The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, should sack Robert Jenrick for “divisive comments,” the Lib Dems have said, after the shadow justice minister doubled down on his comments about immigrants with “alien cultures”.
Jenrick was challenged repeatedly on Tuesday morning for having failed to act on the outcome of an inquiry into grooming gangs while he was in the Home Office, despite now demanding one, and for rarely mentioning the issue in the House of Commons until this year.
Badenoch had previously defended the shadow justice secretary’s right to make the comments, which have caused private disquiet among some Conservative MPs.
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“What I have said is that millions of people have come into our country in recent times, but some of them are coming from countries and cultures that have backwards attitudes to women,” Jenrick told Times Radio. “And that’s backed up by the evidence that we have seen from the Jay report and the testimonies of the victims.
“Pakistani men are over-represented in those who are involved in the grooming gangs, and the evidence we have seen is that some of those have specifically preyed upon white, working-class girls because they viewed them as worthless.”
Prof Alexis Jay’s independent inquiry into child sexual abuse did not conclusively find there was an over-representation of Pakistani men, saying it found a lack of data which meant it was “impossible to know whether any particular ethnic group is over-represented as perpetrators of child sexual exploitation by networks”.
The Liberal Democrat deputy leader, Daisy Cooper, said: “Robert Jenrick’s attempt to exploit this appalling scandal for his own political gain is completely shameless. He didn’t lift a finger to help the victims when a minister, now he’s jumping on the bandwagon and acting like a pound shop Farage.
“Kemi Badenoch should sack him as shadow justice secretary and condemn his divisive comments, instead of letting him run a leadership campaign under her nose.”
Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, Jenrick was challenged on whether he was saying that Britain should bar immigration from certain countries. “I think that it is very difficult to successfully integrate the very large numbers of people who we have had coming into our country in recent years. We should be open about that,” he said.
Asked if he was speaking specifically about Pakistan when he described a “medieval attitude to women,” he said: “I think some people who come from that country do. I’m not saying everybody.
“I’ve always said that point, made by Kemi Badenoch, the leader of my party, that not all cultures are equal. We should be very careful about who is coming into this country and the scale of immigration.”
Jenrick said he would not modify his language, in response to criticism by Boris Johnson’s former adviser on communities and civil society, Samuel Kasamu, who called Jenrick’s comments highly divisive and added that they risked people getting killed.
“This is about young girls being systematically raped for decades, and you’re asking me about disguising my language so as not to offend people. I’m not going to tiptoe around this issue,” Jenrick said.
“MPs have been killed in this country in recent times by a jihadist and by a neo-Nazi. They were killed because of the views of those individuals, not anything an MP has said. We have to fight extremism in this country, wherever we find it, and you fight that by standing up to the extremists, you don’t fight it by shying away, by turning a blind eye, by looking the other way. I’m not going to do that.”
