Corbyn slams Trump’s ‘go back’ tweet as ‘racist,’ accuses BoJo & Hunt of pandering to US president

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has branded US president Donald Trump’s tweet directed at four progressive Democratic Party congresswomen as “racist,” and hit out at Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt for not fully standing up to him.

Corbyn took to social media on Tuesday morning after both Tory leadership hopefuls, Johnson and Hunt, refused to label Trump’s remarks as racist, during a head-to-head debate on Monday evening. The Labour leader attacked the prospective candidates for pandering to the US president.

Telling four Congresswomen of colour to “go back” is racist. But the Tory leadership candidates can’t bring themselves to say so. We should stand up to Donald Trump, not pander to him…

It comes after Trump prompted widespread anger and accusations of racism for recommending a group of left-wing US Democrats, women of color, should “go back” to the “broken and crime infested places from which they came,” in a triple-tweet tirade on Sunday.

He has since doubled down on his attacks against New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib, Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, and Massachusetts’ Ayanna Pressley –all of whom, bar Omar, were born in the US.

Both Johnson and Hunt were critical of the US president’s outburst during their last scheduled debate before a new UK PM is announced on July 23. However, neither candidate explicitly branded Trump’s remarks as racist, ostensibly because they didn’t want to compromise the “special relationship” between the UK and the US.

“I simply can’t understand how a leader of that country can come to say it,” Johnson said. Pressed again, he replied: “You can take from what I said what I think about President Trump’s words.”

Hunt insisted that because the US is “our closest ally,” it would not “help the situation to use that kind of language about the president of the United States.”

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