Longer footage of Suella Braverman telling a Holocaust survivor she won’t apologise for her rhetoric on immigration has been released.
It comes after the Home Office asked for an edited clip, which showed Joan Salter confronting the Home Secretary during a meeting in her Fareham constituency, to be taken down.
Freedom From Torture, the charity that posted the tweet viewed more than 20 million times, has refused and hit back at suggestions it “misrepresented” the encounter.
Ms Salter, 83, had asked: “I am reminded of the language used to dehumanise and justify the murder of my family and millions of others. “Why do you find the need to use that kind of language?”
In the full clip Ms Braverman thanks Ms Salter for her question before going on to explain her own family was not born in Britain, and that they owed everything to this country.
But later she adds: “I won’t apologise for the language that I have used to demonstrate the scale of the problem. I see my job as being honest with the British people and honest for the British people.
“I’m not going to shy away from difficult truths nor am I going to conceal what is the reality that we are all watching.”
Freedom From Torture said they were approached by the Home Office, by phone and on social media, to take the edited video down.
A statement from the Home Office posted on Twitter on Saturday afternoon said the short clip had been “heavily edited” and did not “reflect the full exchange”.
But Sonya Sceats, Chief Executive at Freedom from Torture told The Independent: “We edited it because she [Suella Braverman] had a lot of preparatory remarks before she actually answered the question.
“For the version that we put on social media, we cut straight to the answer that she provided to Joan’s question. It was just abridged.”
Ms Sceats said that the charity took “really strong issue” with the idea it was misleading as the version of the video posted to Twitter “provided Suella Breverman’s answer to the question that Joan asked her”.
“We challenge the Home Office to explain to us, and to the British public, what they consider was misleading,” Ms Sceats added.
Ms Salter, who has been recognised with an MBE for her work on Holocaust education, repeated her concerns about Ms Braverman’s tone in interviews over the weekend.
“I feel very strongly that the Holocaust ended in the death camps but it started with words, with othering the Jewish people, blaming them for all the problems in Germany, and I am afraid that the actions and words of our home secretary is very, very similar,” she told Sky News.
“She needs to look into her humanity rather than dehumanising a group of people many of whom are absolutely desperate.”
The statement posted on Twitter by the Home Office read: “The Home Secretary listened carefully to the testimony. She thanked her for sharing her story.
“The home secretary also expressed her sympathy and set out why it is important to tackle illegal migration.
“Since the footage misrepresents the interaction about a sensitive area of policy, we have asked the organisation who posted the video to take it down.”
Ms Sceats said that the questions that Ms Salter was asking are “incredibly serious” and that the Home Secretary “missed an opportunity to show that she has reflected on the appropriateness of the language and to provide an apology.
“Instead of doing so, she doubled down on this offensive language,” she said. “We would say to Rishi Sunak, ‘is this acceptable for a minister holding a high Office of State to be responding to a survivor of the Holocaust in these terms, and is it acceptable for her to be using this sort of inflammatory language to describe people like those we help at Freedom From Torture, who are fleeing from torture and seeking safety here in Britain?’
“I think that there are serious questions to answer....about whether it is appropriate for the Home Office to be using its corporate channels, including its Twitter channel, to be pressuring an NGO for sharing public comments that the Home Secretary has made”.
A spokesperson for the Home Office told the Independent: “We won’t be commenting any further, and stand by our statement on Twitter.”
