation to address the issue.

The Prime Minister said the government was doing everything it could to address the issue, but that “unless and until we have a change in our culture that acknowledges and understands that women currently do not feel they are being heard, we will not fix this problem”.

 The Labour leader agreed, saying: “Now the awful events of the last week have lifted a veil on the epidemic of violence against women and girls, this must also be a watershed moment to change how we as a society treat women and girls, and how we prevent and end sexual violence and harassment”.

Both leaders agreed that politicians must “work together” to bring about a change but clashed over which policies should be implemented to prevent sexual violence. The standoff came after Labour voted against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, saying it should be revised to include provisions which would better protect women and girls.

Starmer used his questions to grill Johnson on three specific measures to better protect women: new protections against street harassment, a timetable for a ‘Victim’s Law’ to give people the right to abuse support services, and longer sentences for sexual violence.

Responding to Starmer’s point on street harassment, Johnson said the government was “always happy to look at new proposals”, but that they were already introducing tougher sanctions on stalkers. He condemned Labour’s decision to vote against yesterday’s Bill, saying: “We did a lot to protect women and girls, and it would have been good in a cross-party way to have had the support of the opposition”.

Hitting back with one of the headline criticisms of the Bill, Starmer said it did “a lot more about protecting statues than it did about protecting women”, before returning to the collaborative “spirit” of his questioning. He pointed out that nine out of ten women do not feel confident to report sexual violence and asked the PM to commit to a timetable for introducing a ‘Victim’s Law’ – a demand that the PM avoided.

The final clash came over the issue of rape prosecution. “98.5 per cent of reported rapes don’t lead to a prosecution. That’s a shocking statistic,” Starmer told MPs, before asking Johnson what he was going to do about it “not in a few years’ time, not next year, but now”. The PM said the government was investing in the issue and “doing what we can” to toughen the penalties for the “overwhelmingly” male perpetrators of these crimes.

Starmer finished his line of questioning by thanking the PM for “providing me with the best examples of why the priorities in his Bill were so wrong,” and saying: “If this house came together on the points raised today… it will make a real difference to victims of crime.”

But for all of the talk of “collegiate spirit”, the session did little more than prove how far away the leaders are from agreeing on policies to prevent the shocking levels of sexual violence laid bare by the death of Sarah Everard.