Le Pen to Blair: 'I would send all our refugees to you'

The French far right leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, said yesterday that he would send all the 1,400 people in the Sangatte refugee camp "to Tony Blair by special train" if he was elected President next week.

Mr Le Pen, speaking at a tempestuous press conference at his headquarters south of Paris, was responding angrily to an interview earlier this week in which Mr Blair called him a "racist".

Mr Le Pen said: "I am no more a racist than Mr Blair, who doesn't want to take the immigrants who turn up at Sangatte."

If he was in power, Mr Le Pen said, he would "organise a special train" and "send them all to Tony Blair." Although a deliberate provocation – something in which Mr Le Pen delights – Downing Street responded almost immediately.

Mr Blair's spokesman said Mr Le Pen's "racist antecedents" spoke for themselves. He said: "The problem of asylum-seekers is a serious problem. Politicians have to decide whether to try to deal with it, or whether to exoloit it. We're dealing with it. Le Pen is exploiting it."

The Sangatte refugee camp, run by the Red Cross, was opened three years ago near the mouth of the Channel Tunnel to house refugees attempting to reach Britain and refusing to register for asylum in France.

Mr Le Pen's press conference yesterday at the headquarters of his National Front party , was also interrupted by scuffling as his security officials tried to exclude a television crew from a French channel that the far-right leader dislikes.

Mr Le Pen, as usual, peppered his remarks with references to the 1930s and 1940s, including a description of the gathering alliance of almost all French political, social and church groups against him as the "popular front". This is a reference to the left-wing coalition government of the 1930's, blamed in far-right, Vichyist demonology for the defeat of France in 1940.

In this context, Mr Le Pen's use of the phrase "special train" will inevitably conjure up memories of the trains chartered by the Vichy government and the Nazis to deport French Jews to concentration camps during the Second World war. Whether that was a gaffe by Mr Le Pen or another provocation was unclear.

Mr Le Pen attempted to soften his previous announcement that he would pull France out of the European Union if he is elected President in the second round of the presidential election next week. (All the indications are that he will be comprehensively defeated).

Mr Le Pen, 73, said that, if he became President, he would restore the franc but allow the euro to continue to circulate inside France as a parallel currency. Although he continued to say he would organise a referendum on pulling France out of the European Union, he also spoke yesterday of "renegotiating" the EU farming policy to make it more attractive to French farmers.

He is fighting his second round campaign making direct attacks on President Chirac's record of alleged financial wrongdoing as mayor of Paris.

Mr Le Pen called yesterday on the French people to rise up in a "true gathering of the nation, against the popular front that Chirac is trying to put in place to save himself and escape from the judges".

* Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who was defeated in the first round of the election by Mr Le Pen, has called on his supporters for the first time to reject the extreme right in next week's run-off.