Three cheers for Suella Braverman, hammer of the left. The Home Secretary has provoked yet more howls of indignation from progressives after describing anti-Israel demonstrations as ‘hate marches’. Speaking after Monday’s Cobra meeting, Braverman said: ‘We’ve seen now tens of thousands of people take to the streets after the massacre of Jewish people, the single largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, chanting for the erasure of Israel from the map. To my mind there is only one way to describe those marches: they are hate marches.’
Suella Braverman’s right-wing philippics are her version of ‘build the wall’
Finally, someone willing to tell it like it is. That is, after all, what Braverman does. When Tory voters despair at their clueless, ineffectual, ideologically impotent government, many console themselves that at least Braverman is there, fighting the good fight. The Home Secretary is true blue, the standard bearer for the right. She says what ordinary people think, about immigration, about multiculturalism, about extremism, and that’s why she is so vilified by the progressive media.
Who else in frontline politics has been willing to say that mobs marching through the streets of London chanting for the destruction of the Jewish state may be committing a criminal offence? Who else has the guts to warn of a coming ‘hurricane’ of mass immigration and state that politicians have been ‘far too squeamish about being smeared as racists’? Who else has got their head screwed on enough to realise that ‘uncontrolled immigration, inadequate integration and a misguided dogma of multiculturalism’ have been ‘a toxic combination’ across Europe?
Talk like this goes down well with its intended audience, Tory voters. We hear a lot about what Braverman has said, but what has she actually done? In the past 12 months, during which she has been Home Secretary for all except five days, there were over 30,000 arrivals by small boat. That’s an improvement on the previous year, but only because that year’s figure of 45,755 broke all records. When it comes to those old-fashioned enough to arrive here legally, the year ending June 2023 — Braverman became Home Secretary in September 2022 — saw a 63 per cent rise in work (including dependents) visas and a 52 per cent increase in extensions of visas, four-fifths of which were for work.
As for the ‘misguided dogma of multiculturalism’, it was on Braverman’s watch that West Yorkshire Police participated in a kangaroo court that saw the mother of a 14-year-old autistic boy who scuffed a copy of the Quran pleading for him down the local mosque. Braverman said the meeting was ‘like a sharia law trial’, a serious allegation but apparently not serious enough to merit substantive action from the Home Secretary.
Braverman gets away with this because although she governs centre, she talks right, and that seems to be enough for those she is talking to — the Tory voters she hopes will make her leader after the next election. We saw a similar phenomenon with Donald Trump’s pledge to construct a barrier along the border between the United States and Mexico. Chants of ‘build the wall’ became commonplace at Trump rallies and a three-word policy platform. If you knew nothing else about Trump, you knew he was going to build a wall. In four years, just 52 miles of new barrier was built, with existing barriers replaced in a further 406 miles. The other 1,500 miles of land border saw no construction at all.
Yet when Trump’s right-wing critics like Ann Coulter pointed this out, MAGA voters were dismissive or defensive, scrambling around for excuses as to why a president elected to build a wall, and being vested with all the necessary powers to do so, fell spectacularly short. It was as though, after waiting so long for a politician to speak their language on immigration, the words themselves were enough. It didn’t matter if the wall got built as long as ‘build the wall’ got said. Trump’s voters have often been called nationalists but in the main they’re just boomers who care more about outraging the left than they do border protection or American sovereignty.
Suella Braverman’s right-wing philippics are her version of ‘build the wall’. A new arrival to Britain, of which there have been quite a few on her watch, could be forgiven for thinking the Home Secretary’s full name is Suella Braverman-Brands, given the number of headlines she generates that begin ‘Suella Braverman brands…’. She brands anti-Israel demos ‘hate marches’, she brands mass migration a ‘hurricane’, she brands multiculturalism ‘misguided’. Our tough-talking Home Secretary is nothing but branding.
This isn’t my fight. I am, for the most part, a hand-wringing liberal. I’m quite content with squishy Rishi in Number 10. It’s like having the country run by a New Labour covers band. The difference is that New Labour embedded its people and, to some extent, its ideas while shifting the country in its direction. In 13 years, the Tories have embedded not a single right-of-centre idea or policy, unless you believe Brexit is embedded, oh sweet summer child. The liberal-left hegemony is stronger than ever in the public sector, the quangos, the charity industry, and the civil service. Where the Tories have moved the dial, it has mostly been in a leftwards direction, whether on economics or cultural issues. It was, let’s not forget, the Conservatives who were originally pushing gender self-identification.
There are many reasons why the right keeps losing on policy, legislation and culture, even as it wins election after election, but one of them is that right-wing voters can be bought cheap. Chuck them some performative anti-wokeness and a bit of Twitter-baiting rhetoric and they’ll be yours, even as you bob along resignedly on the progressive tide. Suella Braverman offers no more hope to traditional Tories than Priti Patel or Jacob Rees-Mogg or any other ambitious pretender did. The more right-wingers come to realise this the more they will begin to question whether conservative politics can be delivered by the Conservative party.
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