Prime Minister Liz Truss has appointed Brexit hardliner Suella Braverman as the new Home Secretary. Braverman’s parents of Indian origin came to London from East Africa. That doesn’t stop the lawyer from taking a tough stance towards boat migrants.
Suella Braverman on her way to her first cabinet meeting as Home Secretary.
When Suella Braverman gave her first speech as MP in 2015, migration was already at the heart of her finishes. She told the story of her Indian father, who fled to Great Britain in 1968 to escape political unrest in Kenya. “He had no family, no friends and clung to his most prized possession, his British passport. His homeland was in political turmoil.”
In the future, Braverman, who is now 42, will speak much more frequently about migration – although no empathetic tones are to be expected from her.
Controversial Rwanda Pact
New Prime Minister Liz Truss has tasked Braverman as Home Secretary with handling the Channel migration crisis. In the current year, 27,000 asylum seekers have already arrived in Britain from France by boat – that’s almost as many as in the entire record year 2021.
Braverman makes no secret of the fact that she intends to tighten the current policy. The self-declared hardliner has already announced that that it wants to house more migrants in prisons in order to increase the deterrent effect.
Predecessor Priti Patel had launched the controversial Rwanda Pact to deport some of the asylum seekers coming across the English Channel directly to the African country. However, British courts are currently examining whether this pact is legal – due to a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, no one may be deported until this review is completed.
The lawyer Braverman should now find a way out of the legal chaos. She has repeatedly called for withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights if the Rwanda Pact cannot be implemented in any other way.
Indian hardliners
Sue-Ellen Cassiana Braverman was born in Harrow, north-west London. Like her father, her mother is of Indian descent, although she did not immigrate to Great Britain from Kenya but from Mauritius. Braverman has similar roots to Patel, whose parents of Indian origin had fled Uganda to the United Kingdom.
Both Tory politicians stand out with a particularly hard line on migration policy. Both seem to believe that they can parry accusations of racism from the opposition more easily than their white party colleagues because of their ethnic background.
From an early age, Braverman’s parents had great ambitions for their only child. When the father lost his job as an insurance broker and remained unemployed for several years, the mother became the backbone of the family. The nurse worked for the Tories as a local councilor in Wembley, north-west London. Even if she was denied the leap into the House of Commons, she became Suella’s great role model.
Fight against «woken nonsense»
Braverman attended private school on a scholarship before studying law at Cambridge. She later completed a master’s degree at the Sorbonne in Paris and was admitted to the bar in New York. At the age of 35 she moved into the House of Commons and was committed to Brexit from the start. In the Tory group, she belonged to the group of so-called “Spartans”, who voted against Theresa May’s Brexit treaty in every single vote.
Boris Johnson appointed Braverman Attorney General, a sort of legal adviser to the government. In this function, she declared the law on the unilateral overturning of the Northern Ireland Protocol anchored in the Brexit Treaty to be in conformity with international law – a view shared by only a few lawyers.
After Johnson’s forced resignation, Braverman became the first candidate in the race to succeed him. However, she was also one of the first to leave the parliamentary group when it was ruled out. Because as a particularly keen culture fighter, Braverman also polarizes within her own ranks.
she says «dem woken nonsense» offensively started the fight. She finds, one does not have to address trans children with the correct pronoun, and emphasizes that the British Empire was a “force for good”. She is repeatedly attacked on social media, which she seems to be really happy about. “If I provoke negative reactions on Twitter, I know I’m doing the right thing.” she told the Times. “Twitter is a drainpipe for left bile acid.”
Strict parenting methods
Braverman is the first Buddhist woman to hold one of the highest positions in British government. As Attorney General, she became the first cabinet member to take maternity leave in 2021. After marrying Mercedes manager Rael Braverman, they had a son in 2019 and a daughter two years later.
Suella Braverman is a strict parenting advocate. She founded in the London district of Wembley the Michaela Community School, known for discipline and obedience, which is considered the strictest school in Great Britain and, for example, enforces a ban on speaking in the corridors. In the future, the migrants, but also the officials in the Ministry of the Interior, are likely to feel Braverman’s severity.