New Delhi: “I’m proud of the British Empire, I’m not going to apologise for our past history,” said Suella Braverman, current Home Secretary of the United Kingdom, while responding to a question from The Telegraph’s Christopher Hope.
Extolling on the virtues of the Empire with wistful glee, Braverman added that the Empire brought “infrastructure, legal system, civil service and military to countries like Kenya and Mauritius”.
🗣️ “I hope I annoy them, that would be my delight, if I’m annoying the Left”@SuellaBraverman joined @christopherhope for a live @ChoppersPodcast at the Conservative Party conference today.
See more here:https://t.co/VEyZhCO6p5 pic.twitter.com/SAxz1FbjD7
— Telegraph Politics (@TelePolitics) October 4, 2022
Both her parents, mother Uma Fernandes and father Christie Fernandes, have Indian origins and migrated to the UK in the 1960s. Her father went to Kenya first from Goa and her mother — of Tamil descent – migrated from Mauritius. Uma worked as a nurse in the National Health Service (NHS) for 45 years.
In the same exchange, talking about immigration, Braverman added: “I would have no qualms in stopping people from coming (immigrating) to the United Kingdom. My parents came here through safe and legal routes.”
These comments come a few days after Braverman expressed serious concern over a free trade agreement with India, arguing against spillovers of “increased immigration” as a result.
Though Braverman’s comments on Empire and immigration are not new — rather they give a glimpse into her ideological moorings — her love of Empire and disdain for migrants is evident.
For Empire, against migrants
Earlier this year, Braverman told Conservative Home, a website devoted to the Tory party, “They (her parents) came to this country with a huge fondness for the British Empire.” She declared in June that the Empire should be celebrated, even if the “Left” was ashamed of it.
The home secretary has been criticised for overseeing an incredibly slow immigration programme for refugees fleeing Ukraine. She has been a supporter of the controversial Rwanda asylum plan, which will send those applying for asylum in the UK to Rwanda instead.
While the UN and think-tanks have urged the UK to stop the programme, the home secretary has rather insensitively said that watching a flight take asylum seekers to Rwanda was her “dream” and “obsession”.
In another remark against immigration, Braverman stated that the UK has “too many low-skilled migrant workers and very high numbers of international students”.
However, Braverman’s rose-tinted views of the Empire gloss over its atrocities —the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, for which the UK has still not apologised, the Bengal famine of 1943, the travails of indentured labour in Mauritius, and the atrocities during the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya — which are among a slew of wrongdoings committed across the world.
On migration, the home secretary’s views, as The Guardian summarised, “is the stuff of many people’s nightmares”. “Legal routes are so small in number that a tiny proportion of people get refugee status this way. This leaves most with no other choice than to make life-threateningly perilous journeys in the hope they will get here,” The Guardian added.
Natural-born Conservative
Born in the north-west London borough of Harrow, which has a 25 per cent Indian migrant population, Braverman read law at Queens College, the University of Cambridge for her undergraduation. From there she crossed the channel and completed her Master in European and French Law (LLM) at the Pantheon-Sorbonne in Paris.
In 2015, after completing stints as a lawyer in the United States and London, Braverman was elected as a first-time Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) from Fareham, a town in the south of England. She was re-elected in 2017 and 2019, both times increasing her vote share.
Politics and an association with the conservative party run in her blood. Braverman’s mother, Uma, was the Conservative candidate for the Brent-East parliamentary by-election in 2001.
Uma described herself a “natural-born conservative”. The home secretary is leaving no stone unturned to prove that she is one too.
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