Sayeeda Warsi has joined forces with Doreen Lawrence and Shami Chakrabarti to launch an attack on Nigel Farage, accusing him of spreading fear with the “age-old racist” claim that migrants could put women in Britain at risk of sexual assaults.

A letter to the Guardian signed by Lady Warsi and the high-profile human rights campaigners Lady Lawrence and Chakrabarti, demands an apology from Farage when he takes part with the prime minister in a live EU referendum programme on ITV on Tuesday night.

Nigel Farage must apologise for sex attack warning | Letter from Shami Chakrabarti, Sayeda Warsi and Doreen Lawrence Read more

Warsi, a Tory peer and former party chairman, shares the Ukip leader’s desire for Britain to leave the EU, but has hit out at his latest comments over the weekend, writing to claim that he has plumbed to new depths and crossed the “line of civilised discourse”.

The Ukip leader triggered controversy by claiming there were “very big cultural issues” that could mean women in the UK could be endangered. “The nuclear bomb this time would be about Cologne,” he said, referring to mass sexual attacks that were alleged to take place in Germany last new year’s eve.



Warsi, Lawrence and Chakrabarti hit back, claiming the comments took Farage to a “new low”.

“Spreading fear in this way is an age-old racist tool designed to stoke division about the latest group of immigrants arriving in Britain,” they wrote, arguing that the reference to a bomb suggested an indiscriminate act with scant regard for the impact on race relations.

The three women said that despite being on different sides of the EU campaign they were united in their belief that Farage was “spreading lies and fears” about Turkey joining the EU in a “cheap political tactic designed to cause maximum harm and convert fear into votes at whatever cost”.



They also argued that veiled threats of sexual assault were straying “too close for comfort to the race-hate laws”.

Their letter comes as Britain Stronger in Europe, the umbrella campaign for remain, launches a video in which they pull together Farage’s mostshocking comments, including his defence of the use of racist language, claiming foreign nationals with HIV are putting a strain on the NHS and the people would be concerned if a group of Romanian men moved in next door.

A spokesman for Farage said the remain side may not “like the facts” but should not ignore the reality that Britain can only control its borders outside the EU.

“Inside the European Union we cannot stop bad people from coming into our country if they have EU passports. Turkey will have visa-free access to Europe this year with Angela Merkel and David Cameron fully supportive of full EU membership for Turkey.”

The prime minister and Ukip leader will make their arguments in two parts of the same programme on Tuesday night, in the closest that Cameron will come to a head-to-head debate during the referendum campaign.

It comes as senior remain campaigners admit that a shift in the polls towards Brexit is causing concern, with their focus groups having voters typically using the word “confused” 20 times or more within the first five minutes.

Bill Esterson, Labour’s shadow small business minister, said the realisation was dawning that “it might be time to panic” as he criticised what he called Vote Leave’s “outrageous claims about the EU”.

He hit out at the “remarkable lemming-like desire to follow Pied Piper Boris Trump and his sidekick, Vladimir Gove over the white cliffs of Dover”.

Earlier the two campaigns clashed after Cameron claimed Brexit would detonate a bomb under the British economy, while Gove and Johnson said the bigger risk was to stay in the EU.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Britain Stronger in Europe’s video targeting Nigel Farage.

Asked about the prime minister’s claim, Gove said he believed in “free speech and democratic debate, a strong culture of people telling it like it is and shooting from the hip”.

The political battle has heated up, with insults flying in all directions. Tim Roache, the GMB union’s general secretary, sparked fury when he claimed there was “surely a contradiction” in Priti Patel’s name.

The Conservative MP and high-profile out campaigner Anne-Marie Trevelyan accused Roache of a “new low” and “exactly the kind of negativity that voters up and down the country are rejecting”.

The row was particularly embarrassing on a day that Roache joined the general secretaries of Unite, Unison, Usdaw and others to urge their 6 million members to vote to remain in the EU.

In another letter to the Guardian, supporters of the leave campaign including Labour MPs and other trade unionists describe the call to remain to protect workers’ right as desperate.

They write: “Instead of fearmongering about workers’ rights, the unions would be better off telling the British public when they will have a similar chance to elect the EU Commission. The answer, of course, is never.”

Labour’s lead campaigner to stay in the EU, Alan Johnson, has used an interview with Progress magazine to reject the idea that the campaign might damage Labour in the same way that the party was hit after the referendum in Scotland.



“I don’t buy all this guff from some of the ‘Leave’ side, the handful of Labour people who say that this is going to damage us, because it will strengthen Ukip,” he said. “I mean, their argument is really for us to be a totally unprincipled party and just to kind of speak one way out of one side of our mouth in one part of the country ... I mean, that’s nasty, ugly politics.”

It comes as a new analysis from the Stronger In campaign claims that leaving the EU will mean a £34.4bn ‘export tax’ – worth £80,000 for each one of the 430,000 British businesses that export to the EU. The issue will be at the centre of an event with business secretary Sajid Javid and former European trade commissioner Peter Mandelson on Tuesday, with the pair writing to Vote Leave to ask what their alternative plan for Britain looks like.

It comes as a new analysis from the Stronger In campaign claims that leaving the EU will mean a £34.4bn ‘export tax’ - worth £79,500 for each one of the 430,000 British businesses that export to the EU. The issue will be at the centre of an event with business secretary Sajid Javid and Peter Mandelson on Tuesday, with the pair writing to Vote Leave to ask what their alternative plan for Britain looks like.