Shadow Home Office Minister Claims “No-Go Zones” in Luton
Blake Stephenson, the MP for Mid Bedfordshire appointed to the Conservative frontbench a fortnight ago, told a fringe meeting in Birmingham that in parts of Luton “white people won’t go. They are like no-go zones.” He called the town “a very dangerous place” and said some communities “live in ghettoes”. Bedfordshire Police have previously said no-go areas do not exist in the county.
Mr Stephenson returned to the word “icky” more than once: “this is where it gets icky, but we need to make sure we don’t have ghettoes where there are no-go zones for anybody”. He also told the meeting that “there is a consensus, certainly on the right, that mass migration has been an absolute disaster”, and said he knows the town because he lives ten or fifteen minutes away, in a village over the county border. The specific claim has a history that makes it combustible. Anders Breivik invoked Luton and more than a thousand supposed Islamic no-go zones in a statement to an Oslo court in 2012, and Tommy Robinson founded the English Defence League in the town in 2009; the force’s response then was that no-go areas do not exist in Bedfordshire. A shadow Home Office minister saying it from a conference platform is a different order of claim from a fringe commentator making it, which is why the test now is whether the leadership distances itself. No Conservative response had been issued this evening. Watch for one, and for Luton’s own MPs and council.