19 April 2023 , 23:01
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Home Secretary Suella Braverman has shrugged off accusations of racism, claiming: “You can’t please all of the people any of the time.”
The controversial Cabinet Minister sparked fury earlier this month with comments about Asian grooming gangs as the Government launched its latest crackdown on child sexual abuse.
Announcing plans for a new police taskforce to tackle offenders, Mrs Braverman said groups of "vulnerable white English girls" were being "pursued and raped and drugged and harmed by gangs of British Pakistani men who've worked in child abuse networks".
Former Conservative Party chairwoman Baroness Sayeeda Warsi warned the Home Secretary “was tarnishing a whole community".
She added: "Ms Braverman basically said group sexual exploitation is a British Pakistani problem.”
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Other critics branded the top Tory’s comments "inflammatory and divisive".
But writing in the Spectator magazine, Mrs Braverman, the MP for Fareham, Hants, defenced her attack - and revealed she even thought about ringing a radio phone-in to quote her heroine Margaret Thatcher.
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi attacked the Home Secretary's intervention (Getty)“You can’t please all of the people any of the time,” claimed Mrs Braverman.
“But a core part of my job is ensuring that I don’t consistently displease a majority of them.
“Last week a radio show had a phone-in asking listeners to debate whether I’m a racist.
“I thought about calling in as Margaret from Fareham, to suggest the Home Secretary take courage from another Margaret’s words, ‘I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left’.”
She said: “If we are to address the injustice of the grooming gangs scandal we must be willing to acknowledge the role that ethnicity played in covering it up.
“To say the overwhelming majority of perpetrators in towns such as Rotherham, Telford, and Rochdale were British-Pakistani and that their victims were white girls is not to say that most British-Pakistanis are perpetrators of sexual abuse.”
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