Mariella Frostrup perfectly dismantled the anti-immigrant rhetoric from the right, leaving Nadine Dorries speechless.
The journalist was appearing on Thursday’s edition of Question Time alongside recent Reform defector Dorries, Labour minister Stephen Kinnock and Conservative shadow minister Harriet Baldwin.
During the programme, the panel discussed the topic of immigration, and the question of whether the government’s one-in one-out policy was working.
READ NEXT: Albanian PM delivers scathing summary of Brexit as he takes aim at Farage ‘theatrics’
Dorries launched into a predictable rant about how the UK needs to leave the European Convention of Human Rights and use the Royal Navy to patrol the Channel intercepting small boats.
It was then that Frostrup summed up the nastiness of the rhetoric from the likes of Reform by simply saying: “I just don’t know when we started dehumanising people to the extent that we do now.”
After a big round of applause from the audience, she continued: “Imagine if nobody wanted to come here, then we’d really be depressed by Britain as a nation.”
Frostrup pointed out how illegal immigration and the small boats crisis are a result of cuts in government spending on international development and the country’s “completely shambolic asylum system.”
Highlighting the lack of “proper legal routes” for asylum seekers to come to the UK, Dorries claimed there were in fact legal routes.
But when Frostrup gave a scenario of how a woman fleeing the conflict in the Congo would be able to legally reach the UK, Dorries had no response.
She continued: “The way we talk about people trying to come here, and the way we completely ignore the dilemmas that they face. And the fact that we have been instrumental in a lot of those conflicts.
“What happened to Afghanistan? When we were determined that people from Afghanistan could come here because of the way they supported us during that war.
“And now we’re talking about them as if they’re rubbish on the street. I think it’s a shame we’re allowing Reform UK to set the tone and the agenda and the way we talk about illegal immigrants.”
You can watch the exchange below.