Are The Conservatives Braverman Enough?
The Home Secretary has already become a rebel in the Truss Government.
There seems to be a fairly large ideological split opening up at the top of Liz Truss’s Government. Bizarrely it is between the Prime Minister herself and the woman she chose to serve as Home Secretary.
Rather than the Government implementing Suella Braverman’s agenda as Home Secretary, she has already become something of a rebel for merely calling for proper action to stop illegal migration and for Brexit to be completed.
If the Conservative Government want to win another majority and want Brexiteers to back them, they would be well-advised to implement the changes Braverman has put forward.
The key policy of Suella Braverman’s leadership campaign was to leave the ECHR in order to stop illegal migration, given the European Court’s interference in the Government’s Rwanda plan.
Braverman’s policy platform has big public support. As Redfield and Wilton recently found, more Brits are now Leavers when it comes to the ECHR than Remainers.
Indeed when Conservative voters in the Red Wall were asked about the Tory leadership candidates differing policy agendas, Braverman’s was the most popular of any contender.
Braverman’s campaign was put forward by Redfield and Wilton as the following:
“Altogether, a plurality of voters in the Red Wall who voted for the Conservative Party in 2019 say they would be most likely to vote for Suella Braverman’s platform of completing Brexit, leaving the European Court of Human Rights, scrapping EU taxes and laws in Northern Ireland, keeping borders secure, cutting VAT on energy bills, cutting taxes on businesses, and supporting the Rwanda immigration policy.”
The assumption surely is that the new PM picking her Home Secretary would allow them to deliver on this clear pledge to exit ECHR?
After all the tough talk and costly deals with the French, 2022 has already been another record year for illegal migration.
After the ECHR’s intervention, there is still absolutely no sign of the Rwanda policy being implemented.
The dismal Government approach of talking without taking decisive action to stop the boats is one of the reasons that the Tories currently face a hammering in the polls, with some Brexiteers losing faith in the Tories.
A new Party Leader and PM of course marks an opportunity to do things differently. And during the leadership campaign Truss did seem to indicate that possibly, maybe, she would support exiting ECHR.
Instead of that though, the Conservative Conference saw the new Home Secretary become a rebel for merely reiterating her well-known position that the UK must leave the ECHR.
Speaking at a Spectator event at the Tory Conference, Braverman said:
“I was pretty blunt about this issue in my leadership campaign.
“My position personally is that ultimately we do need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.
“That is not government policy, I should say, government policy is to do everything we can within the convention, within the boundaries of the convention.
“But if that doesn’t work, then we will have to consider all options.”
And as for her reasoning she laid out how:
“I don’t think we need to be subject to an institution born out of the post-war era which is a bit analogue in the way that it operates, which has centralised power, which is distant and which is politicised, which is pursuing an agenda which is at odds with our politics and our values.
“I don’t think that’s the direction that the world is going in, that’s not the direction that people called for with Brexit.”
Though the Home Secretary was backed by Nigel Farage, this intervention angered Downing Street.
A Government source hit back by saying:
“As Suella acknowledged, her personal views are contrary to government policy and if she wishes to make those views known within government, she should do so in a more appropriate setting.”
And so the woman now tasked with stopping the boats as Home Secretary has become a Conservative rebel for repeating her stated position that has big support from voters. It is a strange situation but not limited to just this area of illegal migration and the ECHR.
When it comes to legal immigration, the public’s view is clear: YouGov’s recent survey found that 54% of Brits think immigration has been too high over the last decade, including a massive 83% of Conservative supporters.
It wasn’t that long ago that David Cameron and Theresa May were pledging to cut net migration down to the tens of thousands. They couldn’t deliver that inside the EU, with open borders.
Bizarrely post-Brexit, the Conservative Government has chosen to maintain mass migration deep into the hundreds of thousands net each year.
Again the new Home Secretary appears to have found herself becoming a rebel by calling for cuts to these sky-high numbers.
She recently told The Sun that:
“What we've got is too many low skilled workers coming into this country.
“We've also got a very high number of students coming into this country and we've got a really high number of dependents.
“So students are coming on their student visa, but they're bringing in family members who can piggyback onto their student visa.
“Those people are coming here, they're not necessarily working or they're working in low skilled jobs, and they're not contributing to growing our economy.”
And underlined her point by making clear that:
“We want people with high skills, we want people with tech qualifications…What we don't want is a very steady stream of cheap foreign labour.”
This again is the agenda that the overwhelming majority of Conservative voters and Brexiteers want the Government to pursue.
Instead however, there seem to be a number of Government splits when it comes to legal migration, with the Truss Government looking at ways to actually increase immigration even further.
The Braverman agenda essentially is to complete Brexit. As she told the Express back in June:
“I have significant reservations about our relationship with the European Court of Human Rights. In the EU referendum the British people voted to take back control of our laws, they are rightly baffled why our immigration controls can still be blocked by European judges."
“It’s time to complete Brexit and let the British people decide who can and cannot stay in our country.”
The Home Secretary’s call to deliver for Brexiteers, leave ECHR and slash immigration appears to have made her a rebel within the Conservative Government.
That is sure to alienate a lot of Leavers who want to see Truss deliver these reforms, rather than resisting them.
Is the Conservative Party Braverman enough to deliver Suella’s sensible agenda? If not, I suspect many who voted Conservative at the last election might not next time round.
Suella is spot on and why am I surprised to hear this is not government policy. I was given to understand by Truss herself that we would leave ECHR. More misinformation and deceit it seems?
I would have been happy if Suella had become our new Prime Minister....she has the oomph that Liz sadly seems to lack.