Robert Jenrick says lack of integration leads to dark place

Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick has told the BBC “at the extreme levels, a lack of integration leads us into a very dark place as a country”, as he explained remarks he made at a dinner in the Spring which were secretly recorded.

In an extract of his speech in March, published by The Guardian, Jenrick said the Handsworth area of Birmingham was “one of the worst-integrated places” he had ever been to.

He also said he had spent an hour-and-a-half there and not seen “another white face” during his visit, adding: “It’s not about the colour of your skin or your faith, of course it isn’t. But I want people to be living alongside each other, not parallel lives.”

The mayor of the West Midlands, Labour’s Richard Parker, said he believed the remarks were racist, something Jenrick strongly rejected.

“He’s set out intentionally to draw on a particular issue – people’s colour – to identify the point he wanted to make,” Parker said.

“It shows a lack of respect and understanding for those communities. I doubt whether or not if he went to a largely white community anywhere in the West Midlands he’d be making a comment similar to what he made about Handsworth.”

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch backed Jenrick and in a BBC interview the shadow justice secretary said his remarks had been prescient.

Jenrick said: “There are numerous parts of our country now where the same story is happening, and at the extreme levels, a lack of integration leads us into a very dark place as a country.

“We’re here in Manchester today, a week on from a terrible terrorist attack where a man who lived in our country for 30 years clearly wasn’t well integrated, clearly didn’t share British values because he went on to murder British Jews.”

The chair of the Labour Party, Anna Turley, argued the initial remarks reduced people “to the colour of their skin”.

Handsworth’s Independent MP Ayoub Khan said the remarks were “not only wildly false but also incredibly irresponsible”.

Integration in communities has been a big theme at the Conservative conference this week, where the party has been discussing how to respond to the threat posed by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

Asked if there had been a generational failure of immigrant communities to properly integrate, Badenoch said: “No, I don’t think that there’s been a generational failure.

“I think that we are a successful multi-racial country, but I can see that things are fragmenting.”

She added: “I don’t want us to become a multicultural country where different people have different communities, no shared values, fragmented loyalties.

“I think that it is getting harder to integrate people because immigration has been too high.

“This is one of the things which I have acknowledged my party got wrong. It was not deliberate.”