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A tearful woman from Slovenia confronted Nigel Farage on live radio, telling him that the Brexit vote has her feeling like a "second-tier human being" in the UK.

The woman, one of 27 guests from the 27 remaining EU states to take part in a Radio 2 debate hosted by Iain Duncan Smith, told the former Ukip leader how she had been attacked and told to go back to her country in the days before last year's referendum.

The Ukip MEP was also jeered by some of the studio guests as he responded that there had been abuse "on both sides" of the Brexit debate.

The Slovenian woman, who did not give her name but said she had lived in the UK for more than 30 years and was now retired, said that the referendum result felt like "being dumped by my spouse on social media".

"I was up all night, I saw the results, I saw you on the telly," she told Mr Farage. "I felt as if I was dumped by my spouse on social media. I felt personally insulted. I felt personally hurt.

"I felt like I no longer belonged to this country after all this time. I have to tell you, I didn't want to see a single person who spoke English that day - fortunately, most people I met were other foreigners or Irish, so it was OK."

The woman told Mr Farage that the EU guests had been told of his involvement in the show only shortly before going on air, and some of them were not happy at his presence.

She said: "I knew the way the vote was going to go because I was attacked on a train by two Essex blokes who told me to go back to my country, four weeks before the election."

Apparently struggling to hold back tears, she added: "I feel that I am gradually becoming a second-tier human being. I go to our NHS hospital and every single Commonwealth citizen who works there looks at me completely differently.

"We are being treated differently than we were before."

Mr Farage replied: "That's interesting, because before the referendum it was Commonwealth citizens who felt they were getting a rotten deal because anybody with an EU passport was at the front of the queue and they were effectively at the back of the queue."

Asked by Mr Duncan Smith whether he felt "a sense of sympathy" for the Slovenian woman, Mr Farage said: "There was horrendous abuse during the campaign on both sides. A lot of people behaved very badly and I don't approve of that at all."

His reference to bad behaviour "on both sides" provoked mutterings of disbelief from some of the studio guests.

Mr Farage also repeated his criticism of Boris Johnson's claim that Britain hands over £350 million a week to Brussels which could otherwise be spent on the NHS.

It was branded "misleading" by the official statistician but the Foreign Secretary has never retracted it.

"I think the big Boris thing on the NHS and £350 million was a mistake," said Mr Farage. "If they had said £200 million it would have been legit."

Another woman, apparently referring to Mr Farage's comments about feeling uncomfortable when he heard foreign voices in a railway carriage, told him: "I'm from Romania, so I hope you are not too scared at being so close."

Responding to several guests who said they no longer felt as welcome in Britain and were concerned about their future positions, the former Ukip leader insisted: "We are not sticking up two fingers to the rest of the world, we are getting back our democratic rights as a nation.

"There are 200 countries in the world that make their own laws and determine their own futures. We are just becoming a normal country again."

Additional reporting by Press Association