NICOLA Sturgeon, Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood and UK Green Party co-conveners Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley have signed a joint statement attacking the “toxic rhetoric” of the Tory Party conference.
The conference in Birmingham has been dominated by immigration.
It started on Sunday morning when Theresa May suggested foreign doctors would only work in the “interim” until more UK-trained health workers were available. Jeremy Hunt formalised the position saying he would be increasing the number of training places to end the NHS’s “reliance” on foreign-trained staff.
Brexit Minister Liam Fox then said it would be wrong for May to give assurances to EU nationals living and working in the UK about their status, as this would be giving away one of our “main cards” in negotiations.
Fox, speaking at a fringe event, said the Government would “like to be able to give a reassurance to EU nationals in the UK, but that depends on reciprocation by other countries”.
Any other strategy “would be to hand over one of our main cards in the negotiations and doesn’t necessarily make sense at this point”, he said.
Yesterday Home Secretary Amber Rudd had to deny she was a racist after announcing proposals to force firms to disclose what percentage of their workforce is non-British. Rudd said she wanted to “flush out” companies not employing enough local staff.
May’s keynote speech saw her accuse EU migrants of causing unemployment and bringing down wages.
“If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means,” May told the party faithful.
In their joint cross-party response, the leaders hit out at May and her ministers for interpreting the “narrow vote” to leave the EU “as the pretext for a drastic cutting of ties with Europe, which would have dire economic results – and as an excuse for the most toxic rhetoric on immigration we have seen from any government in living memory.
“This is a profoundly moral question which gets to the heart of what sort of country we think we live in.
“We will not tolerate the contribution of people from overseas to our NHS being called into question or a new version of the divisive rhetoric of ‘British jobs for British workers’. Neither will we allow the people of these islands, no matter how they voted on June 23, to be presented as a reactionary, xenophobic mass whose only concern is somehow taking the UK back to a lost imperial age. At a time of increasing violence and tension, we will call out the actions of politicians who threaten to inflame those same things.”
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