Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman stepped up the UK governmentâs war against refugees and asylum seekers in a fascistic speech at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) last week.
Braverman hailed the AEI as an âorganisation that has contributed so much to the intellectual foundations of the conservative movement in the US and the UKâŠâ
âSome of those affiliated with AEI have had a significant impact on my own thinking, she added, naming another devoted Thatcherite, âSir Roger Scruton, who was a visiting scholar here for several yearsâ and Antonio Scalia, the arch-reactionary former US Supreme Court justice, who ruled in allowing the stolen election of 2000 that âthere is no universal right of suffrage.â
Braverman declared that âuncontrolled and illegal migrationâ was âan existential challenge for the political and cultural institutions of the West.â Framing migration by refugees as essentially a criminal enterprise, the word âillegalâ was mentioned over 40 times on the speech and âillegal migrationâ over 20 times.
She cited the island of Lampedusa as a means of solidarising herself with the anti-migrant campaign of Georgia Meloniâs far-right government, declaring that on â12th September, over 120 hundred boats, carrying more than 5,000 illegal migrants, made the hundred-mile crossing from Tunisia, in Africa, to Italy.
âWithin 48 hours illegal arrivals outnumbered the local population and a state of emergency had been declared. By 20th September, at least 11,000 had landed, with migrants sleeping in the street, stealing food, and clashing with police.â
The US âfaces similar challengesâ as âThousands of people illegally cross the border on a daily basis.â
âEurope is at a critical juncture,â she added. âThe [European Union] must find a way to meet the challenge of illegal migration.â She praised EU Commission President âUrsula von der Leyenâs recent visit to Lampedusaâ for demonstrating âthe Commissionâs recognition of the severity of the situation.â
The WSWS noted of the trip, âUrsula von der Leyen expressed solidarity with the fascist Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The measures planned [by the European Union] are reminiscent of the darkest times in European history. They involve the complete closure of âFortress Europe,â mass deportations to war torn countries and disaster zones in North Africa and the establishment of concentration and deportation camps by the military.â
Braverman took aim at the United Nation Refugee Convention, signed in 1951 in the aftermath of the horrors of Second World Warâabove all the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust as not âfit for our modern ageâ. It âconferred protection on some two million people in Europe,â she said, whereas âit now confers the notional right to move to another country upon at least 780 million people.â
A âmisguided dogma of multiculturalismâ had failed by making âno demands of the incomer to integrateâ, allowing âpeople to come to our society and live parallel lives in it⊠And, in extreme cases⊠pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability and threatening the security of society,â Braverman declared.
The entire âglobal asylum frameworkâ had to be torn down is it was a âpromissory note that the West cannot fulfilâ. Those who âarrived illegally or passed through multiple safe countries along the way⊠should cease to be treated as refugees,â she insisted. As well as the Refugee Convention, âIn Europe weâve added through the European Convention on Human Rights additional human rights laws,â she complained.
Western countries, she added, âwill not be able to sustain an asylum system if in effect, simply being gay, or a woman, and fearful of discrimination in your country of origin, is sufficient to qualify for protectionâ. All the worldâs problems could be resolved, said the home secretary, if only illegal immigrants stopped devouring the resources of society.
Like far-right figures around the world, Bravermanâs broad political aim is to whip up a frenzied anti-immigration atmosphere to mobilise politically backward sections of the population as a battering ram against a growing movement of the working class. Her speech followed her comments solidarising with Metropolitan Police armed officers protesting charges brought against the officer responsible for the murder of Chris Kaba in 2022 and promising measures to prevent such prosecutions in future. Both interventions were made on the eve of this weekâs Tory Party conference to cement a future leadership challenge, in anticipation of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak losing an expected general election next year to Labour.
They had the desired effect, with the Daily Express crowing that with the speech, âSuella Braverman went from [Tory party] leadership hopeful to international superstar in just 24 hoursâ.
Outright fascists backed the speech, with Mark Collett of the Patriotic Alternative group declaring, âWhat I do know, is that what she said is a good thing for nationalism⊠we should capitalise on this and do our best to take control of this situation and steer the national conversation in the correct direction.â
No opposition to âsteering the national conversationâ to witch-hunt and scapegoat migrants was forthcoming from the liberal media, outside of a few pro-forma complaints over her attack on âmulticulturalismâ and her homophobia.
The Guardianâs main political concerns were two-fold.
It tried to portray Labour as some sort of progressive opposition to the government but was reduced to focusing on a single tweet by Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper complaining of âDeeply divisive, damaging political game playingâunworthy of her office.â The Guardian continues to fulsomely back Labourâs plan to curb immigration through âa restored partnership with the EU.â Cooperâs central message was that Braverman had âlost grip of Tory asylum chaosâ and should âsort chaos at homeâ.
The Guardian also tried to boost supposedly dissenting voices within the Tory Party, again to conceal and apologise for the full reactionary direction of both the government and Labour itself. Its endeavours and those of other newspapers centred mostly on a dozen gay Tory MPs who complained to the chief whip and, after days of silence, Jeremy Hunt, a leadership rival, who politely declared that he âwouldnât use her wordsâ while stressing that Braverman was âabsolutely rightâ to demand measures against âcriminal gangs smuggling thousands of people over the Channelâ.
This was the pattern throughout government, with one of what the Times described as a âpink wallâ Tory MP complaining, âHer comments lessen the argument for reform because now the focus is on whether we are bigoted to argue for change rather than the need to reform a broken asylum system across the worldâ, and Sunak refusing to explicitly contradict someone clearly mounting a challenge to his leadership for fear of solidifying internal opposition behind her. Like Hunt, he praised Bravermanâs Illegal Migration Act denying refugees the right to stay in Britain if they arrived âillegallyâ on a small boat via the English Channel and enables them to deported to a âsafe third countryâ–with the government seeking to send them thousands of miles away to Rwanda.
The Spectator, the house organ of the Tories, laid out the underlying political logic behind Bravermanâs elevation as Sunakâs likely successor, with columnist Patrick OâFlynn writing, âHere is the thing: Suella Braverman is right. The system really is unsustainable. Either it must be reformed radically by conventional politicians or it will end up being dumped in chaotic and dangerous fashion by a new wave of demagogues that electors have had to turn to in desperation.â
He concluded, âThe time is coming soon when the Conservative party and its leader will have to decide whether they are for real when it comes to tackling the wholesale abuse of the asylum system by would-be economic migrants or prefer instead to hand the task on to wilder forces.â
Source: Wsws.org