As an actor, Idris Elba set up one of the most memorable betrayals in TV history when his character Stringer Bell arranged the murder of D’Angelo Barksdale. In real life Hackney’s most famous son has been lied to and betrayed by Keir Starmer.  Though in real life, virtually everyone who has chosen to believe Starmer has been lied to.

Elba has been a high profile campaigner against knife crime for several years. His BBC investigation Our Knife Crime Crisis was an unsensationalised look at the impact it has on families and a plea for adequately funded strategies. His conclusions were very simple and entirely obvious to anyone familiar with the subject. Identify young people who are at risk and put support in place for them. As he pointed out, a place in a young offenders’ centre costs about £120 000 a year. The mentoring, support and diversionary activities Elba looked at are much cheaper.

Having pointed out that the Tories cut youth spending by 50%, Elba was staking a lot on the election of a Labour government. In a viscerally cynical piece of electioneering Stamer invited him and the families of several young people who’d been murdered with knives to a campaign event. As we now know, Starmer and Reeves want to take the concerns of the tax dodging “non-dom community” into account. Back then he told Elba that squeezing the non-doms would provide the money for youth services and diversionary schemes.

Elba is too much a diplomat to get angry on camera and maybe he’s been made promises of good things to come, but an on screen caption reminded us that last October’s budget didn’t give a single extra penny to youth services.

Labour seems to be on a mission to give young people reasons not to vote for it. This week alone it has committed to heating the planet further with a new Heathrow runway and is strongly signalling that it will insist on the opening of more North Sea oil fields. Its support for genocide in Gaza and its growing authoritarian streak will repulse any young person with internationalist or ecological ideas.

One surprising person who does seem to take the issue seriously is Charles Windsor. We know nothing of Starmer’s parents but Mr Windsor was born into unimaginable wealth and has probably never had to take his own socks out of a drawer. Nevertheless, his engagement with the issue was a real contrast to Starmer’s use of grieving families as part of an election campaign based on lies.

Every single person interviewed for the programme has a tragic story to tell and they all talk of moments when things could have gone in a different direction. Having done very well for himself, Starmer has decided to kick the ladder away from working class kids. Idris Elba, on the other hand carries on battling for them.