Britain's former Home Secretary Suella Braverman has lashed out at a report handed to a parliamentary group that warned of "racist colonial legacies" as she said it was wrong to make "white people feel guilty".
UK-born Suella Braverman, who is of Indian heritage with a Goan-origin father and Tamil-origin mother, writes in 'The Daily Telegraph' on Tuesday to defend perceptions of racism in the rural areas of Britain.
It follows a report by Wildlife and Countryside Link, a coalition of voluntary organisations, handed to the all-party Âparliamentary group on race and community in the House of Commons.
"Just because there are more white people than non-white people somewhere does not make it racist," the 43-year-old politician writes in the newspaper.
"The UK is a majority white country, so of course there will be many areas where there is very little, and sometimes no, ethnic minority participation. I do not see a problem. Ethnic minority people tend to live in urban areas. Does that make Wembley, where I come from and which is now a majority non-white area, racist because there are fewer white people who live there? Of course not," she said.
To illustrate her point, she also published a picture of herself on a camping holiday with her Indian-origin family in the 1980s and said not once in 30 years of such holidays did they experience hostility.
The Link report, which triggered her defence of the English countryside, notes: "Cultural barriers reflect that in the UK, it is white British cultural values that have been embedded into the design and management of green spaces and into society's expectations of how people should engage with them.
"Racist colonial legacies that frame nature as a 'white space' create further barriers, suggesting that people of colour are not legitimate users of green spaces." Suella Braverman countered that to claim that the countryside is racist is one of the most "ridiculous examples" of left-wing idenÂtity politics.
"It's a symptom of a deeper problem within our society: the urge to constantly view everything through the lens of race or gender, plead victimhood and point the finger at an oppressor... We need to stop making white people feel guilty for being white," she noted.
Suella Braverman, now on the backbenches of the House of Commons since being sacked as a Cabinet minister by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last year, has been very vocal about race and migration issues.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
