“I’m not going to criticise Kamala Harris,” Nandy told Times Radio. “I think that she’s fighting her own campaign and she’s entitled to speak for herself, but I wouldn’t use that language about other politicians.”
“I think over the course of time, both in American politics and here in the U.K., we’ve got into a very base political debate where we’ve had far too much people using negative language towards one another,” Nandy added. “I’ve always believed, whether it’s politicians in my own party doing it or politicians in other parties, that we can fundamentally disagree on matters of policy, but we should treat each other with respect and that is not the sort of language that I would use.”
Nandy, a veteran of the U.K.’s fraught debates over Brexit, said it was her personal view that “you lose the ability to understand one another if you don’t treat each other on a personal level with the utmost respect.”
Harris replied in the affirmative Wednesday when asked if she thought Trump was a fascist during a town hall event. The vice president was agreeing with Trump’s former Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, who said of Trump in an interview with the New York Times: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
The British minister’s comments come as the governing U.K. Labour Party tries to hose down a row with the Trump campaign over assistance for Harris’ White House bid.
Trump’s campaign this week filed a legal complaint with the Federal Election Commission, accusing Labour of election interference after party aides traveled to the U.S. to campaign on the Democrats’ behalf.
