we've all got a big decision to make about who leads the country for the next five years, about who has power and influence in westminster. you get the opportunity to have your say in the election on july the fourth. on monday, we heard from the prime minister rishi sunak and during this campaign we're talking to other party leaders. tonight, it's the turn of the leader of the opposition, labour leader sir keir starmer. sir keir, welcome. thank you very much for having me on. my promise at the start of this interview is that what you say in the next half hour or so will be broadcast in full. i want to give you the chance to make your case, and want you to answer some questions, so if you would do your best to do that. one thing we should also make clear is you don't know what the questions are in advance. thank you. three weeks from today, you could be spending your first night in downing street as our new prime minister. are you ready? yes, i know that we've got to earn every vote and not a seat has been won yet and therefore i'm not complacent about it, but i've spent four and a half years changing the labour party, getting it into a position where we could put our offer before the country. we unveiled our manifesto, a manifesto for wealth creation and for growth, to fix the fundamentals and take our country forward. so, yes, we are prepared, we are ready, but i'm conscious that every single vote has to be earned and we're still at the stage of earning the votes. and in order to earn them, many of our viewers are telling us that they still don't really know what you stand for and what i want to say to them is this is important sales brochure, if you like, at election time, but it's your instincts, it's your values... yeah. ..that may matter as much. so, can we examine the evidence together of what keir starmer stands for and who he is? quite a few subjects to get through. let's start with the big promise at the heart of this manifesto, change — that's what it says on the front cover. now, you say to people, the country is broken and yet when i examine the changes here they're very small. why so? i don't accept they're very small. what we set out in the manifesto is a plan for change, a plan to grow the economy. i think that amongst the biggest problems of the last 14 years has been that the economy has been flat, we haven't grown the economy, and therefore we haven't had the money to put into our public services, which are crumbling, and we haven't been able to raise living standards, so we have to have a plan for growth. this is a bold plan for growth and it's got within it tough things we are going to have to do, like changing the planning regulations, like having a national wealth fund, like having a new industrial strategy, a new skills strategy and making sure that we set up enterprises like gb energy, a publicly owned energy company. you were very clear when you launched this that you hadn't got a magic wand to solve the country's problems, and you've stressed, as you just have, that growth is the key to everything. we'll talk some more, i promise you, about growth. let me tell you what i meant by small, though. you see, in this manifesto there is a promise on schools, for example, you say labour will recruit an extra 6,500 teachers. how many extra teachers per school is that over five years? well, i haven't broken it down per school, to be perfectly honest. 0ne extra teacher for every three schools over five years — that's a third of a teacher per school. two things i'll say about that. firstly, that is set out in the manifesto very clearly as a first step, a down payment, one of the steps that i hope we'll be taking literally on day one of government, starting down that recruitment. the second thing is a particular problem that we are aiming this at is the lack of teachers in specific subjects in secondary school. so, to give you an example, we don't have enough maths teachers in our state secondary schools, so people watching this who have children in state secondary schools will know that, you know, will be familiar with the supply teacher, the pe teacher teaching maths. we have to fix that and that's what the 6,500 teachers is about. it's a first step. it's billed as a first step. it's quite small as a first step, isn't it? it's described as tiny by some of the independent... just on that, if a child doesn't have a maths teacher at the time they need it... it's a big deal forthem, understood. it's not a one—year problem or two—year problem, a budgeting problem, that will live with them for the rest of their lives because they may not be to go on to do a—levels, apprenticeships are really hard to get if you haven't got maths, so it is a very meaningful change for the children that need it. meaningful but relatively small. let me give you another example, the nhs. big sounding promise, 2 million extra nhs appointments a year. there were around 150 million appointments last year, so 2 million extra isn't very much. let me just illustrate that in terms of the budget of the nhs. big numbers, hard to grasp, so what i've got in here is the nhs budget, 100 pennies to illustrate. let's do that, there is the nhs budget. so how much more is sir keir starmer promising? there we are. not even ip, it's not even i% of the budget that you are adding. it's a small promise. well, again, it's a first step, it's a down payment, it's 40,000 extra appointments and operations each and every week so that means operating theatres operating weekends and evenings, 40,000 extra a week, that's 2 million a year and that means that we can get the waiting list down which is the best part of 8 million. you will use all that money for paying off the doctors, you said you will sort the doctors, you might have the doctors, you have mental health, you've got gps, a&e, that could take up that one pence i put down there, the i%. nick, that is specifically for these 40,000 appointments and we've set up the model we want to operate and i do push back on this idea it doesn't really make much difference. if you are on a waiting list right now watching this programme, it makes a huge difference if you can get off that waiting list. i have no end of people coming up to me saying they've been on a waiting list 12 months, i've been told it's going to be another 18 months. that is physically uncomfortable for people. they are often in pain. it also means in many cases they can't get back into the labour market, so again, it's a first step. if you don't you spend the money on other things? the problem you have, you will know, it's all over the front pages of the newspapers on the day after your manifesto launch which is the independent experts, the people we respect about the public finances, say, look, sir keir starmer would have more money, he's actually going to have he's actually going to have less money, because baked into the treasury's figures, figures that you and the labour party have are £18 billion of cuts. that's about 10% of the nhs budget, that's a third of all schools in england will close. you are not being open with people about that, are you? well, look, two things there, nick. firstly, on the nhs, we set out the first steps which is the 40,000 appointments, but we've also made it clear in the manifesto we want to reform the nhs, that we want to make sure that we move to a preventative model where we are catching issues and diseases and scanning much, much earlier, where we are intervening earlier, making much more use of technology and to give an example, ai working with the radiologist is six times better at scanning early for cancer. that's hugely important. what about the 18 billion? do you accept the figure exists? will you say now that labour under sir keir starmer will not cut the courts, the prisons, the roads, council budgets and so on? as far as public services are concerned, obviously i ran one for five years, the crown prosecution service. i believe in our public services and i want to see them properly run and properly funded. firstly, there will be a cash injection straightaway into our police, into our hospitals, into our schools, our first steps, that's the first thing we will do. we will also carry out reform. i know from running a public service that, yes, you can put more money in the top and get a slightly better product but if you want a really better service than you've got to reform and we will have to do public service reform. i'm hearing that. forgive me, i think the viewers will say the question was will there be cuts in other areas and the independent experts say there will be cuts in other areas unless you borrow more or tax more or grow the economy incredibly fast, so are you saying there will be cuts or not? well, nick, first of all, we are not going back to austerity. i ran a public service during austerity. i know what that feels like, i know the damage it did and that's been the legacy of the last 14 years, so we're not going to go to austerity. but secondly, i do want to take on this challenge that you rightly put to me in relation to tax and spend, because the assumption of those that are saying these are the forecasts is we cannot do any better than we've done in the last 14 years, that in other words it's impossible to grow the economy and therefore you're going to have to tax more or spend less. when you are asked a tough question, i have a magic wand, it's called growth. no, no, it's not a wand, it's a plan. that's the complete difference. 0ur manifesto that we launched is the culmination of four years�* work working with business partners, working with others, about what is the change, so i say to every sector, what is inhibiting the growth that you need? and they say to me, let's take big infrastructure projects, plan it, we can't get our roads, our rail, all of our projects are massively over budget and overdue because of planning. industrial strategy. let me ask you a question about that. let's not go through a list, let's deal with one at a time. planning, i'll ask you that, are you saying now because i need to get the economy growing, what i will do is say to someone who is objecting to electricity pylons going across the field near their house, sorry, they've got to be built, we've got to get the economy moving? if you are worried about a new housing development, sorry, that has got to be built. are you prepared to make enemies to make the economy grow? yes. we are going to have to be tough, we are going to have to change the way things are done. i'll give you one short example, i won't take long but it makes my point. i spoke to the ceo of an energy company and said how long would it take you to put a wind turbine farm up, he said, i could do it in two years. he said, you wouldn't get any power out of it for 13 years because i'd lose five years to planning, another six or seven years before the grid connected. we cannot go on like that. i'll give you another example, if i could. we need tough decisions. sorry to rush you but there's quite a lot to get through. are you willing to make enemies on brexit? any business, big business will say to you, if you want to grow the economy, get rid of those barriers or at least minimise those barriers. now, to do it, you are going to have to look at people who voted leave and say, i'm sorry, we need to get closer to the eu to grow oui’ economy. well, nick, we obviously had a referendum on this. i campaigned to remain, i voted to remain, but the vote was to leave. we've left and we are not going back into membership of the eu. you are not that keen on growth. the single market, the customs union. you are not that keen on growth. two things about that, nick, the first is, i do think we can do better than the botched deal we got under borisjohnson. i think every business thinks that. so if there are businesses that are watching this, yes, i hear what you say about the barriers to trade and we are going to do something about that. and the second thing, i think this is important, is if you look at the problems for growth over the last 14 years, they were there, or many of them were there, before brexit. the idea that a single silver bullet is simply a relationship with the eu is not something that i accept. planning, industrial strategy, skills, these are all issues that are there, have been there, and we need to grapple with them. we are going to move on to tax in just a second. underlying, i think, the questions that people are asking about you, and you, when you launch your campaign, said i've got to win people's trust, you said, on money, and on borders and security and we'll come come to those other two. it's this question of who you really are. i want you to look at a photograph here. sometimes this is who you are. there's tony blair, there's keir starmer, spot the difference. well, tony hasn't got his tie done up. and the last election, yes, it's looking a bit more ruffled, at the last election, let's look at how you looked. there you are withjeremy corbyn. now, you said to voters this week, when you had said that he would make a brilliant prime minister, when you said you were 100% behind him, when you said he was your friend, you effectively said you didn't really mean it, you had to say it because i wanted to get labour mps elected. isn't the problem you've got if you didn't mean what you said then, how do we know that you mean what you say now? well, nick, what i said was i didn't think we would win the last election in 2019. i don't think many people did. i'll be surprised if you yourself did. i remember the sense of foreboding when parliament went up for that election, the sense that we were never going to win this election. but you also have a chancellor, rachel reeves, she didn't say he'd make a brilliant prime minister, she didn't even serve him. lots of very good labour mps just said i don't agree with this guy, i'm not going to allow things out of my mouth that i don't believe. nick, look, people took different positions, i accept that. in 2016, i decided i would serve in the shadow cabinet because i thought that it was very important that we had an effective front bench on the question of brexit, which dominated those years, 2016 to 2019. i thought that almost irrespective of the leadership of the labour party this was going to frame the country for many years to come and it was important to be on the front bench. here's another reason i ask. other colleagues took a different approach, i accept that but i thought it was important to be there. two keir starmer manifestos, there is this week's and here is the one you ran to be leader under. they couldn't be more different. let's take this issue of tax that people are raising. here, you talk about economicjustice, you talk about a core principle, you say, i'm in favour of increasing income tax for the top 5% of earners. this is no new taxes, this is yes, new taxes. people are not sure what you really stand for. i took a decision, nick, that we had to change the labour party and drag it closer to the country. and i did that having thought long and hard about the last four elections. because we lost in 2010, 2015, 2017, 2019 and i took the view that that was because we had drifted too far from working people, our central purpose. we had drifted to a place where we were essentially looking and feeling like a party that was looking down on people across the country and we got very badly beaten in 2019. i think the underlying question is, did you mean it when you said it? do you mean what you are saying now? people know that you can change your mind, they know times change. i have changed my mind and the reason for that is having reflected politically on those four losses in a row, i took the decision we needed to change the labour party and drag it closer to the... let's talk about what you do say in this? i would also say this, i think that it's very important we got to a position now we are very firmly saying, "country first, party second". that has to dictate decisions. let's talk about tax, can we in this document? i'llfinishjust this point and then, of course. so when i look at anything that was said or done before by me or anybody else the prism of the test i put it through now is, is it truly country first, party second? if the answer to that is yes, then off we go in the manifesto. if the answer is no, then we are not doing it. understood. i think our party got too far from the country and from working people and i've put it back where i think it should always have been. i ask you because i've covered politics for an awfully long time, what people say in their manifestos is only a tiny part of what they end up doing because of events change. we have to look at your instincts, what you really believe. so let me ask you this, you've got a phrase which is, you are not going to put taxes up for working people, you say, you won't put vat up and you won't... vat, income tax, national insurance, we will not be putting them up. so, viewers have been in touch with us saying, "i don't know what working people means." jamie oliver works, is he a working man, victoria beckham, what about the boss of tesco? they all work, they are all very well paid, they are arguably very rich, are they working people? people who pay their income tax, people who pay national insurance are working people. and that's why we have chosen income tax, national insurance and vat but income tax and national insurance are paid by working people. therefore rich people paying income tax who do work, they are not going to pay higher taxes under keir starmer? no... you are not saying that, you are just saying something much smaller than that? no, across the board for income tax, national insurance and for vat, there will be no increases. but nick, that is why this manifesto is a plan for change, a plan for growth. i know you say it's just a manifesto. i said yesterday, no surprises, no rabbits out of the hat, that is four years work... i don't mean you have a secret plan, i mean that things happen and people have to react and people want to know how you're going to react... let me give you an example, if i could. people know what you are not saying. they know you are saying you will not increase certain taxes, but they know that you are not replying when asked questions. i don't want to waste your time and i don't want to waste the viewers�* time, but there are working people, for example, people who have built up a small business, go and sell it, they make what is called a capital gains, it's worth more than when they bought it in the first place — it might be a newsagents or a florist. it is labour going to increase the tax that working person pays in capital gains? nick, all of our plans are set out in the manifesto... so they might? let me finish the sentence. all our plans are set out in the manifesto, fully costed, fully funded and none of them, none of them, all launched yesterday, require tax increases over and above the ones we've set out. we are going to deal with the non—dom tax status, we are going to deal with the private equity loophole, with the tax break for private schools and they are tax we need to introduce or to extend on oil and gas companies. but none of our plans require any other tax rises. plans change, just like sir keir starmer�*s opinions change, events change... nick... and its possible, isn't it? if you are not ruling it out, people who have got a business, may be going to sell their house and think it's never been charged with capital gains tax before, they've got to think maybe these guys will need the money, like the experts say and they'll come for me? nick, let me explain. unlike some labour leaders that may have sat in a chair like this in an interview with you, my manifesto is about wealth creation. this is a party of wealth creation, of growth. an