THE Bibby Stockholm could be “confined to the dustbin of history,” Portland Mayor Caroline Parks said as she prepares to take Home Secretary Suella Braverman to court over a failure to obtain planning permission.

The vessel was to be used as accommodation for asylum-seekers, despite health and safety warnings, but was delayed after Legionella bacteria was discovered in the water supply in August — only days after 39 asylum-seekers had moved in.

Ms Parks told the Stand Up to Racism fringe meeting at the Labour conference that she spoke to some of the men who were “incarcerated” on the vessel and they described it “as like being in a prison.” Some of the men who had been in prison in Iraq got flashbacks.

She said that if they had gone through planning permission, things like fire safety would have been taken into account.

The permission hearing takes place in the Royal Courts of Justice tomorrow.

“If it’s successful, the Bibby Stockholm could be confined to the dustbin of history,” she said.

Also speaking at the meeting, Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy accused the Tory party of “promoting racism.”

“The Tories themselves are just offering nothing economically except for more misery, even lower living standards, and now cuts to welfare benefits,” she said.

“So their entire election campaign is going to be based on racism.”

Ms Ribeirio-Addy said it was important to campaign on “all of the key issues that affect the most oppressed by racism.

“This includes racist policing [and] the disgusting case of the treatment of Child Q.”

“And the overwhelmingly black children who have been strip-searched in our schools.”

Labour MP Richard Burgon warned that the government was using “racism as a weapon of mass destruction.”

“It’s trying to shift the blame for a decade of falling wages, of collapsing services, of plummeting living standards, and underinvestment in communities from those that are really to blame, the Tory Party and its policies that serve the super-rich, to some of the most powerless people,” he said.

“We can’t point out enough that it’s the political choice of those in government that’s left the working-class majority in all its diversity in this country paying the price for an economic crisis that they didn’t cause.”