Donald Trump and senior Conservatives have helped to create a space for “overt racism” that has spilled on to British streets, a Home Office minister has told Labour delegates.
Angela Eagle, the minister in charge of irregular migration, said the Republican presidential candidate had helped to create “vitriol” against migrants through social media.
She said unnamed rightwing Tories had used language that had given a “yellow flashing light” to racists, using a “toxic discourse” as they fought off the challenge from the Reform party.
Speaking at a fringe meeting at the Labour conference on Monday, she said it was difficult for new immigrants to “rise above the constant drumbeat of toxic anti-immigration, anti-immigrant rhetoric that has become emboldened, not only in Britain but across the western countries”.
“I mean, Trump does the same. If you look at some of the memes that he’s using with the wall stuff at the moment, it’s astonishing, quite the level of vitriol that it has created,” she added.
She told the Refugee Council meeting that the Tories’ obsession with the challenge from Reform as the general election approached had prompted the party’s ministers to use “toxic” language against asylum seekers.
“We had a discourse as the right of the Conservative party got more and more obsessed with what Reform was doing that was very toxic indeed, othering asylum seekers, othering human beings in general, and creating a space, I think, for overt racism on our streets.
“Because let’s face it, talking about asylum seekers in the way that some government ministers did, at least gave, let me say, at least a yellow flashing light to people that wanted to indulge in a discourse about people whose skin wasn’t the colour that they wanted it to be.
“Let’s just put it that way. And I think creating that kind of toxic discourse around asylum is a real problem,” she said.
Asked which former ministers she was referring to, she told the Guardian: “I won’t name them but you can probably guess.”
Eagle said she wanted to make the processing of asylum seekers less traumatic. “A lot of people who claim asylum in this country have been through horrific experiences and often had a difficult journey, may have been abused in various ways on the way, and have traumatic experience which will cause them mental anguish. And what we need in our system is to create a system which doesn’t make that worse and deals with them quickly and fairly.
“That’s the ideal. It doesn’t sound like much, but it will be a major change if we manage to bring it about clearly,” she said. “There’s a clear connection between being an immigrant and mental health issues because of racism.”
She said the government would stop the “industrialisation of small boat crossings” by cooperating with other countries.
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“[We are] shifting some of the money from the failed Rwanda scheme into trying to deal with the gangs that are currently getting people across the Channel in an uncontrolled way for money, exploiting people, putting their lives at risk, [so that they] are actually dealt with in a proper way. And that means actually cooperating with our neighbours in Europe, rather than blaming them the whole time for allowing people to come here,” she said.
“It means actually being able to go upstream and do operational work with other law enforcement agencies to deal with gangs, who are cross-border and very, very established in the way in which they work. That requires intelligence capability. It requires international cooperation, which is why we put more resource into our presence in Europol. It requires us dealing with our counterparts in Europe and beyond, to deal with the threats that this trade represents.”
On Tuesday, the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, will tell the conference hall that “impunity that built up during the Tory years” encouraged criminals to riot across the UK this summer.
In an address to delegates, she will announce powers to respond to antisocial behaviour, shoplifting and off-road bikes, with more neighbourhood police expected in communities.
Cooper will bat away claims from some commentators that the riots were a form of protest. She will say: “Don’t tell me it was about immigration, or policing, or poverty. Plenty of people across Britain have strong views. On immigration, on crime, on the NHS and more. But they don’t pick up bricks and throw them at police officers. They don’t set light to buildings when they can see people trapped inside.
“It happened because criminals thought they would get away with it. They saw the cracks in the system. The impunity that built up through the Tory years. And when they decided to run riot those early August days, they thought no one would stop them. They were wrong.”