No home secretary should write the article that Suella Braverman published in the Times on Thursday and expect to remain in post. The article is a reckless intervention on the most sensitive political subject of the day, and intentionally so. It plays fast and loose with her ministerial responsibilities. It is designed to stir trouble, not to help ensure calm or order. It had also not been approved by 10 Downing Street.
The article’s inflammatory language is particularly irresponsible. Protests are not “mobs”, and home secretaries should not describe them in such terms. Participants in demonstrations are not “angry” in the violent way she implies either. Calling for a ceasefire does not make you a “hate marcher”. Nor is it the “valorisation of terrorists”. There are too many heated adjectives in her article and all too few facts.
The home secretary’s comparison of the marches with events in Northern Ireland is also ignorant and dangerous. Her choice of words – the marches are dubbed “an assertion of primacy” with “links to terrorist groups” – manages to confuse and infuriate in equal measure. She has succeeded in provoking maximum offence and minimum conciliation, not just over the Israel-Hamas conflict but in Northern Ireland too.
Ms Braverman’s most serious constitutional offence, though, is to subvert the operational independence of the Metropolitan police. “There is an impression,” she alleges, “that senior police officers play favourites when it comes to protesters.” This slippery and unsubstantiated comment is followed by a direct attack on the police’s impartiality. “Politically connected minority groups who are favoured by the left,” she says, get better treatment from “senior officers” than “rightwing and nationalist protesters”.
This attempt to tell the Metropolitan police commissioner, Mark Rowley, how to do his job strikes at something fundamental in British policing. The former Met chief Sir Robert Mark expressed it well when he said in his autobiography that “[the commissioner’s] operational actions must never be thought to reflect the wishes of the government in power, as distinct from his own professional judgment”. This was essential “if the police are to enjoy the respect of [people of] all political beliefs”.
Ms Braverman has now launched a rocket into that whole approach. By inviting them to take an approach that Scotland Yard thinks unwarranted, she makes the police’s already difficult job harder. As Remembrance weekend nears, she is trying to inflame the public mood. It is hard to avoid the shocking conclusion that this home secretary – the minister responsible for policing – would now probably welcome some scenes of disorder in London this weekend. In the process, she is also undermining, whether thoughtlessly or deliberately, the police commissioner’s authority in his vital work of getting rid of misogynistic and racist officers.
No other home secretary would ever have done this, said Labour’s Yvette Cooper in the Commons on Thursday. But then no other home secretary has been allowed to use the office as a platform to mount a party leadership campaign either. Labour and the Liberal Democrats have demanded that Rishi Sunak sack Ms Braverman. He should replace her with someone who respects the police and the right to peaceful protest more than she ever did. Such calls probably ensure it will not happen. But the opposition parties have the consolation that, even if it does not, they will gain politically from another demonstration of Mr Sunak’s weakness as a leader.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
