Suella Braverman isn’t just some ‘pantomime villain’ – she’s dangerous

It’s quite easy, and as it happens entirely accurate, to say that Suella Braverman is “unhinged”, “out of control” and “offensive”. We’ve known that for some time. Perhaps she’s playing some sophisticated political game, whereby she goads Rishi Sunak into sacking her, making her an even bigger hero of the hard right and party leader. On the other hand, she might just be being her own “authentic” self.

In a way it doesn’t matter. That’s because there is a much more serious side to what Braverman is actually doing right now as home secretary.

She is inflicting huge damage on our multicultural society, on the party she purports to serve and the constitution of the nation. She’s not just potentially dangerous – she is undermining the police, eroding the right to protest, encouraging Islamophobia, stirring up hatred and effectively encouraging violence on the streets in a lot of what she says and does.

Whether the prime minister or his staff approved her latest article or not (in an op-ed for The Times she also claimed Islamists were using Saturday’s demo to express “primacy” and compared it to extremist rallies in Northern Ireland with links to terrorism), she is the home secretary. The fact that she feels the urge to encourage conflict is profoundly disturbing.

Her language is defiantly extreme and, it seems, designed to provoke fear and anger. It is in that respect, Powell-like. At the Conservative conference, she spoke about a “hurricane” of migration. She suggested that asylum seekers pretend to be gay in order to gain a right to remain in the UK – at odds with the statistics. According to Home Office data, sexual orientation formed part of the basis for an asylum claim in 1 per cent of all applications in 2021 (77 per cent fewer than in 2019).

She claims, again in defiance of the evidence of cities such as Leicester, that multiculturalism has failed. Before her latest foray into inciting hate, she cheerfully called the movement of small boats full of refugees in the English Channel an “invasion”.

She has openly advocated leaving the European Convention on Human Rights – something that would conveniently end the qualified right to protest and lawful assembly we’ve enjoyed for centuries. Braverman is a kind of cultural vandal, who seems to take some sort of sadistic pleasure in making us believe that what divides us is far greater than what unites us.

Frankly, she seems highly Islamophobic, and that is not helping Muslim people in Britain who want nothing more than to make a living and build a future for themselves and their families – the same as everyone else.

It’s not just that her attacks on the Metropolitan Police are unconstitutional, according to some dusty textbooks. The damage is that she is undermining the authority of the Met to do the job society needs them to do, and keep the peace.

Frustrated that she can’t actually ban a protest march that the police and Crown Prosecution Service assess as lawful and unlikely to provoke serious public order, she suggests that the police are exercising “favouritism”. Further, she implies that the pro-Palestine marchers are Islamists, ie terrorists, and the British police are somehow on their side. Yes, that’s outrageous and insulting, and indeed “unhinged”.

The significance of the suggestion, from the cabinet minister in charge, that the police are biased, partisan and favouring one community above another, and won’t protect you if they don’t want to, is vast.

EDL? BNP? Britain First? She’s apparently on your side: “Right-wing and nationalist protesters who engage in aggression are rightly met with a stern response, yet pro-Palestinian mobs displaying almost identical behaviour are largely ignored, even when clearly breaking the law.”

Nonsense, and dangerous with it – but she’s said it, and will keep saying it.

That is one powerful reason why politicians shouldn’t ever get involved in the operational activities of the police, and ought not attack the chief constable. Yet Braverman will continue to do so, and probably use any disturbances this weekend, whipped up by her own words, to use against the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Mark Rowley.

A situation where the home secretary is openly critical of the commissioner is not sustainable. That she chooses to attack the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan – who happens to be Muslim – in the same vein is equally damaging to the fabric of society. It is regrettable, to say the least, that Sunak has opted to add to the pressures on Rowley. The question needs to be put: if the government has no respect for the police, why should anyone else?

We need to understand why these constitutional conventions are so important. If we did not have the right to protest, if we didn’t have coppers such as Rowley able to defy the politicians, if we didn’t have independent courts and judges, then Braverman could tell Rowley to arrest someone on some march that she’d read about in the newspapers.

Once charged, she could then make it known to the judge in the case that anything less than a conviction and stiff sentence would be defying the will of the people, according to her, the democratically-elected minister. She could get her way and the criminal justice “blob” would be told what to do. It would be – and you have to use the term qualified – a form of mild fascism.

We have glimpsed it many times since the Brexit referendum, the “will of the people” invoked against the “enemies of the people” – judges, “woke” police, opposition (and some Tory) MPs, the BBC, the universities, trades unions, the civil service, the Archbishop of Canterbury, even (on occasion) the King. They are all characterised, even demonised as some homogenised “luxury elite”, an absurd concept.

But what does a society where the “will of the people”, as interpreted by a handful of people in power, look like? I’ll tell you: like an elected dictatorship where a part-rigged general election every four or five years hands absolute power to the leadership of one political party. That’s the country Braverman seemingly wants to create, and that’s exactly why we should be so worried about her.