West Ham should drop ‘cruel’ Zouma after cat-kicking video, says Starmer

Sir Keir Starmer has said West Ham should drop “cruel” Kurt Zouma from the team as he criticised their response to a video showing the player kicking a cat.

The France international defender, who was selected against Watford in the Premier League on Tuesday night, has been widely condemned after the video emerged of him dropping, kicking and slapping the pet.

Zouma, who is under investigation by the RSPCA after his two cats were taken into the care of the charity, has been fined “the maximum amount possible” by West Ham.

But Sir Keir has criticised the club’s response to the incident, saying it “needs to do the right thing, which is to drop him”.

Speaking to the BBC on Thursday, the Labour leader said: “I don’t know what they were thinking in playing him the other night.

“That was just a mistake.

“It’s such a bizarre thing to be so cruel like that.

“It’s very, very odd, but I think the club needs to do the right thing, which is to drop him.”

Asked if football clubs in general should do more to ensure their players were held up as “decent role models”, Sir Keir said: “I think they should.

“I think a lot of clubs do this, it is a million miles from where we were 10, 20 years ago.

“But you know, West Ham had a choice,” he said, adding that the club should not have included him at the Watford game on Tuesday.

“I think a lot of their own fans think they shouldn’t have played him and they made a mistake in my view,” he said.

The Labour leader’s comments come after West Ham said Zouma had been fined the “maximum amount possible” – two weeks’ wages, reported to be in the region of £250,000 – which will be donated to animal welfare charities.

Zouma, who joined the Hammers from Chelsea in August 2021, also released a statement,