Warsi: ‘Brexit makes UK more racist’

In a blistering attack on some of her Conservative colleagues and the Leave campaign in general, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi states that Britain will be a more divided and xenophobic country in the wake of the Leave campaign tactics. As a result she was switching sides from the Leave camp to the Remain camp.

Speaking exclusively to the Guardian newspaper, Warsi stated that she hoped the awful death of Jo Cox MP would result in campaigning tactics; particularly on the Leave side, it would less poisonous, and yet by Sunday as the campaigns resumed, Warsi admitted that not much had changed by those leading the campaigns:

The vision that the Brexit campaign is presenting is not the vision that me and other Brexiters started off with a year ago. The ‘hello world’ approach to Brexit, which is open-minded, visionary, inclusive, has been lost instead we have reverted to a campaign that says: ‘The Turks are coming, the Syrians are coming, the refugees are coming, the Muslims are coming, and the terrorists are coming’. And that is both sides – Vote Leave and Leave.EU.”

Within hours of the news that she had defected to the Remain camp, some Brexiters had been an unprecedented personal and vicious attack on her, prompting her to claim, this is symptomatic of the climate that has been created.

Simon Woolley