U.S. President Donald J. Trump is a “racist” who “sympathises” with Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, Labour MP David Lammy has claimed.
The former higher education minister made the statement on Twitter, where he vowed to “be out protesting on the streets” when Trump makes a state visit to Britain and even threatened to chain himself to the door of Number 10.
Earlier, Lammy had told a Labour Party conference fringe event, organised by alt-left open borders-backing campaign group Stand Up to Racism, that Trump is a “racist” who counts “Ku Klux members” amongst his closest advisors.
“We need to marshal our efforts to fight. I will be on the streets when eventually they cave in and let Donald Trump into this country,” the Daily Mail reported him as saying.
“The man is a racist. The man has Ku Klux members in his inner team. The man thinks it is OK to have protesting Nazis on the streets.
“Of course I will campaign against it. If I have to chain myself to the door of Number 10 this black man will do it.”
Lammy also claimed that Britain is sleepwalking into fascism thanks to Boris Johnson’s use of “nasty politics” in attempts to secure Brexit, and television appearances by Leave champion Nigel Farage.
Accusing the Foreign Secretary of “playing a game”, he told activists in Brighton: “We must stand up to it because it is the same nasty politics that we saw in the 1920s and 30s and we see where it led to.
“It is not a joke to put Nigel Farage on to and panel shows every week. It is not funny. There is nothing funny about vulnerability.”
Proclaiming, “We need to put race back on the agenda in the country”, the Tottenham MP also alleged at the event that Brexit backers voted to leave the European Union (EU) in the hope of removing non-white people from Britain
“I have come to the view that there were people who went to the polls and voted leave and what they meant is that you, you, you and you and me should leave,” he said, pointing to activists around the room.
Critics slammed a report on the criminal justice system in England and Wales by Lammy published earlier this month, which urged more lenient treatment for ethnic minority suspects.
The Labour politician’s claim that disproportionate rates of imprisonment among some minority ethnic groups are as a result of “overt discrimination” in the criminal justice system was debunked by Civitas chief David Green.
“[Lammy’s] selective use of statistics suggests that he was determined to find discrimination whether it was there or not,” concludes Green’s Spectator piece, which analyses each of the MP’s claims.
Former Deputy Mayor of London for Culture and Education Munira Mirza came to a similar conclusion about the report, which he warned “could do more harm than good”, in an article which points out that statistics in the Lammy report failed to back up the Labour figure’s allegation that “institutional racism” plagues the criminal justice system.
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