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Ukip launches manifesto with pledge to act against Islamic terrorism

Paul Nuttall speaks at the launch of the Ukip general election manifesto in London.
Paul Nuttall speaks at the launch of the Ukip general election manifesto in London. Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images

Ukip has sought to cast itself, after the Manchester Arena attack, as the party taking strong action against Islamic terrorism, using its manifesto launch to outline policies on security and immigration.

After the attack on Monday evening in which 22 people died, other political parties are pausing in their campaigning until Friday. But Paul Nuttall said his party, Ukip, would recruit thousands of extra police, troops, prison guards and border forces.

The Ukip leader refused to rule out interning terrorism suspects without trial, an idea raised by one of his MEPs.

A confirmed Ukip policy is that anyone found to have fought for Islamic State overseas should forfeit their citizenship and not be allowed to return to the UK.

The party’s deputy chair and manifesto lead, Suzanne Evans, said Ukip’s previously announced plan to permit only zero net migration would now include a “social attitudes” test, in which people found to have discriminatory attitudes towards women or gay people would not be allowed in.

At the occasionally rowdy event in Westminster, in which several journalists’ questions were met with boos and shouts from some party activists, Nuttall promised “a far more muscular approach to integration and against segregation”.

Evans speaks at the Ukip manifesto launch
Evans speaks at the manifesto launch. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

With Ukip slumping in the polls, Nuttall dismissed the idea he was exploiting events in Manchester, saying the manifesto had gone to print at the weekend and had not been changed since the bomb attack.

The event began 45 minutes before the minute of silence at 11am for the victims and had to be paused for this to take place. Asked why the party had not moved the event time until later, Nuttall said: “We tried to push this back but the broadcasters told us we couldn’t.”

In a speech dominated by ideas surrounding security and integration, Nuttall served notice that Ukip now saw one of its primary roles as trying to push politicians into taking stronger action over the issue.

“It is the role of Ukip in our national political life to challenge the cosy establishment consensus whenever it is failing the British public,” he said. “We did that on immigration control, we did that on Brexit. And now we will do it by tackling issues surrounding integration.”

He added: “It is not good enough to light candles and proclaim that extremists will not beat us. Action is required on multiple fronts and I am proud Ukip is setting out its patriotic agenda for defending our country and our way of life.”

Both Nuttall and Evans repeatedly castigated Theresa May for cutting police numbers and failing to control immigration, with Evans suggesting the prime minister was at least partly responsible for events in Manchester.

“I think she must bear some responsibility. All politicians who voted for measures to make cuts must bear some responsibility,” she said.

Asked again about this, Evans said only the attacker was ultimately to blame, but “the circumstances that allowed their ideology to breed, allowed their hatred to spread – politicians should have taken action on that long ago”.

Specific security policies included a call for 20,000 more police and a similar number of new troops, 7,000 prison officers and 4,000 border guards.

People who sought to move to the UK would be interviewed about their views, Evans explained: “We will test their social attitudes, and if they do not agree, for example, that women or gay people are equal and not second-class citizens, then quite simply they will not get in.”

Evans said the party would push ahead with policies aimed at the Muslim population, including a ban on full-face veils in public and obliging girls seen at risk of female genital mutilation to have medical examinations.

“When Ukip launched our integration policies last month they were met with hysteria from leftwing virtue signallers and cowardly politicians, who refuse to admit there is a problem with radical Islam in this country,” Evans said.

Nuttall had stressed that the approach should not be seen as anti-Islam, and that he believed “the vast majority of the Muslim population of this country are peaceful people and a great asset to our society”.

However, asked whether he would take action against the party’s Brexit spokesman, Gerard Batten, who wrote a blogpost in the wake of the Manchester attack calling all Islam “barbaric” and primitive” – Batten had previously called it a “death cult” – Nuttall declined to answer.

Other policies in the manifesto include taking £11bn a year from foreign aid to spend on the NHS and social care, and abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an English parliament.