Suella Braverman, Gaza, and the Trumpification of the British Conservative party

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Whitehall last weekend (CREDIT: Getty)P

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Like so many other organisations that boast of their patriotism, the Conservative party is destroying the country it professes to love.

At the time of going to press, the main concern of political journalists was whether Conservative politicians would destroy each other. Specifically, whether the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, would destroy the career of Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary (or minister of the interior as overseas readers would call her).

But while the fights of the dying administration obsess journalists, another battle has already been lost. Not just Braverman but the entire Sunak administration are determined to destroy the vital principle that the operations of the police should be independent of political control. In the UK and in Trump’s United States, the right is now openly talking about seizing the coercive instruments of the state.  

If the UK were any other European country, we would have no difficulty in describing Ms Braverman as a “far-right” politician, who was intent on fermenting division to advance her career. Only the myth of English exceptionalism, that “extremism can’t happen here” delusion, which no amount of contrary evidence can shake, prevents us from describing her in plain language.

Braverman chose a moment of heightened racial and religious tension to attempt to subject the police to political direction. Democracy cannot survive when politicians can order the police to follow their prejudices, as Braverman wants to do. She wishes to direct officers to suppress a demonstration of which she disapproves.  She is hardly alone in that. The prime minister Rishi Sunak hauled in the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, and demanded he explain why the police were allowing the pro-Palestine march on Remembrance weekend.

Liberal- and left-minded readers may not like to hear it but there are grounds for conservative disquiet, and not only because the remembrance weekend is a quasi-sacred event for many British people. The Hamas attack on Israel was followed by an explosion of anti-Jewish hatred in the UK. As I have pointed out, the hatred began before any Israeli retaliation. It was almost as if the initial reaction to a crime against humanity was a celebration of the massacre of Jews.

True to form the demonstration will not just feature Quakers, liberals and other humanitarians moved by the suffering of innocent civilians in Gaza. There will be Islamists dreaming of driving out all the Jews from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, Stalinists, post-Stalinists, and outright supporters of a new caliphate.

The Metropolitan police commissioner, Mark Rowley, had decided that the march did not constitute a threat. The "legal threshold" to stop it on security grounds "had not been met”, he said, and people "should be very reassured that we're going to keep this away from the remembrance and armistice events".

Writing in the Times on Thursday, Braverman made the political case against the demonstration, as she was perfectly entitled to do . “We have seen with our own eyes that terrorists have been valorised [and] Israel has been demonised as Nazis,” she said in her clunky style.

She then threatened police independence by claiming  senior officers were biased.   “During Covid, why was it that lockdown objectors were given no quarter by public order police yet Black Lives Matter demonstrators were enabled, allowed to break rules and even greeted with officers taking the knee.” In other words, the cops would punish right-wing demonstrators, but not left-wing demonstrators because they had been corrupted by the woke mind virus.  And they were proving their bias by refusing to ban the march.

As a matter of fact and for the record, Braverman’s charge of double standards is not true, you will be unsurprised to hear. The Metropolitan Police arrested Black Lives Matter protestors suspected of breaking the law as vigorously as they arrested anti-Vaxxers

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Braverman either did not know or did not care. She was using the attack line that the police were biased to force officers into complying with her political wishes. We have seen this pattern repeatedly since 2016. BBC broadcasters or civil servants or judges are not impartial but biased members of the progressive deep state, the right maintains. Therefore, the only remedies for Conservatives are to bully them into compliance or to replace them with appointees who will obey the ruling party’s orders.

In the US Donald Trump is quite explicit about his desire to purge the US of neutral public officials. If elected, he says he will use a politicised law enforcement apparatus to go after his enemies. This week’s New Yorker reported that Trump has already demanded that his aides make plans to target some former advisers who have become public critics, including his former chief of staff John Kelly, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.  “If I happen to be President and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them’. They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election.”

No sane person can want a country where police officers, tax officials or any other public servant can be directed by their political masters to attack opponents and dissenters. A true police state is a state where politicians control the police.

Well, OK, I hear you saying, but Braverman is busted. She may even be out of a job by the time you read this, if Sunak, our Prufrock of a prime minister finally finds the courage to fire her.

But notice that Braverman is not a one off.  Sunak himself is also trying to politicise the police. He called Sir Mark Rowley into Downing Street to seek reassurance that "those who seek to divide society” will not be able to use Saturday’s protest to promote extremism. He warned that he would hold the police “accountable” if Sir Mark’s promises of a peaceful protest did not hold true.

There’s a hell of a lot riding on this demo, is there not?

The police erred on the side of liberty, as they should, and resisted calls to ban today’s march. Their intelligence did not lead them to suspect serious trouble.  But the intelligence could be wrong. Sir Mark can no more see the future than the rest of us.

As I said, well-intentioned protestors will be accompanied by some very nasty types. It is not impossible to imagine trouble kicking off. And then, what, does Rishi Sunak hold Sir Mark “accountable” by forcing him to resign? Do senior officers become reluctant to stand up to politicians for fear of being held to account as well?

Under Boris Johnson the Conservatives tried to close Parliament, they threatened to move the House of Lords to York, sought to limit the power of the Courts, boycotted the BBC, threatened a ‘hard rain’ for the civil service, and, in the judgment of the Scottish courts, misled the late queen. Now his successors are turning on the police.

I wonder if it ever occurs to them that Labour in power may use all the authoritarian precedents the Conservative party has set and turn on right-wing interests with the same venom. Fear of what the other side might do, would have stopped a wise Conservative party from tearing up the unwritten rules of public life. But then a wise Conservative party would never have let Suella Braverman within a million miles of power. And so, the Conservatives, like the rest of us, must pay the price for their stupidity.

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