She described migrants crossing the English Channel as an “invasion” and said the “law-abiding patriotic majority” have had enough of illegal immigration.
She even told the Tory conference last year: “I would love to have a front page of the Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda. That’s my dream. It’s my obsession.”
And this summer she provoked fury from the legal profession by declaring: “Crooked immigration lawyers must be rooted out and brought to justice.”
So it’s no surprise that a home secretary who regularly uses inflammatory and provocative language to make political points should turn her anger on anti-Israel protest marches.
“To my mind, there’s only one way to describe these marches,” Suella Braverman pronounced after a COBRA meeting on the terror threat in the UK. “They are hate marches.”
Hate marches? Strong stuff. Cue outrage from Labour MPs, not surprisingly.
After Labour backbenchers piled in, the shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper eventually responded: “The Home Secretary has a responsibility to make it easier for the police to tackle hate crime and extremism while reassuring different communities who are deeply distressed by events in the Middle East, not to use rhetoric carelessly in a way that makes the job of the police much harder.”
But the home secretary won’t mind that sort of criticism, and will no doubt see the predictable Labour backlash as a badge of honour.
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Explaining her “hate marches” attack, Ms Braverman said: “We’ve seen tens of thousands of people take to the streets following the massacre of Jewish people, the single largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, chanting for the erasure of Israel from the map.
“What the police have made clear is that they are concerned that there’s a large number of bad actors who are deliberately operating beneath the criminal threshold in a way which you or I, the vast majority of the British people, would consider to be utterly odious.”
Odious? The vast majority? Ah, that would be the “law-abiding patriotic majority” again.
And Ms Braverman concluded her post-COBRA remarks: “These are hate marches and the police must take a zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism.”
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Despite the tough language, however, the home secretary wasn’t able to announce that the terror threat in the UK, reduced from “severe” to “substantial” in February, is being raised again. That’s staying the same.
“The Joint Threat Assessment Centre has maintained its assessment to date,” she said, sounding disappointed.
Incidentally, Ms Braverman presumably meant the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, a bunch of clever spooks inside MI5 who decide these things, which is known as JTAC in Whitehall.
According to MI5’s website: “JTAC analyses and assesses all intelligence relating to international terrorism, at home and overseas. It sets threat levels and issues warnings of threats and other terrorist-related subjects for customers from a wide range of government departments and agencies, as well as producing more in-depth reports on trends, terrorist networks and capabilities.”
Strong on rhetoric but weak on detail
A home secretary strong on rhetoric, then, but rather weak on detail, it seems. And she’s a politician accused of playing to the Tory gallery ahead of a post-general election leadership contest.
The home secretary did promise, though, to toughen the law to tackle extremism. “If there’s a need to change the law, just as we did in relation to Just Stop Oil protests last year, I won’t hesitate to act,” she said.
That was a slightly unfortunate comparison. Only an hour or so earlier, the very same Just Stop Oil protesters had caused yet more disruption with a sit-down protest in Whitehall near the gates of Downing Street. Whoops!
The home secretary’s inflammatory language is certain to raise the temperature in the growing opposition among MPs to Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer’s refusal to back a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.
And within hours of her “hate marches” outburst the first two casualties of the row were confirmed: Tory MP Paul Bristow, sacked as a junior ministerial aide for calling for a ceasefire, and left-wing Labour MP Andy McDonald, accused of echoing the Hamas slogan “from the river to the sea”.
What Mr McDonald actually said at the big London rally on Saturday was: “We won’t rest until we have justice, until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty.”
After the Tory high command acted against Mr Bristow to make Sir Keir look weak, Mr McDonald was suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party by chief whip Sir Alan Campbell, pending an investigation.
“The comments made by Andy McDonald at the weekend were deeply offensive, particularly at a time of rising anti-Semitism which has left Jewish people fearful for their safety,” a Labour spokesperson said.
By coincidence, the complaint made about Ms Braverman’s “hate marches” claim by Labour MPs was that she was being deeply offensive.
She won’t face any sanction or disciplinary action, however. Far from it.
Her supporters will be delighted with her choice of words, however inflammatory they were, which will indeed play well with the Tory gallery.
