‘You just didn’t seem to take much notice of it when the perpetrators were white.’
LBC presenter Ben Kentish has hit back at Nigel Farage and other senior Reform figures over claims that small boat arrivals are making women and girls unsafe.
At the Women for Reform conference on Monday, Greater Lincolnshire mayor Andrea Jenkyns said she no longer feels safe walking in the street.
Kent County Council leader Linden Kemkaran claimed “illegal migration is harming women and girls”, while Sarah Pochin MP argued the threat to women’s safety comes from “young, military-aged males” arriving by small boats.
Nigel Farage has said that migrants arriving in small boats pose a “national security emergency” and made a false claim that Afghans are 22 times more likely to be convicted of rape than a British-born person.
A Sky News analysis found that Afghans are three times more likely to be convicted of a sexual offence than someone born in the UK, a figure that the outlet noted was “still potentially an overestimate”.
On his show yesterday, Kentish used official figures to dismantle Reform’s claims further.
Referring to Farage, he said: “More and more now, politicians who are on course, if the polls suggest are going to be our next prime minister, try and tell us that Britain was a ‘safe haven’ for women and girls before the small boats started coming.”
However, statistics show a very different picture.
Citing official figures, Kentish said that in 2015, before small boats became “a real issue”, 103,614 sexual offences were recorded in one year, with almost 35,000 reports of rapes, 68,000 reports of other sexual offences.
The LBC presenter went on to say: “This is the country that Nigel Farage thinks was a safe haven for women and girls.
“He wasn’t talking about it back then, was he? He wasn’t banging this drum passionately in defence of women and girls and their safety back then.”
“But as soon as it’s asylum seekers ‘oh it’s outrageous, we’re not a safe haven any more’. We never were, Nigel. You just didn’t seem to take much notice of it when the perpetrators were white.
“But suddenly now it’s a couple of asylum seekers that are accused of it, suddenly everyone cares about violence against women and girls. It’s desperate stuff.”
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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