UK official wows some Conservatives while alarming others
>> U.K. Home Secretary Suella Braverman railed against unauthorized migrants, human rights laws and “woke” critics of her hard-line policies Tuesday, as she tried to secure her place as the flagbearer of the Conservative Party's authoritarian lawand-order wing.
In her keynote speech to the governing party's annual conference, Braverman called migration a “hurricane” that would bring “millions more immigrants to these shores, uncontrolled and unmanageable.”
She said that U.K. governments had been “far too squeamish about being smeared as racist to properly bring order to the chaos.” But the Conservatives, she said, would give Britain “strong borders.”
Braverman hailed the government's moves to make it harder for migrants to seek asylum in the U.K., including a law that requires anyone arriving in small boats across the English Channel to be detained and then deported permanently to their home nation or third countries.
Despite being passed by
Parliament earlier this year, the law hasn't yet taken effect. The only third country that has agreed to take migrants from Britain is Rwanda, and no one has yet been sent there as that plan is being challenged in the U.K. courts.
Braverman's speech to party activists contained little new policy and had the feel of an election rally. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's Conservatives are lagging behind Labour in opinion polls with an election due by the end of 2024. Many members attending the four-day conference are looking ahead to a leadership contest that would likely follow a defeat.
Braverman is unofficially campaigning for the support of the party's populist authoritarian wing by advocating ever-tougher curbs on migration and a war on human rights protections and liberal social values. She quipped that the Human Rights Act should be called the “Criminal Rights Act,” said trans women shouldn't be allowed on single-sex female hospital wards and vowed to remove “gender ideology, white privilege, anti-British history” from education and cultural institutions.