What is Suella Braverman up to? Framing migrants as an existential threat to western civilisation, assailing multiculturalism, while talking darkly about the numbers of children had by foreign-born mothers; this week the home secretary was to be found delivering a speech to a rightwing US thinktank that sank to a bleak new low. Braverman has form when it comes to introducing extreme rightwing views into the mainstream, but this speech was especially egregious. It was riddled with the same tropes found in the “great replacement” – a far-right conspiracy theory that suggests Europeans are being replaced by outsiders with the complicity of elites.
The speech also moved Britain’s officially sanctioned anti-LGBTQ backlash up yet another notch. It was never going to stop at trans people. After the government’s delaying of plans to ban conversion “therapy”, Braverman pointed the finger at LGBTQ refugees, saying that it is currently too easy for them to seek asylum, even though official figures show they represent a tiny fraction of those who hope to find refuge in the UK. LGBTQ Britons who became accustomed to perpetual progress after the 90s should now prepare for worse to come.
