Race key in politics for years, says Cable
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable has said successive governments have assumed the public were “pretty bigoted” and needed to be offered “red meat” in the form of tough immigration controls.
Appearing on BBC1’ s The Andrew M arr Show, Sir Vince – who was business secretary in the coalition government when Theresa May, as home secretary, introduced tight er controls – said it was an “ugly truth” that race has been a key factor in British politics for many years.
However, he said the Wind rush scandal had shown that the public recognised that there had been a “terrible injustice” to people who had wrongly been threatened with deportation.
“I think the working assumption successive governments have made is that the public out there are pretty bigoted and they have got to be given red meat in the form of these very restrictive measures and it has done a lot of harm,” he said.
“I think the interesting thing about Wind rush is that perhaps for the first time the public opinion has been ahead of the politicians in seeing that there is a terrible injustice here and it should not be allowed to pass.”
Sir Vince, who was criticised for saying many older voters backed Brexit out of nostalgia for a world where “passports were blue, f aces were white and the map was coloured imperial pink ”, said he was acknowledging that race had been a factor for some voters in the referendum.