Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch has criticised the BBC’s refusal to call Hamas terrorists after the attacks on Israel which sparked the growing conflict.
She told the Daily Telegraph a “false equivalence” has been made in “an attempt to be impartial”.
“Given all of the footage that we saw, we were in no doubt that what we were looking at was a terror attack,” she said, defending the UK continuing to deal with Qatar which is believed to be housing members of Hamas.
“If you stop doing business with people, if you stop talking to them, then you have less influence and you’re unable to help shape the outcome of events.”
I’m not saying that our country is perfect, but I’m saying that our country is better than others in handling differences
Kemi Badenoch
Ms Badenoch, who is also the minister for women and equalities, backed up her assertion at the Conservative Party that the UK is “the best country in the world to be black”.
On the eve of the G7 Trade Summit in Osaka, Japan, she said she believes the country is as good a place to be black as it is white.
“I think so,” said Ms Badenoch, who was born in London but spent part of her childhood in Nigeria. “Being an ethnic minority, irrespective of what country you’re in, is challenging and that is just human nature.
“Even in countries where everybody is black, when you have ethnic minorities within them, as I saw within Nigeria, they often face very significant discrimination, more so than the sort of discrimination that I have seen myself in the UK.”
She continued: “I’m not saying that our country is perfect, but I’m saying that our country is better than others in handling differences.
“The message I would say to many of those people who want to portray life in the UK as being so terrible is that if it was so, why is it that people keep coming here?”
She said many of her critics believe she should hold certain views due to her colour and are trying to “silence people like me”.
“As long as there are people like me out there showing what a success the UK is at hosting people from other countries, they are not going to be able to make profit from stoking division, so I make no apologies for that,” she said.
She said she is “not worried at all” by Labour denting the Conservatives’ traditional image as the party of business, saying the opposition “have not done their homework” and “assume the EU is the answer to everything”.