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Suella Braverman has railed against “experts and elites” and what she called the divisive politics of identity, in a highly partisan speech that is likely to be viewed as setting out ideas for a post-election Conservative leadership bid.
Addressing the National Conservatism conference in Westminster, the home secretary made comments trailed in advance about the need for the UK to cut back on legal migration and train domestic workers for jobs such as fruit picking.
The speech, which was interrupted by two Extinction Rebellion protesters who were marched from the hall, otherwise largely steered clear of specific policy areas.
Instead, Braverman set out a highly personal blueprint for a political philosophy to take on the “radical left”, including the Labour party.
Braverman argued that conservatism “has no truck with political correctness”, in a section of the speech that piled squarely into culture war issues.
“The ethnicity of grooming gang perpetrators is the sort of fact that has become unfashionable in some quarters,” she said. “Much like the fact that 100% of women do not have a penis. It is absurd that we find ourselves in a situation where this a remotely controversial statement.”
In one of a series of attacks on Keir Starmer, Braverman said that “given his definition of a woman, we can’t rule him out from running to be Labour’s first female prime minister”.
On a similar theme, Braverman said those on the left “are ashamed of our history and embarrassed by the sentiments and desires expressed by the British public”.
She said: “I think the left can only sell its vision for the future by making people feel terrible about our past. White people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt. Nobody should be blamed for things that happened before they were born. The defining feature of this country’s relationship with slavery is not that we practised it, but that we led the way in abolishing it.”
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Beginning with a description of her father’s arrival from Kenya in 1968, and her mother’s move from Mauritius to train as a nurse, Braverman said her politics, like that of her parents, was “a politics of optimism, pride, national unity, aspiration, and realism”.
She went on: “The left’s is a politics of pessimism, guilt, national division, resentment and utopianism. The left on the other hand sees the purpose of politics as to eradicate the existence of inequality, even if that comes at the expense of individual liberty and human flourishing.”
Attacking identity politics, Braverman said it was “the politics of grievance and division – it is illiberal and incompatible with social cohesion.”
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In an apparent attack on academics and other advisers, Braverman said conservatives should be “sceptical of self-appointed gurus, experts and elites who think they know best what is in the public’s interest, even when that public is quite certain that they need something different from what those experts are proposing.”
She added: “Common sense and a shared understanding of who we are and what really matters in life have vastly more to recommend themselves than does anything that emanates from an ivory tower.”
Braverman warned against the UK descending into a US-style culture war that pitted various elements of the right against each other.
“I suspect the form it takes in the UK will naturally differ in some ways to the form it’s taken in the US,” she said. “But having observed events in the US in recent years, I do want to sound a note of caution. One way that we Conservatives must distinguish ourselves from the left is by not devouring ourselves through fratricide.”
