Displaying items by tag: hate speech

The Metropolitan Police is ‘assessing’ a report of hate speech made against MP Lee Anderson after comments which he made on 23 February. The force said it had received the report after the MP claimed ‘Islamists’ had ‘got control’ of London mayor Sadiq Khan, and he had ‘given away our capital’ to extremists. The Ashfield MP refused to apologise, and was suspended from the Tory party the next day. The prime minister's official spokesman said the language used was ‘wrong’, but added that Rishi Sunak did not believe Mr Anderson was racist. Mr Khan has urged the prime minister to call the remarks racist and Islamophobic. Mr Anderson, the former Tory deputy chairman who is now sitting in the House of Commons as an independent, has continued to refuse to apologise and said Mr Sunak made a ‘mistake’ in suspending him. Some of his Conservative colleagues, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, have expressed agreement with his viewpoint.

On 4 December, a bomb squad in Madrid destroyed a grenade which had been thrown over the wall of a migrant centre for children. Police said it was a training grenade containing a small amount of explosives, and no injuries were reported. The centre houses dozens of unaccompanied minors, many of them immigrants. The attack has been widely condemned by Spanish politicians and human rights campaigners, with many linking it to anti-immigrant rhetoric. During a televised election debate in November, the leader of the far-right Vox party, Santiago Abascal, accused youths at the centre of causing a spike in crime in the surrounding neighbourhood, where he lives. In the election, Vox more than doubled its seats to become the country's third most-powerful party.