Against Suella Braverman's Ideas

 

Suella Braverman recently gave two speeches, one in Washington and one at the Conservative Party conference.

In these speeches and elsewhere she put forward several ideas I disagree with.

There is no such thing as a simple homogenous British identity. What constitutes ‘Britishness’ or ‘British values’ are subjects of permanent dispute, and are evolving, not fixed. There is a British national character, as every nation has a character, but it is complex, multifaceted and difficult to define: perhaps a national character is best described as a cluster of competing and complementary ideas, some more prominent than others, like a word cloud. Whatever Britishness may be, the Home Secretary does not get to define it and insist that the rest of us comply with that definition. That is overreach, & that is the power she is trying to assume. She unfortunately has the power while in office as Home Secretary to oversee who is and is not British when it comes to people applying for citizenship, but she emphatically does not have the power to decide who is and is not British over we who are already citizens.

Suella Braverman may disapprove of my way of life or my opinions. As long as I am not breaking the law, these matters are none of her business, and the same applies to all other British citizens in the UK, of every religion and ethnicity. A key British value which Suella Braverman is transgressing is our saying “Live and let live”.

I am a proud Briton, and a patriot. I dispute the right of Suella Braverman to decide who is or is not properly British – the absurdity is evident as soon as you write it down – and who is or is not patriotic. It contradicts our most basic British traditions of freedom to claim that the government can decide what Britishness is, and enforce that decision on the populace. The National Conservatives and others on the Right are trying to co-opt the terms ‘British’, ‘Britishness’, ‘British values’, ‘patriotism’, and co-opt the ideas behind the terms. We should not let them. They are trying to appropriate these very important ideas, which are held in common by all British people, to increase their own political power. We should dispute and fight this. We should not abandon those terms to them.

It is only a brittle and incomplete sort of patriot who cannot stand to hear anything bad about their country. If I research, think and write about the bad things the rulers and people of this country have done in the past – like, to take one example, the centuries of our misrule in Ireland – this does not mean that I ‘hate Britain’. It means that I am sufficiently adult to understand that a nation or group of nations with a long history will have done in that time both good and bad things. This is a blindingly obvious point, and a true patriot understands and embraces it. On the contrary, the National Conservatives seem to hate Britain because they are constantly promulgating a highly negative, distorted caricature of it.

Suella Braverman and others on the Right refer negatively over and over again to people living parallel lives in our society. It is a favourite theme. But all sorts of groups lead parallel lives in our society, perhaps it is an inherent feature of any society. The very rich lead parallel lives to the rest of us, but Suella Braverman is not proposing to confiscate their wealth to end this. The very poor lead parallel lives, but she is not proposing to increase their income. The homeless lead parallel lives, but she is not proposing to house them. It is only the alleged parallel lives of some immigrants which she is against, making sweeping assertions about them and offering little to no evidence. The logic that whole communities are a threat to the rest of us and must be monitored, integrated, controlled and re-educated leads to what the Chinese government is doing to the Uighurs.

In practical terms, what is ‘integration’ ? How much integration is enough ? Who is integrated in the first place i.e. what is it exactly that the people who it is claimed need to integrate need to integrate with ? Do different people or groups need to integrate more, or less ? Who decides all these things? ‘Integration’ and ‘integrate’ are words Suella Braverman is throwing about as if they are clear and clearly understood. They are not.

We should not cede the right to define Britishness to a tiny, paranoid, power mad fringe of the Right, which nevertheless has a considerable foothold in our current governing Party and in our national media. They are very noisy and claim on the basis of no evidence to speak for the majority of us. This is false. We must resist.