Shaun Bailey has been criticised for suggesting that free access to contraception and abortion services leads young people into crime.
The Conservative party’s candidate for London mayor, due to stand against Labour’s Sadiq Khan in the 2020 election, called on local authorities to stop providing teenagers with free condoms.
“By giving children condoms and the amount of sexual material they are exposed to you normalise sex and they feel it is their divine right to have it, when actually it is not,” he told a told a parliamentary committee in 2006.
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He added: “That is one of the things that drives their self-esteem up or down and leads to crime.”
Bailey has come under fire for a series of controversial remarks that have been unearthed in recent weeks.
Buzzfeed News revealed that Bailey once suggested that good-looking girls “tend to have been around,” while Business Insider reported that the former youth worker said single mothers deliberately get pregnant in order to receive benefits.
In a policy paper published in 2008, he also accused Hindu and Muslim communities of “robbing Britain of its community” and contributing to the country becoming a “crime-riddled cesspool”.
Kimberly McIntosh, policy officer at Race on the Agenda, says Bailey’s “offensive comments make him unfit” to be the next mayor of London.
Writing in The Guardian, she accuses Bailey of slighting single mothers, working-class Londoners, black families, Muslims, Hindus and young women “in one fell swoop”.
Labour MP Karen Buck said that the Tory candidate’s “backward and illiberal views” are further evidence that he “doesn’t understand” modern London.
The 47-year-old has defended himself by insisting that his comments about single mothers were made in the “rather raw and ill-judged manner of a young man still figuring out his world.”
But as the New Statesman’s Stephen Bush points out, Bailey was 34 when he wrote his remarks about Hindus and Muslims, and 38 when he made spoke about single mothers.
“Now, of course, people can repent of past statements at any age,” Bush says. “But pleading youth at 34 and 38 is a bit of a stretch, and suggests that the apology isn’t wholly sincere.”
