Vince Cable has denied calling Brexit supporters racist after he used a speech at the Liberal Democrats’ spring conference to say that too many of them wanted to recreate a world where passports were blue and “faces were white”.

Defending his comments, Cable said that while “one element” for some people in supporting Brexit was a desire to curb non-EU immigration, he was primarily making the point that the vote to leave the EU was delivered predominantly on the votes of older people.

“I know it’s uncomfortable but the simple truth of the matter is the older generation – my generation – the majority voted Brexit, whereas for the younger generation – I’m talking under 25, but indeed a wider group, voted to remain,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

At the speech in Southport, Cable said that while 75% of under-25s voted remain at the 2016 referendum, 70% of those aged 65 or more voted for Brexit.

“Too many were driven by a nostalgia for a world where passports were blue, faces were white, and the map was coloured imperial pink,” he said. Their votes were “crushing the hopes and aspiration of the young for years to come”, he added.

Asked about the comments, Cable said he did believe one factor for the Brexit vote was nostalgia: “Why else has so much fuss been made about the change in colour of the passport?



“If you’d read the whole of my speech, to the extent to which I touched on the race issue at all, in 40 minutes, my main criticism was of my own party.”

In his speech, Cable had said: “Looking around the auditorium, we are very, very white. We must prioritise making our party more ethnically diverse.”

The Lib Dem leader told Today that a main focus of his speech had been to how to improve inter-generational fairness. However, he argued, some leave voters had been motivated by race.

“And I think there’s a couple of bits of evidence which support that. Some of the most effective propaganda at the time – you may remember [former Ukip leader Nigel] Farage’s advertisements – were queues of dark-faced people, and that was an argument about immigration being prevented.

“I spent a lot of the referendum going round mostly prosperous country areas – they weren’t deprived areas of the north – and the overwhelming reason given for voting the way they were, and they were predominantly older groups, were about immigration. And when people thought about immigration they weren’t predominantly thinking about people from eastern Europe.”

This was, Cable said, “only one element” of the argument, but did exist.