Emma Thompson: BNP would love your university

The 50-year-old actress told students that "Nick Griffin would feel very comfortable" at Exeter, which she said must work harder to help make the south-west of England more diverse.

Thompson, who won a best actress Oscar in 1992 for her performance in Howard's End, made her comments after claiming that her Rwanda-born adopted son Tindyebwa Agaba, 22, suffered racist abuse during his studies there.

Mr Agaba - known as Tindy - read politics at the university. His mother claimed he suffered a "rough" time with "unpleasant experiences" because he is black.

Thompson visited the university with her son and actor and writer Kwame Kwei-Armah to talk about racism in society. She urged staff and students to be more tolerant and told them "it's up to you".

One member of the audience raised the issue of the BNP and comments by its leader Mr Griffin that London was no longer a British city.

Thompson replied: "He'd love Exeter, he would feel very comfortable here." The woman asked: "What can we do to change the whiteness of Devon and Cornwall, how can we expand our university?"

The actress said: "This is how we're doing it [by talking about it]. It's depressing when people think nothing is being done about it. Tindy had his experience and now we're having a big week of educational events to try to help it. Please understand you're already engaged, give yourself small goals.

"You're not going to get hundreds and hundreds of black students here overnight, but what you can do is make them more comfortable."

The actress was hosting a lecture at the university's Streatham Campus entitled All Africans Now: Artistry and Activism to promote racial equality. Thompson and her actor husband Greg Wise adopted Tindy, a former child soldier, in 2003 after he fled the genocide in Rwanda. He was 16.

University spokesman Stuart Franklin said: "Racism is a sad reality of British life. We would be naive to think racism did not affect some of the 18,000 people who work and study on campuses". A survey of 326 GPs by Pulse magazine has found that two per cent of them - six doctors - would vote for the BNP. Another four per cent said they would vote for UKIP. Just eight per cent would vote for Labour, 22 per cent for the Liberal Democrats and 52 per cent for the Tories.