Suella Braverman, Rishi Sunak’s Indian-origin Home Secretary, has been sacked for defying her boss by publishing an incendiary opinion piece recently without implementing the changes requested by Downing Street. In an article for The Times, Ms. Braverman, known for her right-wing views, berated the police for their ‘double standard’ of responding sternly to ‘nationalist protestors’ while ignoring ‘pro-Palestinian mobs’, as she has termed the (largely) British demonstrators calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Ms. Braverman has spent the last year as Home Secretary fighting culture wars over her views on immigration, crime and even homelessness. That Rishi Sunak tolerated her rhetoric raises questions about whether he shared some of her opinions. He will now have to deal with the fallout of a bitterly divided country whose views on human rights, conflict and multiculturalism are being tested on the touchstone of Westminster’s unflinching support for Israel in its current war against Hamas.
Setting off another culture war
Even by Suella Braverman’s record, her opinion piece, on November 9, set a new low. She attacked the police for not caving in to political pressure to ban a pro-Palestinian demonstration — one of a series of Saturday marches seeking to highlight the humanitarian crisis in Gaza as a result of the Israel Defense Forces’ sustained attacks — that on this occasion happened to coincide with Armistice Day.
She had already dismissed these demonstrations as ‘hate marches’, a sentiment that her Prime Minister faintly chimed in on, describing the demonstration as ‘disrespectful’ to the memory of those who had fought and died for the United Kingdom’s freedom. Neither of them seemed to care that the demonstrators were calling for a halt to bloodshed on the anniversary of the armistice that ended the Great War, in which blood was shed by some of the 4,00,000 Muslims from the subcontinent who fought on the fields of Europe or the Arabs who fought alongside the British in the Middle East.
Charging the police with ‘playing favourites when it comes to protestors’, Ms. Braverman accused the ‘pro-Palestinian mobs’ of ‘an assertion of primacy by certain groups – particularly Islamists’, thereby igniting yet another culture war that questions the loyalties of Muslims in Britain. Reacting to her comments, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, a former Chair of the Conservative Party and a former cabinet Minister, called the Home Secretary ‘dangerous and divisive’.
Of the cabinet Ms. Braverman served in, Baroness Warsi observed that there were those in government ‘who project as patriots but they are indeed arsonists. They set this country alight. They pit community against community. They create these fires’.
Rishi Sunak will now have to put out these fires, but he has let them rage unchecked for too long. Time and again he expressed confidence in Suella Braverman as she stoked controversy and outrage with attacks on immigrants, against the ‘woke’ left, against the very multiculturalism that has allowed a Britain made up of diverse communities to rub along together. A compilation of her ‘greatest hits’ as a cabinet Minister in both the Liz Truss and Sunak governments reads as a depressing mix of dog-whistle politics and xenophobia, which in not being officially condemned when they were uttered have succeeded in moving political discourse in the U.K. further to the right.
Ms. Braverman’s problem with immigration
That Suella Braverman has a problem with immigration is well known. Soon after she became Home Secretary under Ms. Truss, she told a Conservative gathering, while miming the movement of an aeroplane taking off, that ‘a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession’.
Under plans first drawn up by Priti Patel as Home Secretary and then faithfully nurtured by Ms. Braverman as her successor, those deemed to have entered the U.K. illegally will be deported to Rwanda and blocked from subsequent attempts to claim asylum in the U.K. Not a single plane has actually taken off because the plan has been ruled illegal under the U.K.’s human rights legislation. Yet, for Ms. Braverman and the Tory right, the scheme remains totemic; instead of showing any inclination for understanding why people might risk their lives in a dangerous Channel crossing, Ms. Braverman described the challenge posed by the small boats as ‘the invasion of our southern coast’. Ironically for the now self-declared champion of Britain’s Jewish community, soon after this intervention, she was confronted by an octogenarian Holocaust survivor in her constituency who told Ms. Braverman that her use of ‘invasion’ and ‘swarms’ reminded her ‘of the language used to dehumanise and justify the murder of my family and millions of others’.
Ms. Braverman’s views remained unchanged. Her outspokenness on Indian immigrants in particular — who she accused in October 2022 of routinely over-staying their visas — almost derailed negotiations on a U.K.-India trade deal. That she herself is the daughter of immigrants does not seem to bother her in the least when she attacks immigration. As she explained in October 2023, ‘The wind of change that carried my own parents across the globe in the 20th Century was a mere gust compared with the hurricane that is coming.’
The child of immigrants from Mauritius and East Africa via Goa, has however, reserved her special ire for multiculturalism, which she denounced in a speech in America earlier this year. At the time, she sat in a cabinet under a Hindu Prime Minister of Indian origin, with a colleague of Sierra Leonian-British roots as the Foreign Secretary (and her successor as Home Secretary); she is married to a Jewish man of South African extraction, and is herself Buddhist. And yet, in her opinion, multiculturalism had ‘failed’ because ‘it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it’.
The cruelty of this statement that asks of people that they shed their culture, their history, the essence of who they were before they entered Britain, whether willingly or seeking refuge, cannot be overstated. It makes all immigrants fair game, their loyalties constantly questioned, a legacy they will pass on to their children and grandchildren.
The irony
Suella Braverman has now gone, sacked not for the views she espoused, but for openly defying her boss. The chessboard of moves required to replace her pulled former Prime Minister David Cameron out of his post-political life to become Foreign Secretary. The irony is unmissable. The Prime Minister who unleashed the Brexit debates that made the vitriol over immigration possible has now been recalled to douse the fires and present a more centrist, electable face of the Conservative Party. India’s External Affairs Minister, S. Jaishankar, who flew in to London expecting to meet James Cleverly on the morning of the reshuffle was not the only one surprised to find a new old face at the Foreign Office that morning. The fires of polarisation that are burning in Britain, however, are anything but new: after a year’s supply of gasoline drip-fed to them, though, they will not go out easily.
Priyanjali Malik is an author and commentator
