Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn blasts Trump's racist tweets

British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn on Tuesday said tweets by US President Donald Trump suggesting four Congresswomen of colour should "go home" were racist.

The president attacked the four first-term congresswomen - who are of Hispanic, Arab, Somali and African American origin – on Sunday, telling them to "go back" to the countries they "originally came from".

"Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done," Trump tweeted.

The Congresswomen include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

Read more: Seven times Boris Johnson has offended minority groups

Corbyn took to Twitter to condemn the comments. "Telling four Congresswomen of colour to 'go back' is racist," the Labour leader said.

He also accused Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, two contenders for the Conservative leadership, of "pandering" to Trump for not calling the comments racist.

"But the Tory leadership candidates can't bring themselves to say so. We should stand up to Donald Trump, not pander to him for a sweetheart trade deal which would put our NHS at risk," Corbyn said.

Both Conservative leadership hopefuls condemned Trump's comments during a leadership debate on Monday, but deflected when pressed on whether the remarks were racist.

"I think that, look I'm foreign secretary, this is a president of a country which happens to be our closest ally and so it is not going to help the situation to use that kind of language about the president of the United States," Hunt said.

Johnson, who himself has a long history of making bigoted comments about minority groups, called Trump's remarks "totally unacceptable", but refused to call them racist.

"I simply can't understand how a leader of that country can come to say it... You can take from what I said what I think about President Trump's words," he said.

Trump came under fire from Democrats and even some members of his own Republican Party after launching an extraordinary xenophobic attack on four progressive Democratic congresswomen.

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