Kemi Badenoch has said people from “cultures that do not respect women” need to get “out of our country”.
The Conservative leader, reacting to the government’s violence against women and girls strategy, said it is “not 11-year-old boys who are committing violence against women and girls”.
“We need to get people who have come from cultures that don’t respect women out of our country! Not all cultures are equally valid,” she wrote on X without specifying which cultures.
She accused Labour’s plan to teach secondary school pupils about misogyny and healthy relationships of being “a complete distraction”.
Ms Badenoch called for all foreign criminals to be deported and more police on the UK’s streets.
“Pretending a few extra lessons in school will fix this is complete nonsense. Labour need to stop watching Adolescence and get real,” she said in reference to the TV series about a teenage boy arrested for murdering a schoolmate.
“But they can’t, because they’re too scared, weak and divided. They have no serious plan to tackle this problem.”
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This week has seen the government release its long-awaited strategy to tackle violence against women and girls.
Today, ministers announced all secondary school teachers will be trained to spot early signs of misogyny in boys and how to steer them away from it.
Lessons on issues like consent and the dangers of sharing intimate images will be mandatory by the end of this parliament in 2029.
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Earlier, Tory frontbencher Katie Lam, responding to the government’s VAWG announcement, had called for “an informed and honest debate about whether mass migration is making this problem worse”.
“Not every country and culture in the world believes, as we do, that women are equal to men with personal, bodily and sexual autonomy,” she told the Commons.
“And where people from those countries and cultures come here, this can be dangerous.
“If we cannot be honest about this, we will fail to achieve the first of this strategy’s goals, preventing men and boys from becoming abusers.”
Safeguarding minister Jess Phillip said she was “yet to find any community where violence against women and girls does not happen”.
She earlier branded VAWG a “national emergency”.
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This is not the first time Ms Badenoch has spoken about cultural inequality, but is the first since she became leader.
During the Tory leadership race last year, she said “not all cultures are equally valid” when it comes to deciding who should be allowed into the UK.
Drawing on her own background – she was born in the UK but spent her childhood in Nigeria – she said: “Culture is more than cuisine or clothes. It’s also customs which may be at odds with British values.
“We cannot be naïve and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnic hostilities 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.”
