Conservative MP Sayeeda Warsi quits Leave campaign

Prominent Leave MP Sayeeda Warsi has taken away her support for the campaign to exit the European Union, citing the side's tactics of "hate and xenophobia".

With just days to go before Britons arrive to the polls for its historic referendum on EU membership, the former Conservative chair said the positive case for leaving the EU had been neglected by the official campaign, as they focus on negative reasons to leave.

The former Conservative chair said the positive case for leaving the EU had been neglected by the official campaign

Leaders within the Leave side have said that she was never a fully active part of the campaign.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4´s Today show, Warsi questioned the actions of those fighting for a Leave vote.

“Why is it people like me, instinctively Eurosceptic who feel the EU needs reform, feel they now have to leave leave?” she said. “Because day after day what are we hearing? The refugees are coming, the rapists are coming, the Turks are coming.”

Monday saw a new barrage of commentators expressing their opinions on the upcoming referendum including speeches of support from businessman Richard Branson as well as the Premier League.

Warsi referred to the poster showing migrants and refugees queuing on the Slovenian border as her main reason for abandoning the Leave campaign.

"Day after day what are we hearing? The refugees are coming, the rapists are coming, the Turks are coming.”

She said it was “perpetuating a set of lies about who those people are, where they were going, suggesting they were coming to the United Kingdom”.

“This kind of nudge-nudge, wink-wink xenophobic racist campaign may be politically savvy or useful in the short term but it causes long-term damage to communities,” she told the BBC.

UKIP leader Nigel Farage was forced to fend off criticism of the poster over the weekend as polls indicated the two sides were neck-and-neck ahead of the 23 June vote.

“I look at that group of people and I think they’re not the kind of people I’d get on a night bus with. Why would I want them to run my country?" Warsi continued.

“I don’t want the leave camp to be running this country and I don’t want the messages coming out of that camp to form the basis of the kind of Britain that I want to live in and to bring my kids up in.”

However, a member of the Vote Leave campaign committee, Daniel Hannan, has said that she initially declined his offer to join the cause, and that she had stopped campaigning in recent weeks.

“I was making the case to leave before Vote Leave had ever formally been established,” she told Today. “I had a very clear conversations where I said I had concerns about people who were now becoming involved in the Vote Leave campaign, taking the message of what Vote Leave stood for down a path that I was not comfortable with... unfortunately those moderate voices have been stifled.”