‘He said some fruity things’, Angela Rayner defends Labour after Trump’s new running mate touts UK as ‘Islamist state’
DONALD Trump’s pick for Vice President has come under fire for calling Britain an “Islamist country” under Labour.
The ex-President’s election running mate JD Vance was heavily criticised after suggesting the UK could be the first extreme Muslim state to hold nuclear weapons.
Mr Trump picked the Ohio Senator on Monday evening to be his number two if he is successful in this November’s election against incumbent Joe Biden.
Vance wrote the book Hillbilly Elegy about growing up in the rustbelt America which has now been turned into a film starring Oscar-winning actress Glenn Close.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner hit back saying: “I’m very proud of the election success that Labour had recently.
“We won votes across all different communities, across the whole of the country. And we’re interested in governing on behalf of Britain and also working with our international allies.
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“So I look forward to that meeting, if that is the result and it’s up to the American people to decide.”
Mr Vance accused Labour of sympathising with Islamic extremism at a National Conservatism conference in DC this month.
The right wing republican said: “I was talking to a friend about what is the first truly Islamist country to get a nuclear weapon? Maybe it’s Iran, maybe Pakistan already kind of counts.
“And then we finally decided maybe it’s actually the UK since Labour took over.”
Ahead of Trump’s possible election to the White House, Ms Rayner diplomatically claimed that “political leaders across the world all have different opinions but we govern in the interests of our countries”.
She added: “The US is a key ally of ours and if the American people decide who their president and vice president is, we will work with them, of course, we will.
“And I’m sure they’ll have opinions on what we do and suggest, and we’ll work together constructively and I look forward to those meetings and being able to do that.”
But Tory Shadow Veterans Minister Andrew Bowie this morning blasted Mr Vance for making “offensive” comments.
He told Times Radio: “I do not agree with that view quite frankly. I think it’s offensive to my colleagues in the Labour Party.
“We need to re-learn how to disagree agreeably.”
Mr Vance is understood to have a good relationship with Foreign Secretary David Lammy.
The pair have met multiple times, with Mr Lammy saying the senator’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy “reduced me to tears”.
In a speech to a Conservative think tank in Washington in May, the Foreign Secretary also argued that Mr Vance was “right to say we in Europe have a problem that we need to fix with higher defence expenditure”.
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But the two politicians take opposing views on the war in Ukraine.
Mr Vance has criticised Joe Biden’s decision to give Volodymyr Zelenskyy “hundreds of billions of dollars of weaponry with no obvious end in sight”.