I don't get worked up about Suella Braverman and her bid to surpass Priti Patel as the coldest Home Secretary we’ve ever had.
She’s being who she has always been. Hungry for power and desperate to hold on to it by inflicting as much pain on ordinary people as possible.
I’m sad for the sections of society she wants to gag by empowering police to silence protestors exercising their free speech.
I’m fearful for the families she will tear apart with her proposed new laws to make it easier to deport people who come to the UK via illegal means (remind me what the legal route is again…).
My thoughts are for the Black and Brown people she wants to come down hardest on, as if to prove a point to the rabid racists on the right of the Tory party.
She and Patel are both children of South Asian immigrants. Yet her dream, expressed at last week’s Tory party conference, is a broadsheet newspaper front page with a picture of a plane packed with migrants taking off from the UK to Rwanda.
Thankfully most of her plans would breach the United Nations Refugee Convention, which states that how you enter a country and whether it’s the first “safe” country you reach shouldn’t affect your asylum applications.
And thankfully her bid to make cannabis a Class A drug – thereby filling our jails with thousands of Asian and Black men disproportionately arrested and charged with possession – has bitten the dust.
But the havoc she is set to wreak on people’s lives is still considerable. Under her immigration plans her own father, who left Kenya for Britain in 1968, would struggle to get into this country today.
Labour might not think it is embracing a similar narrative by insisting, as Sir Keir Starmer did last week, that they will “control immigration…using a points-based system.”
That, however, sends out the same stark message as the Tories: we want you if you’re useful but you’re on your own if you’re not. Let’s get into a time machine back to the Sixties, why don’t we?
It may well be two years until we, the public, get the chance to make our own decision between a regime ripping the country apart and an opposition yet to convince the electorate that it doesn’t just assume it will take over simply by default.
But with Labour’s handling of racism within the party unconvincing to say the least, many of us are watching with interest.
