10 hours ago
Kemi Badenoch opens door to ‘ghetto law'
Asked whether she would consider a similar policy for the UK, Mrs Badenoch told an audience at the Policy Exchange think tank on Monday that she had 'looked at it' and would be talking about it more.
She said: 'I think integration is not enough. I say assimilate, I think assimilation should be the target, and if people don't assimilate, then they integrate.
'But we've had so many, so many people, so high numbers, people from lots of different places, which is not what immigration used to look like, and I think we need to move from passive to active integration.'
Saying her ideas were 'along the lines' of the Danish policy, she added: 'We need to do what works for the UK, it's not exactly the same situation, we have a much bigger population, and so many other things that would require adjustments, but that sort of thing, yes.'
Mrs Badenoch was speaking to Lord Moore, the crossbench peer and Telegraph columnist, as part of Policy Exchange's project to mark the centenary of Margaret Thatcher's birth.
'Unstable' families
She went on to say she wanted to see the state doing less and did not want to see an 'active state' in areas outside policing and defence.
Recalling Baroness Thatcher, she also argued for society to do more to prevent 'unstable' families from being formed.
Asked about the role of personal responsibility in family policy, she said: 'I think that we need to start looking more at the prevention side of it.
'How do we make sure people don't start families that are unstable in the first place? I don't think that government needs to get overly involved in that.
'Society, and there is such a thing as society, needs to have some form of supporting families as well.'
It is amid competition between the Tories and Reform UK for socially conservative voters, especially on the issue of immigration.
'Very Left-wing'
Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, has said that Britain's immigration system is fundamentally broken, and called for an overall cap on the number of legal migrants.
Mrs Badenoch said on Monday that Reform was not a centre-right party but 'very Left-wing'.
She also attacked the Labour government, arguing that Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, had engaged in 'legal fetishism' by prioritising international law during the Iran-Israel conflict.
'With regards to the Government, I think there is a complete absence of moral clarity and, in fact, moral courage,' she said.
'I do think it is quite extraordinary the position they found themselves in where the Foreign Secretary is unable to say whether or not he believes that the action was lawful. It's a completely preposterous situation because if there's a counter-attack from Iran, they will probably come out and say that it is lawful. They clearly don't think it's lawful, because if they did, they would have come out and said so.'
