Suella: Words diminish Holocaust victims

SUELLA Braverman yesterday attacked Gary Lineker’s ‘lazy and unhelpful’ intervention on the Government’s migration policy, saying it ‘diminishes’ Holocaust victims and their descendants.

The Home Secretary, whose husband is Jewish, accused the BBC presenter of being ‘offensive’ to those affected by the tragedy, including her own family.

Lineker has faced calls to resign after he suggested immigration reforms are ‘immeasurably cruel’ and claimed the lan-family guage used by ministers was ‘not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s’.

Mrs Braverman told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast: ‘To hear that characterisation is offensive because – as you said – my husband is Jewish, my children are therefore directly descendant from people who were murdered in gas chambers during the Holocaust... And my husband’s feels very keenly the impact of the Holocaust, actually.

‘Those kinds of flippant analogies diminishes the unspeakable tragedy that millions of people went through, and I don’t think anything that is happening in the UK today can come close to what happened in the Holocaust... So I find it a lazy and unhelpful comparison.’

Mrs Braverman has been married to Mercedes manager Rael, who she describes as a ‘very proud member of the Jewish community’, since 2018. She was the latest in a string of senior Tories to criticise the Match of the Day presenter.

Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer said: ‘As somebody whose grandmother escaped Nazi Germany in the 1930s, I think it’s really disappointing and inappropriate to compare government policy on immigration to events in Germany in the 1930s.’

Energy Secretary Grant Shapps said: ‘As a Jewish Cabinet minister, I need no lessons about 1930s Germany from Gary Lineker.’