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.

Dead Cat

[The following is an attempt to make a piece entirely out of buzzwords, buzzphrases, clichés and jargon.]

So unless you’ve been living under a rock and a hard place, you know that Dead Cat is the name on everyone’s lips. In the grand scheme of things, from the perspective of neoliberal peak wokery, Dead Cat is living the dream, living his best life in the crypto winter.  He is smashing it. He is the clinically-proven prebiotic WWF and FSC approved founder and CEO of UK PLC. Nature is healing. Zoom out, Dead Cat’s exuberance is moving into a realm an order of magnitude more cutting edge than revolutionising organic cosplay going forward. Zoom in, if Schrödinger’s tree falls alone in the forest slowly, then quickly, Dead Cat’s holistic synergies cut to the chase back to basics.

 

Let that sink in.

 

Dead Cat’s innovative proprietary muscle memory allocates something north of a bull bear market. It’s a mood, it’s a vibe, there is a kind of upcycling thing going on here. It is hashtag in the weeds, it is a downside upside hedge. To rehypothecate, to glamp, despite the due diligence of nerdy gatekeepers, would see Dead Cat over-leveraging his messaging bingo. Is it a truth universally acknowledged that the ongoing systemic buzzwords will fanboy false flags ? Not so much. Long story short, it is unsustainable. Sourcing the market cap of third rail globalists might gaslight hermetically sealed market participants, but here’s the thing, it is what it is.  Deep states working from home smarter not harder will qualitatively ease the asset classes of all and any stakeholders. Big picture, these are not the droids they are looking for, nor the snowflakes. There is an interesting conversation to be had here over time about pattern recognition and its discontents. White hats will red team the Overton window of opportunity with red pills, Laffer Curves and Ockham’s OODA Loops in a zero sum game of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Needless to say, bildungsroman à clef à outrance is for the birds. Meta ! Churchillian Thatcherites are kryptonite to sound-bite-sized fiscal hawk remainiacs. To coin a phrase, agile blue-sky thinking outside the box. Trolling the median revealed preference of known unknowns in real time, a maverick red flag gone rogue. No biggie, but that would be telling. Face with dark glasses emoji.

To the Bulk of Tory MPs Regarding Boris Johnson

 

Boris Johnson giving his Statement on the Sue Gray report in the HoC, 25.5.22

On Wednesday 25th May 2022, the Sue Gray report was finally published. Boris Johnson's defence in the House of Commons that afternoon amounted to -

When I said repeatedly to the House at the despatch box that there were no parties and no covid rules were broken, I did not mislead the House because the parties it has now been proved beyond dispute I attended were not parties during the time I attended them, but only became parties - each and every one - after I had left.

This is preposterous, at once labyrinthine and flimsy. That Johnson has misled the House repeatedly is a fact for anyone who wants to see it. This is attested to by the brave Tory MPs who have publicly called for the Prime Minister to resign and/or submitted letters of no confidence to Sir Graham Brady. At the time of writing I think there are 23 of them, including Tobias Ellwood, David Davis, Sir Roger Gale, Nick Gibb, Steve Baker, John Baron, Sir Bob Neill - all highly experienced parliamentarians. These 23 are courageous souls who can see that lying to the House is an absolute red line, and that the House must enforce its rules to stop our democracy being debased. In our system - whether it is a good or a bad thing - it is not the job of the Met Police to remove the Prime Minister, it is not the job of a civil servant such as Sue Gray, it is the responsibility of Tory MPs and the bulk of them are avoiding their duty in this matter.

This bulk of Tory MPs are postponing their point of final judgement again and again. Before, it was after the Council elections, then after the Sue Gray report is published: now, it is after the upcoming by-elections in Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton on 23rd of June, after the Committee of Privileges reports . . . There is probably a psychological term for what they are doing, but I don't know it: however, what they are doing is because they don't want to take the action that the fact requires, they are refusing to admit the fact i.e. that Johnson misled the House, and therefore has to resign, and if he won't resign he has to be voted out, and they have to do the voting. All other considerations, such as the claim that there is no obvious alternative, are irrelevant and are rationalisations for inaction.

In his review of Hallam's Constitutional History, Macaulay wrote the following about Henry VIII:

"A King, whose character may be best described by saying that he was despotism itself personified ..."

I often think of that quote in relation to Boris Johnson, except for 'despotism' I substitute 'effrontery'.

To illustrate that, here is Johnson's press conference in full from the 25th May, if you can stand it: