9th November 2023
The extraordinary newspaper column of the Home Secretary – the Home Secretary! – should be either consequential (in that the Home Secretary loses their job) or significant (in that it signifies something about the government that does not sack this Home Secretary).
But in neither situation, should it be treated as normal, and it should not just be shrugged off as an ambitious politician seeking advancement. It should matter, one way or the other.
This blog does not offer commentary on Israel/Palestine/Gaza – as this blog does not have any special knowledge or understanding about the Middle East.
But this blog does follow the constitutional (and operational) relationship between central government and the Metropolitan Police, and it also follows free expression issues and Irish matters.
And in respect of each of those things, the Home Secretary’s column is (at best) unfortunate and (at worst) horrific.
It is a rare Home Secretary who makes the Metropolitan Police – the Metropolitan Police! – look liberal.
If the Home Secretary keeps their job after this, their intervention should not be forgotten. It was a crass and illiberal assault on the constitutional (and operational) independence of the police, against freedom of expression, and based in part on a mangled and limited understanding of Irish history.
This intervention should not have any place in our polity, even in these unusual political times.
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David,
Just a thought.
When do “these unusual political times” stop being unusual, and become the norm?
In the UK, the unusual times don’t appear to have stopped for – well – a very long time.
Eight months back, in a comment on another post on this site, I couldn’t avoid the conclusion regarding the Illegal Migration Bill that “our government is spending our money to foment xenophobia” https://davidallengreen.com/2023/03/the-illegal-migration-bill-is-about-political-theatre-not-serious-law-making/#comment-494427
We need to keep calling this out loud and clear. Because if we don’t take action to stop it becoming the norm, it will be.
There have been comments that she wants to be sacked to start a leadership campaign, and I think this is her intent. As a result Sunak can’t sack her to avoid a leadership challenge. Therefore her vile rhetoric will continue to foment action by her right wing acolytes against those she sees as the others.
She needs sacked but it’s unlikely to happen so there isn’t an answer.
It shouldn’t really matter in this case even if the HS wanted to start ww3. She’s seriously undermined the police & exceeded her authority in doing so. From a political pov she’s also defied the PM and his previous decision to back the police security analysis, so on both grounds, it’s dismissal.
Suella Braverman should be sacked even if this triggers a leadership election. The Conservative Party sooner or later must lance this boil.
Surely allowing a bad actor to continue within your ranks is the shortest path to your (and your organisations/governments) demise. Quite the opposite of ‘strong & stable’ leadership (appreciate that wasn’t Sunak’s tag line anyway).
Could you have taken this further? The Commissioner has, one assumes, followed the opinion of his in-house lawyers to conclude that he does not have the power to ban a march simply because it suited the government of the day on the thin pretext that it was projected for a certain Saturday of especial significance in November. (Where, BTW, are the Home Officer’s lawyers? Overruled one assumes.)
Now let us suppose that the Commissioner was more craven than he has turned out to be and had accepted the Home Secretary’s instruction. Would his action in banning the march, or insisting it was deferred to later in the month, have been liable to challenge in the courts? How would that have ended?
I am quite sure that David Allen Green is right to see this as a very significant moment. If I wasn’t already committed on Saturday, I would probably have gone and marched myself to make a point.
Phil Moorhouse gave a good political analysis of Cruella’s Times letter on YouTube. From a left-wing perspective but clear and to the point.
Hear hear. Of course, anyone who has been following Braverman’s career will not be surprised. She does a passable impression of someone who never attended a single constitutional law lecture.
I disagree. She was a perfectly competent government lawyer. This is the worrying thing. She knows the stuff.
One has to hope that as a recognised competent person in law that the Home Secretary receives appropriate treatment when the ‘day in court’ happens.
Or a single march as she admitted on Sky News
There may or may not be legitimate comparisons to make between marches in Northern Ireland and pro-Palestinian marches in London. But what is most striking is the incapacity of the current Home Secretary to articulate this supposed similarity in a way that is remotely intellectually coherent. She knows little and cares less.
That is a good point, well made.
I do quite like the Northern Ireland approach to have an independent commission to make decision on parades.
Obviously it’s not exactly the same thing but I do think it would be better if decisions on demonstrations were taken by an independent body rather than the police. And I suspect the police would be quite happy to give up that responsibility.
Sunak can’t sack her to avoid a leadership challenge, of course not. But in the name of all that is decent and honourable and for the security of the country, this vile woman should be gone before the weekend. Whether Sunak has the backbone to carry that out is highly doubtful.
It’s almost as if Sunak and Braverman want there to be trouble on Saturday. Then they can blame the Met Commissioner for not banning the protest.
Braverman’s claim that the police favour left wing protests (something left wing protesters may find surprising) is almost certain to encourage right wing thugs to get stuck in.
I have no sympathy for Sunak’s dilemma. It’s his own fault for needlessly reappointing Braverman as Home Secretary.
One answer would be for Sunak to call an election now. He’s likely to lose, so he could buzz off to California and leave the way clear for her to have a go at being leader.
One is tempted to wonder whether she parrots these views or actually holds them but I’m honestly not sure that it matters. Or even which condition is worse. Both prospects are appalling.
So the Met is (so far) declining to use the new powers granted by Braverman (by means of a statutory instrument, and contrary to the wish of Parliament) to ban demonstrations which cause more than minor nuisance. Which is no doubt why she is ramping up the rhetoric. Let’s hope in the short run that Rowley holds his nerve and in the longer run that Liberty’s case against her for a misuse of statutory instruments succeeds – there’s little hope that the vacuum in number 10 will do anything.
Incidentally has anyone noticed that “right-wing and nationalist” demonstrators are “protestors”: pro-Palestinian demonstrators are a “mob”.
The protests would have to take place and be found to be a nuisance. I don’t think the new powers are enough to ban a protest in advance. Rowley doesn’t believe so anyway.
I note your reason for not commenting on the situation in Gaza. It’s perfectly legitimate for you not to comment on anything, but your “no special expertise” reasoning is not very persuasive to me. I’m not saying what I think someone without special expertise might be able to say, but I bet that in the non column- writing part of your life you have opinions about the subject. Knowing you they are probably well informed. So “no special expertise” is not really an excuse. May I suggest that a more reasonable excuse would be “I have my views but I don’t want to express them here because it is only going to divert attention from the content I want people to read and think about.”
I think that probably more accurately reflects what you want to say.
No, I am perfectly at ease expressing an informed view – but I am still (in)forming an informed view.
If you want ‘hot takes’ other blogs on the internet are available!
Quite. And she should be fired, leadership ambitions or no. If she then gets into a position to become Tory leader then either we shall have the most revolting government in generations and/or we shall soon have a general election that has a chance of letting sanity rise a bit.
I agree that Ms Braverman’s article is quite extraordinary.
She probably sees this as a win-win situation. Whether she is sacked, or not, her words will polish her credentials in certain quarters. Future statements will carry the weight of her status as un-sackable Home Secretary or martyr.
Whatever happens, Sunak has never looked weaker.
Different to most other discussions of British right-wing politicians of the Brexit Tory party wing kick off these days in there desperate pitch to clinch to power the row over the British Home Secretary is worth a stunned comment even in conservative German regional newspapers! That shows the dismay of European media about the “out of control” Conservatives U.K. ministers and government as today a newspaper in Hessia, Germany, styled its headline! The level to which U.K. politics under illiberal and explicitly very very right-wing Conservatives government have sunk is something I from a German conservative perspective would never have imagined 10 years ago!
Indeed,
The amount of hand wringing, and pearl clutching, in the UK (and, say, the US media), about far-right parties gaining support in the EU (more often than not governing in coalition settings), whilst their own governments are run by, as far-right political cabal, as I have seen in my life time in Western democracies (were run in the US, and might be again in 18 months) is one of the most baffling features to deal with.
I know, I know. The Orbans, PiS, etc., are not exactly paragons of moderation, but PiS lost, and Orban/Hungary is not the US, or even the UK, as far as importance, and possible consequences go.
Now, I am not saying that there is no reason for alarm with all the wannabe little Benitos popping up everywhere (on the continent, and beyond), but this is a collective problem, and in many ways more acute in the UK, and the US, rather than the EU.
State capture is a real thing. It is not only theoretical, it is not harmless, and when it happens, you become what the UK resembles at present.
Politicians loot the state coffers for their chums, constitutional order can be uprooted on a flimsy, legally shady, referendum (hence its “advisory nature”), people in dinghies become an existential threat, dying Italians are funny, Mr. Johnson gets an 80 seat majority with ~43% of the vote, and now your Home Secretary goes all Gobbels on a section of your own population.
But, the AfD…
Well said. He can’t sack her unless he wants a leadership challenge and one conspiracy reading of these events is that it was intended to get her sacked whilst at the same time enhancing her right wing credentials – as if she needed to actually do that.
My conspiracy theory may be right or it maybe wrong, or it maybe right but her strategy won’t work and the PM won’t sack her because he knows what I know, which is that he would face a leadership challenge which he would lose.
Either way she is not fit for high office (or in my opinion any office) of state. Because anyone who would use this situation to try to advance their career is as one commentator said on Newsnight last night, is a dangerous woman.
Why are you so confident that Sunak would lose a leadership challenge? It seems to me that the very last thing Tory MPs want just now is yet another change of leadership.
By not immediately sacking her, or at the very least publicly distancing himself from this article, Sunak reveals the depths of his weakness. An alternative explanation would be that he agrees with her remarks – which, in itself, would be even worse.
The police maintain law and order with the consent of the public. Having lived in Franco’s Spain, where the police were effectively one of the arms of that dictatorship, I fully appreciate the need for police forces to be free from government interference. I also, as will others, recall how relations between police and public deteriorated during the Miners’ Strike, when the boundaries were clearly blurred. Braverman would have no memory of those times, but it’s reasonable to think that she would have approved of how Thatcher used the police to enforce her policies back then. Police officers, however, would probably prefer not to return to such confrontations.
Braverman’s misunderstanding of the situation in Northern Ireland back in the day may be wilful, but all her interventions illustrate is how dangerous and/or ignorant she is.
I think what I found most surprising was the Secretary of State, who holds one of the great offices of state and has a huge amount power decided to write a letter to The Times.
It struck me as a very weak thing to do. One would have expected her to introduce a Bill to Parliament, reform the Met Police, call for a resignation or even as a minimum to kick-off a consultation.
But she decided against using any of her substantial powers and instead to publicly whinge in a completely ineffective way.
The comparison with the Thatcher government is stark: one may well not agree with what they did but nobody could deny that ministers got stuck in and made dramatic changes happen.
For those of us who are more liberal it is perhaps a good thing that she is so poor at using the machinery of government and has achieved absolutely nothing in her tenure – other than record legal immigration.
This lends credence to the view that her missive to the Times was motivated by political maneuvering rather than any actual belief in the left-wing bias of the Met: she wrote a letter the main target of which was her boss, who she put in a bit of a no-win situation.
Sunak’s only play, it seems to me, would be to sack her with a very public message along the lines of “we cannot have this kind of disloyalty on the front bench, and the only thing worse for the party would be a divisive leadership contest before the next General Election” – make it a party loyalty red line to cross, and while she may have the support of a couple of dozen xenophobes on the back benches, actually giving Sunak the boot would be very unlikely. They played kingmaker, and made their king: I can’t see it working to put their own candidate on the throne.
God only knows why she decided to do this now, though: were she to succeed in getting herself sacked, challenging for the leadership and actually winning before the next election, she could very well beat Liz Truss’ record for being the shortest-lived PM.