British Home Secretary Suella Braverman on Tuesday blamed uncontrolled migrations into the United Kingdom for the recent tensions between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester.
Forty-seven persons were arrested in Leicester in connection to multiple incidents of unrest between August 28 and September 17. The tensions first broke out following an India-Pakistan cricket match.
“The unexamined drive towards multiculturalism as an end in itself combined with the corrosive aspects of identity politics has led us astray,” Braverman said at the annual conference of the Conservative Party, held in Birmingham on Tuesday evening.
Braverman also described Leicester as a “melting pot of culture that was riddled with the civil disorder” because the United Kingdom had failed to integrate “a large number of newcomers”.
The home secretary added that it was not racist of her to want to tighten the country’s borders.
“It is not bigoted to say that we have too many asylum seekers who are abusing the system,” she said. “It is not xenophobic to say that mass and rapid migration places pressure on housing, public services and community relations,” she said.
Braverman, who was born to a couple who had immigrated from India, said that her parents came to the United Kingdom through legal means and integrated themselves into the community and embraced British values.
The home secretary also said that integration did not mean abandoning her Indian heritage, but meant adopting the British identity.
“This is the best place on earth to come and live in, but I fear that we are losing sight of the core values and the culture that made it so,” she warned.
Braverman said that she will also put in effect the scheme to deport illegal migrants from the United Kingdom to Rwanda, which was formulated by her predecessor Priti Patel.
The UK had announced the Rwanda asylum plan in April, the BBC reported. It intends to give some asylum seekers who cross the English Channel to the UK a one-way ticket to Rwanda. Some of the asylum seekers, who were being deported to the African country in June, had claimed that they were being treated like criminals.
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