Rishi Sunak has much to learn from Suella Braverman

Amid all the heat and not much light thrown up by the ongoing debate on the illegal migration crisis, it is easy to pick out the voice of Home Secretary Suella Braverman. She is the Conservative who isn’t bluffing when the idea is raised of the UK withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights or even the United Nation Refugees Convention and running its own much tougher system.

While Rishi Sunak’s Downing Street operation specialises in generating ‘refuses to rule out’ headlines to counter a new round of failure to stop the boats, he shows no signs of preparing to ensure all Tory general election candidates are onside. So even in the event of a surprise Conservative win in 2024 there would be a sufficient phalanx of Tory MPs able to side with left-wing parties to block UK departure from the thicket of international treaties and bodies that prevent effective action on this issue.

Had Braverman triumphed in last year’s Conservative leadership contest – at which she made the case for Britain bailing out of the unsustainable global asylum system – one senses that she’d have gone at it rather as Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings once went at getting Brexit ‘done’. By contrast with his Home Secretary, the Prime Minister has so far proved to be much more of a toe-in-the-water merchant and the British public have been able to detect that.

Braverman’s speech to the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington today is an exercise in taking her cast-iron conviction onto the world stage at a time when administrations from the US to Italy are struggling to contain huge upsurges in illegal migration. Were there to prove to be a viable multilateral market in robustly rewriting the global rules that people traffickers and their people are currently running rings around it would be an undoubted boon for Braverman and her wing of the Tory party.

She wants the definition of a refugee to be much narrower, with far sterner tests applying as to whether someone has a well-founded fear of persecution. As she puts it: ‘There are vast swathes of the world where it is extremely difficult to be gay, or to be a woman. Where individuals are being persecuted it is right that we offer sanctuary. But we will not be able to sustain an asylum system if, in effect, simply being gay or a woman and fearful of discrimination in your country of origin is sufficient to qualify for protection.’

Braverman also wants it made explicit that someone who has already passed through a safe country cannot seek refugee status in another safe country. She branded the asylum ‘shopping’ that goes on presently ‘absurd and unsustainable’.

All this, naturally, is anathema to the global liberal superclass who police the obsolete mid-20th century treaties which are still applied to our new world of mass human transit as if they were sacred texts for all time.

Braverman must therefore know that by arguing for fundamental change to reinforce nation state borders she is putting herself once more into the firing line. The modernist left will seek to use her ethnicity against her, depicting her as a hypocrite to argue for tougher controls – even though her own parents came to the UK absolutely legally. It surely cannot be reasonable to suggest that black or brown Britons are ethically forbidden from arguing for robust immigration controls and thus unable to exercise their own judgment about what is in the national interest because of some inherited duty to outsiders. But media outlets and many ‘centrist’ political figures advanced just such opinions when Priti Patel was home secretary.

They will come for Braverman too, suggesting that she is a peculiarly nasty and heartless person, having already dubbed her ‘Cruella’. She will face a hate campaign as virulent as anything Margaret Thatcher ever braved but far more widely disseminated in this era of all-enveloping social media.

But here is the thing: she is right. The system really is unsustainable. Either it must be reformed radically by conventional politicians or it will end up being dumped in chaotic and dangerous fashion by a new wave of demagogues that electors have had to turn to in desperation.

The former Manic Street Preachers band member Richey Edwards was once challenged as to how serious he was about his art or whether his rebel persona was mainly a pose. His response was to pick up a razor blade and carve ‘for real’ into his arm.  

The time is coming soon when the Conservative party and its leader will have to decide whether they are for real when it comes to tackling the wholesale abuse of the asylum system by would-be economic migrants or prefer instead to hand the task on to wilder forces. Suella Braverman is for real and I like that.