Last week, Britain’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman gave a very toxic speech. Addressing the Conservative Party at its annual conference, she enjoyed the applause as she laid out her hard line on immigration and migration – that pesky thing called human rights – and her ‘woke’ critics. It cemented her place as the standard-bearer of the extreme Conservative agenda at a time when the party is struggling with its numbers in the polls, with a general election due by the end of next year.
Braverman described migration as “a hurricane that would bring millions more immigrants to these shores, uncontrolled and unmanageable”. British governments, she said, had been “far too squeamish” about being “smeared as racist to properly bring order to the chaos”. In an earlier speech to an American think-tank, she warned that countries faced an “existential” threat if they could not control their borders.
But her language made some Tories uncomfortable. The BBC reported comments from Conservative MP Alicia Kearns, who said: “I recognise that there are legitimate concerns, but I think we have to be very careful that we don’t create a situation where we demonise either minorities or those who are vulnerable.” Her comments on “gender ideology”, which she described as a “woke” and “highly controversial” thesis, provoked even sharper reactions.
How Braverman drew Tory ire
She said trans women should not be allowed on single-sex wards and promised to remove “gender ideology, white privilege and anti-British history” from educational institutions. There was a very public and angry reaction from Tory London Assembly member Andrew Boff, who heckled Braverman and was ejected from the venue. He later told the media: ‘I’m a loyal Tory. This rubbish about gender ideology makes our Conservative Party look transphobic and homophobic. That is not what our Conservative party is about.
Braverman does not like human rights either. She told the conference that the Human Rights Act should be called the “Criminal Rights Act”.
Ironically, this extremely tough line comes from a woman of Indian origin. Her parents are of Indian origin and emigrated to the UK in the 1960s. Braverman recently took a strong stance on a trade deal with India, saying that Indians were the largest group of people overstaying their visas in the UK, while ruling out more visas for Indians as part of sealing the trade deal.
It is astonishingly hypocritical that a woman who grew up in a multicultural Britain, with every opportunity available to her because her parents moved to the UK, should now be drawing up policies to stop others seeking a better life, or even trying to escape persecution in their own countries. It’s not just hypocritical, it’s outrageous.
Their efforts to stop migrants seeking asylum in the UK are simply cruel. Thankfully, the law requiring anyone arriving in small boats across the Channel to be detained and then permanently deported to their home country or third countries has not yet come into force as it is being challenged in the UK courts.
