Tory suggests UK towns are like 'foreign countries' as he defends Braverman
A Tory MP has suggested people feel like they're "living in a foreign country" in UK town centres in a veiled swipe at Suella Braverman's critics.
Tom Hunt defended the Home Secretary's vile comment that multiculturalism had failed in Britain and claimed it is not xenophobic “to not want to feel like you’re living in a foreign country” when you walk into your town centre. His comments came in a heated debate in which an audience member questioned whether their language was stoking racism.
Speaking at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, he told a packed room of Tory activists the "important thing" was to consider a number of factors when deciding what level we want net migration to be. "We should view it in the round not purely through lenses of GDP - [but] GDP per capita, pressure on public services, and actually cohesive communities," he said.
"Because, being frank, it is not xenophobic to - when you walk into your town centre - to not want to feel like you’re living in a foreign country. I don’t think that makes you a xenophobe.” He added that he thinks it makes you someone who wants “shared values” in your community.
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg spoke about British workers not wanting to pick soft fruit (PA)Mr Hunt was speaking at a rally for the hard-right Tory faction, the New Conservatives. The group of Tory MPs set out five policy pledges including to “reduce immigration by halving the number of visas awarded to migrant workers, foreign students and their families”.
Teachers, civil servants and train drivers walk out in biggest strike in decade
Their extreme proposals on migration have come under fire as they include scrapping a scheme to fast-track workers in the care sector for visas. This is despite care homes and providers battling massive labour shortages which have contributed to NHS backlogs and ambulance response times plummeting.
Mr Hunt praised the Illegal Migration Act as “the furthest we’ve ever gone”. He defended Ms Braverman’s speech in which she claimed multiculturalism in Britain “has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it".
“We’ve got a Home Secretary who is doing a sterling job," he said. "Personally I welcomed her speech last week. I thought it was brilliant and actually a lot of people have told me that. I think she was brave to say it and whoever is incessantly briefing against her, with not even the braveness to actually say it publicly, shame on them.”
Former Minister Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, who also sat on the panel, said the UK needed to “halve legal migration and stop illegal migration”. “What we have to do is really be capitalist about this and think about free trade and comparative advantage,” he said.
“If British workers do not want to pick soft fruit, soft fruit should be grown in warmer countries where the workers do want to fit it, We are not a country that will do everything. We should not want to be a country that does everything however lowly paid. We should be a country that aims for the high productive jobs that are well paid and give hope to the least well off of my constituents.”
The two Tories were confronted by an audience member about whether their language around migration stirred up racism. The person asked: “Do you think your rhetoric does actually ferment the racism towards EU migrants that have lived here for two decades or one decade because I’ve almost lived here for a decade and just a month ago, my mother and I were told to get the the f*** out of this country?”
Sir Jacob said whoever was “rude” to them was a “disgrace” as he said that having the courage “to move to a country where you don’t necessarily speak the language to create a better life for yourself and for your family” was “the most wonderfully Conservative thing to do”. He added: “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t now control our borders that limit the migration because we were having numbers that were more than we could take.”
The New Conservatives’ conference event was a brazen attempt to challenge Rishi Sunak, with the launch of an alternative Tory manifesto including pledges to ban gender ideology in schools and cut taxes for families and businesses. The agenda is supported by other high-profile Tories including former Home Secretary Dame Priti Patel and ex-Conservative Party chairman Sir Jake Berry.
* Follow Mirror Politics on,, and.
Read more similar news:
Comments:
comments powered by Disqus
