BORIS Johnson must apologise for having published “racist and cruel” remarks about Jamaicans, Labour have said.
The news comes after a Spectator article published in 2003, while Johnson was editor, resurfaced. It is still live on the magazine's website.
In the piece, Anthony Daniels, writing under the pen-name Theodore Dalrymple, claims that Jamaican immigrants to the UK are "ludicrously self-satisfied, macho, lupine-gaited, gold-chained-and-front-toothed predators of the slums, with the bodies of giants and the mind of a pea".
He then says that the situation on the Caribbean island is “even worse, more salient and exaggerated”.
Daniels says that modern Jamaica has a “childish but very dangerous bang-bang-you're-dead culture”, and blames the rap music industry for making “actual the stereotype of the Jamaican as a man of small brain but large appetites, with a powerful though primitive sense of rhythm”.
The Prime Minister was editor of the Spectator magazine from 1999 to 2005. The article was published in August 2003, but came to light again as Prince William and Kate headed to Jamaica on a Caribbean tour.
The two were forced to cancel one engagement in Belize amid protests at their presence, and protests have been planned in Jamaica accusing the British monarchy of having “perpetuated the greatest human rights tragedy in the history of humankind”.
Commenting on the Spectator article, Labour’s shadow equalities minister, Taiwo Owatemi MP (below), called on the Prime Minister to apologise for having published it.
Owatemi told The National: "These racist and cruel remarks are completely unacceptable and Boris Johnson should apologise for having published them.
"Sadly they are consistent with the Prime Minister's track record of appalling remarks about gay men, Muslim women, and black people. He is unfit for office.
"Little wonder Boris Johnson's Conservatives deny that structural racism even exists. The next Labour government will introduce a landmark Race Equality Act to tackle structural racial inequality at source."
Owatemi was referring to articles written by the Prime Minister in which he referred disparagingly to gay people as “tank-topped bum boys”, black people as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”, and said that Muslim women wearing burkas "look like letter boxes”.
Downing Street has been approached for comment.
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