TRYING to “out-Tory the Tories” on immigration will only embolden the far right and “sow the seeds of our own demise,” Nadia Whittome MP told a Labour conference fringe meeting last night.

Ms Whittome described Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s meeting with his Italian counterpart, Giorgia Meloni, earlier this month as “the last place that we should be looking to” when it comes to the future of migration in this country.

“We need to remember that this is an extremely far-right government that has employed and funded incredibly brutal methods to achieve its aims,” she said.

“We need to go back to the question: why do we want to stop small boats?

“For us, the answer is because they’re dangerous, and because we want people to be able to claim asylum here safely.

“For the right, it’s because that they don’t want people to be coming here at all.”

The MP for Nottingham East said she feared the Labour front bench was pursuing the latter.

“We can’t out-Tory the Tories when it comes to immigration,” she said, because doing so would “sow the seeds of our own demise because we’re emboldening the far right.”

The fringe meeting was hosted by Labour Campaign for Free Movement, which also held a demonstration outside the Labour Party conference earlier on Sunday.

One of the speakers, firefighter Brendan Woodhouse, told those gathered in the rain about one of his 2016 missions with Sea-Watch, an NGO that operates a refugee rescue ship in the Mediterranean.

He told the crowd of the desperation he felt when a doctor told him it was too late for the 14-year-old girl he had pulled from the sea and tried to resuscitate.

“I realised then that some bastard had signed away her life,” he said.

“Some bastard had written a policy in Brussels that was rubber-stamped by our politicians, too.

“They don’t get to be out there, like I was that day, seeing the poor little girls and boys getting killed.

“But if they could be there for a second, they’d think differently about their policies.”