Hardliner Danny Kruger – son of Great British Bake Off host Prue Leith – was confronted by a Question Time audience member who said the way asylum seekers are spoken about is “disgusting”
Question Time audience member accuses Tory MP of lying over immigration
A furious Question Time audience member got into an angry clash with a Tory MP – accusing him of “lying” about immigration.
Hardliner Danny Kruger – son of Great British Bake Off host Prue Leith – was confronted by a young man who said the way asylum seekers are spoken about is “disgusting”. In the tense face off, the man said refugees are treated as scapegoats after years of failure to build new homes and hit out at “dehumanising” treatment.
During a discussion about expanding safe and legal routes, Mr Kruger declared: “It is illegal to break into this country.” But the member of the audience interrupted, shouting: “It’s not illegal to claim asylum. You’re lying.”
The man, in a grey sweater, shouted the allegation a second time. He told the show, hosted by Fiona Bruce: ““It’s disgusting how we’re talking about human beings. It’s not illegal to claim asylum in a foreign country. Saying they’re illegal immigrants is not… they’re asylum seekers and refugees.
“Illegal immigrants tend to be people who come here legally and overstay a visa or overstay an application. That’s the majority of illegal immigrants that are within this country. They’re not people who are fleeing war.”
He went on to hit out at “dehumanising” language around asylum. The audience member said: “We know countries that are closer to the Middle East tend to take on a lot more refugees than we ever do, and it’s the element of calling these people invaders, dehumanising them so that we can point a finger at them and say, ‘You’re the reason we’ve got a housing shortage’.
“But we have only built 250,000 council houses since Thatcher came into power, but before that we built five million.”
Mr Kruger, a key member of the right-wing New Conservatism faction when Rishi Sunak was PM, went on to say that 100 million people would qualify for refugee status. He said: “We have a genuine obligation to do what we can to the needy as the world, to the displaced, so dispossessed, to the people fleeing torture.
“And we do that generously as this country, as we always have… We have in this country taken hundreds of thousands of people from other nations.
“And I mean, you talk about human beings. There are a hundred million human beings in this world who would qualify for refugee status, status.”
