THE MOTHER of the first person in the world to have air pollution listed as their cause of death has accused Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer of refusing to listen to medical experts.

Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah lost her nine-year-old daughter Ella Roberta in 2013 after she suffered a series of asthma attacks which were found, in a 2020 inquest, to have been “contributed to by excessive air pollution” in London.

Ms Adoo-Kissi-Debrah has campaigned for the last decade for anti-pollution measures, but has been dismayed by Sir Keir’s apparent abandoning of support for London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez).

“Let me take a deep breath,” she said on Sky News earlier today.

“Keir Starmer went to the Crick [Institute], and met a respiratory consultant who showed him X-rays of someone with lung cancer … down to air pollution — and he was on board [with Ulez] two weeks ago.

“Keir tells us he’s going to bring in a new clean air Act. How are you going to bring in a new clean air Act if you are wobbling over Ulez?

“That tells me he hasn’t been listening.”

Sir Keir’s position on Ulez appears to have shifted in recent months, and senior Labour politicians have citied the policy as the reason the party narrowly missed out on winning the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election.

He told Labour’s national policy forum (NPF) at the weekend that “we are doing something very wrong if policies put forward by the Labour Party end up on each and every Tory leaflet.

“We’ve got to face up to that and learn the lessons.”

Not all in Labour share that analysis, however.

“Wildfires are sweeping Europe, but Keir Starmer doesn’t seem to have noticed,” climate campaigner and member of the Labour’s Scottish executive committee Coll McCail told the Star today.

“Barely content to pay lip service to the severity of the crisis, now the Labour leader is preparing to juggernaut what’s left of his ‘green’ agenda.

“Ulez is the latest casualty of Starmer’s focus-grouped pander. It joins a list that includes nationalised energy and, recently, the £28 billion investment plan.

“Starmer has made it very clear that he considers climate activists his enemy. It doesn’t take a genius to work out who he wants for friends.

“Tepid, mainstream political ambition continues to fall woefully short of the action necessary to mitigate climate collapse.

“The planet is burning, but Labour’s leadership won’t break the ‘fiscal rules’ imposed by the people who lit the match.”

Mr McCail’s accusations of “focus-grouped pander” echo the reactions by many on the party’s left to Sir Keir’s declaration to the BBC’s Laura Kuenessberg that the two-child cap “stays.”

His shift to retain the Tory policy — branded as the “worst of the welfare reforms of the last 13 years” by Poverty Alliance director Peter Kelly — was widely condemned both inside and outside the Labour Party, but remained in place after attempts to reverse it were thwarted at the forum.

The outcome has left Scottish Labour’s Anas Sarwar, who vowed last week that he would “press for change” under attack from the SNP.

SNP’s Kirsten Oswald MP commented: “Anas Sarwar must come clean over the Labour Party’s formal decision to keep the Tory two-child cap.

“Either Scottish Labour Party representatives were completely ignored, or they broke their promise and failed to vote against the two-child cap. Which was it?”