A leading figure in the Trump administration has warned that Britain is less safe because of the government’s inability to get to grips with the small boats crisis.
Sarah Rogers, the US Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, told The Late Show Live on GB News: “Nobody’s safe in the country, if just anyone can walk in.
“And I would also add what every Brit and every American these days, unfortunately, intuitively knows, which is that when you change the people who live in the country, the country’s values change too. The country’s politics change too. The country’s institutions change too.
“That’s what you worry about, that cohesion level. Yes, we have to care who comes into the country. We have to care who constitutes the country, because otherwise, the foundational freedoms that we all staked out hundreds of years ago are not going to be long for this world.”
She also warned that freedom of speech is under threat: “As Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, I oversee America’s diplomatic engagement with foreign publics, including the online public and I’m in the United Kingdom because our two countries share great foundational freedoms that helped shape the post war order to our benefit, that helped defeat Communism to our benefit, and that birthed the system of self government we enjoy.
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“But those freedoms are in danger now because of a temptation to censor the Internet, and I’m here to speak against that, and to urge Brits, whom I know share America’s fundamental desire to be a free society, to join us in that and help welcome new technology in a way that innovates through the current problems we’re seeing in the communications sphere, rather than trying to put that innovation back in the bottle and censor everything.
She added: “The way we explain it in America is that 250 years ago, our forefathers undertook the original Brexit. We split from the old world to claim new freedoms as citizens, not subjects. And America’s first freedom, our most famous freedom, is freedom of speech, enshrined in the First Amendment.
“Most countries don’t share that constitutional bulwark, even though many countries, and I think the British people, share a fundamental desire to be free.
“But when you don’t rigorously defend that right, even when it’s inconvenient, even when the speech is offensive, you end up in these absurd scenarios where you have comedians arrested for tweets, priests arrested for silent prayer, grandmothers dragged out of their homes for criticising gender ideology and all manner of absurdities that I think good, thoughtful British people I’ve met with all reject these.”