Steinbeck’s book removed after some pupils felt distressed during discussions about its racial slurs

During the Conservative leadership contest Kemi Badenoch wrote an article for the Sunday Telegraph about immigration in which she suggested the UK should not be admitting migrants who do not accept British values. She said:

We cannot be naïve and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnichostilities at the border, or that all cultures are equally valid. They are not. I am struck for example, by the number of recent immigrants to the UK who hate Israel. That sentiment has no place here …

Our country is not a dormitory for people to come here and make money. It is our home. Those we chose to welcome, we expect to share our values and contribute to our society.

People assume that I’m always talking about Islam, but I’m not really. It’s one of many variations of culture which we have in the country because of immigration, especially the more recent immigration which has been too high.

To understand what I’m saying, you have to look at where I grew up [Nigeria], where there are 300 different languages and cultures, everybody looks the same, and people don’t get on unless there is a unifying thing.

One of the things that profoundly affected my view on the world was what happened 10 years ago when those 300 schoolgirls were abducted from their school by Boko Haram, a terrorist group in northern Nigeria. It has a lot of parallels with what happened on October 7.

And this group had been indulged – you know, ‘It’s just Islam, they’re just people who are poor and they’re fighting for their rights’, and then it moved into something really hideous and terrible, and it’s now just a depraved group of people who assault Christians, women, destroy families.

Remember, that steel plant was one I was helping to manage [when she was business secretary]. I didn’t nationalise it then, did I?

It depends. With many of these things, it depends.

Aren’t you tired of people who just tell you what you want to hear? I will not do that.

And that’s why I don’t answer those questions, because the answer is always, and should always be, it depends.