Even in politics, and certainly in more normal settings, it takes a lot to challenge a colleague openly. To weigh the consequences of a public criticism before making it, not least for one’s family, is understandable. That is perhaps especially true when the critic and the colleague share a political party and both are from ethnic minorities. All of these concerns, Sayeeda Warsi wrote this week, went through her mind before she finally penned the Guardian article accusing the home secretary, Suella Braverman, of racism and of “playing politics in the gutter” after she had branded British Pakistani men as child sex abusers.
However difficult, writing the article was the right thing to do. The home secretary has been getting away with her politics of performative cruelty and vindictiveness for too long. Every unchallenged provocation she makes only increases her boldness. Her comments that the members of sexual grooming gangs are “almost all British-Pakistani, who hold cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values” were deliberately loose and consciously inflammatory, and were not based on the facts that, as a lawyer and a senior minister, she has an obligation to uphold. These were not dog-whistles, but racist language.
