Conservative chairman Oliver Dowden has spoken out against claims by ‘woke’ activists that Britain is a racist nation.  

Speaking after a speech to the American Heritage Foundation, Mr Dowden said “generation after generation” had fled persecution and sought out the “freedom and protection” of living in Britain.  

He praised the “large and growing Jewish community” within his own Hertsmere constituency as proof that Britain was a diverse, open and welcoming nation.  

Mr Dowden delivered a speech to the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington DC about the need to fight “woke” ideology and attacked “cancel culture” which he said was dominating political debate on both sides of the Atlantic. 

In a question and answer session after the speech, he went on to caution against critical race theory, which he said was becoming increasingly dominant in American debate and was beginning to infiltrate politics in Britain.  

He said that “British people by and large are passionately anti-racist” but critical race theory sought to “create divisions where there are not divisions in the first place” and to perpetuate a myth that Britain’s institutions were “somehow systemically racist”.  

“It moves from a wholly correct disgust at racism to saying that somehow our societies have become or are systematically racist,” he said.  

He said Britain was a great country to live and work in and warned it was essential to counter the arguments put forward within critical race theory.  

He said: “I see this in Britain, and I see this in my own constituency, it is wonderful that we have such an open and welcoming society. I have a massive and growing British Indian Hindu community, in previous generations we have a large and growing Jewish community, many of whom escaped persecution elsewhere. 

"People come generation after generation to the UK and the US to seek that freedom and protection and for that in turn to be characterised as some kind of racist construct is perverse.”  

Mr Dowden was the first Conservative chairman to speak in Washington in two decades in an event called “The threat to democracy: Defeated cancel culture by defending the values of the free world”.