Jenrick

ROBERT Jenrick should stop lecturing the public on integration, Sir Keir Starmer has blasted.

The PM hit out at the Shadow Justice Secretary after he claimed he “didn’t see another white face” during a visit to Birmingham.

3

3

Sir Keir slammed the comment on Thursday night, saying “it’s quite hard to take anything that Robert Jenrick says seriously.”

He accused the senior Tory of “running a leadership campaign” instead of making serious political arguments.

Speaking on a flight to Mumbai, where he will meet Indian President Narendra Modi, Sir Keir said: “We’re working hard on questions of integration, but we need no lessons or lectures from Robert Jenrick on any of this.

“He’s clearly just engaging in a leadership campaign.”

The row erupted after senior Conservatives rallied behind Mr Jenrick’s claim that Britain must confront “ghettoised communities” and a “dangerous” lack of social cohesion.

Labour figures branded the comments “racist”, but Tory leader Kemi Badenoch defended her colleague, saying there was “nothing wrong with making observations.”

Shadow Cabinet Minister Claire Coutinho also backed him, saying: “If you walk through an area and don’t see a single white face, it is a sign that integration has failed.”

The controversy broke out during the Tory party conference in Manchester after The Guardian obtained a secret recording of Mr Jenrick describing a 90-minute visit to Handsworth earlier this year.

He told members at an Aldridge-Brownhills dinner: “I went to Handsworth in Birmingham the other day to do a video on Twitter and it was absolutely appalling.

“It’s as close as I’ve come to a slum in this country.

“But the other thing I noticed there was that it was one of the worst integrated places I’ve ever been to.

“In fact, in the hour and a half I was filming news there I didn’t see another white face.”

Just nine per cent of Handsworth’s population is white, with most residents of Pakistani, Indian, and Bangladeshi heritage, official data shows.

Asked if he regretted his comments, Mr Jenrick told the BBC: “No, not at all and I won’t shy away from these issues.”

3

He said he mentioned skin colour “because it’s incredibly important that we have a fully integrated society regardless of the colour of their skin or the faith that they abide by.”

He also linked the terror attack in north Manchester last week to a lack of integration.

Ms Badenoch again backed her shadow minister, saying she would take The Guardian report “with a pinch of salt.”

The Tory leader said: “What he and I both agree with is that there are not enough people integrating.

“There are many people who are creating separate communities.”

Labour last night pounced on the remarks, saying Mr Jenrick had “crossed a red line.”

Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick has defended remarks he made in March about the Handsworth area of Birmingham, calling it “one of the worst-integrated places” he had ever been to.

In a recording reportedly made during a dinner and published by the Guardian, Jenrick said he had not seen “another white face” in the hour and a half he spent in Handsworth filming a video about litter.

Jenrick stood by his comments on Tuesday, saying he had no regrets about the language he used.

Labour Party chair Anna Turley criticised Jenrick, saying his comments reduced “people to the colour of their skin”.

Handsworth’s Independent MP Ayoub Khan said the remarks were “not only wildly false but also incredibly irresponsible”.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said she did not know the context of the recording but that Jenrick may have been “making an observation” about his visit to the area.

“I wasn’t there so I can’t say how many faces he saw, but the point is that there are many people in our country who are not integrating,” she told BBC Breakfast on Tuesday, adding she was “very worried about what is happening in Birmingham”.

The authenticity of the recording at the Aldridge-Brownhills Conservative Association is not disputed by Jenrick’s team.

In the recording, he goes on to say: “That’s not the kind of country I want to live in. I want to live in a country where people are properly integrated.

“It’s not about the colour of your skin, or your faith, of course it isn’t. But I want people to be living alongside each other, not parallel lives.”

Asked on BBC Radio 5Live on Tuesday whether he regretted the comments made in the recording, Jenrick said: “No not at all and I won’t shy away from these issues.”

“It’s incredibly important we have a fully integrated society”, he said.

“It’s a very dangerous place if we have a country where people are living in ghettoised communities, where people are not living together side-by-side in harmonious communities. We’ve seen the damage that can do in our society,” he said.

“We’ve had major failures of integration in this country for my whole lifetime. We’ve got to fix it, and that’s the comment I was making in Birmingham the other day.”

Responding to the recording, Labour’s Turley said: “This weekend Kemi Badenoch said she stood against a politics that ‘reduces people to categories and then pits them against each other’.

“Robert Jenrick in his leaked comments reduces people to the colour of their skin and judges his own level of comfort by whether there are other white faces around. His comments clearly cross a red line that his leader has rightly laid down.

“People of colour should not have to justify their Englishness, or their Britishness, or their presence in this country, to Robert Jenrick or anyone else.

“Robert Jenrick needs to urgently explain himself and why these comments are in any way compatible with what his party leader said.”

Asked if the number of white people seen in an area is the right measure for integration on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Badenoch said: “The right measure for integration is that people don’t care what people look like.”

She added: “We are a multiracial country. That means we have to work harder to bring people together.”

She said Jenrick was “making a point which I don’t have the context of”.

“I think we should look at these things in the spirit of what was intended, which I believe knowing Rob and hearing him speak, is that he wants, as I do, a country that is well-integrated”.

Jenrick is due to address the Conservative Party’s annual conference on Tuesday, when he will set out plans to put ministers in charge of sentencing policy.

Khan told the Guardian that Jenrick had “misrepresented a storied and diverse community, awkwardly distorting the product of an all-out bin strike to fit his culture-warrior narrative filled with far-right cliches”.

Former Conservative Mayor of the West Midlands Andy Street told BBC Newsnight: “Putting it bluntly, Robert is wrong.”

“Handsworth, it’s come a hell of a long way in the 40 years since the last civil disturbances there and it’s actually a very integrated place,” he continued.

Street also rejected Jenrick’s recorded comment that Handsworth was “the closest I’ve come to a slum in this country”.

The former mayor noted the “incredible hope, optimism and people taking part in education which is based around British values and thinking how they can make a contribution to the future of their region their city and their area.”

“That is not a definition of a slum,” the former Conservative mayor said.

CRIMINALS will be forced to pay back every penny they steal under proposals being drawn up by Tory Robert Jenrick.

The move could let courts claw back many billions of pounds of ill-gotten gains which would be returned to victims or help tackle crime.

1

Under the proposal, fines on burglars and thieves will be hiked so they have to pay for the full amount of damage they inflict.

Rules which stop courts pursuing criminals for unpaid fines after six years would be torn up so a thief can always be made to pay up.

The shadow justice secretary is proposing the crackdown in an amendment to the Victims and Courts Bill, which is being debated in parliament next week.

Mr Jenrick said: “There’s never been a better time to be a criminal. That has to change: crime should never pay.

“Thieves and burglars must be fined the full cost of the damage they cause.

“If they can’t pay immediately, they should be made to pay it back over their whole lifetime.

“Our criminal justice system must put victims first and yobs last.”

Criminals owe a record £4.4billion in unpaid fines and court fees.

It is made up of over £1bn in fines and £3.4bn in legal costs and confiscation orders slapped on convicts.

This is enough cash to build 20,000 prison places.

Courts can impose fines on criminals as part of their sentence. The size of the fine depends on the severity of the crime and the offender’s ability to pay it.

But thieves and burglars routinely fail to pay up. And some dodge these fines by serving an extra day in prison – racking up a bigger bill for the taxpayer.

Labour have a giant majority in Parliament, so they would have to back the amendment for it to become law.