Is Suella Braverman The Most Cruel Politician in Britain?

Tents, boat prisons, kidnap planes, and starvation are now par for the Conservative course

There are loads of contenders for the Most Wretched Person in Britain:

• There’s Wael Sawan and Andrew Mackenzie, the CEO and chairman of Shell, the massive petrochemical monopoly that pollutes the planet and dominates British energy, choking the life out of millions of British families and forcing them to choose between heating or eating.
• There’s Charles Windsor, the reparations-owing head of the UK monarchy. As we’ve discussed in the past, he oversees one of the most violent and longest-enduring crime families in history, with active political injustices and economic corruptions that carry on to this very day.
• There’s Rupert Murdoch, the curmudgeonly billionaire who dominates political media in the US, UK, and Australia, dragging the West into corporate feudalism.

But when it comes to politicians being downright and disturbingly cruel, the award has got to go to Suella Braverman.

Braverman is the UK’s Home Secretary, the equivalent of the US’s Secretary of Homeland Security. She’s in charge of issues including immigration, security, policing, and counter-terrorism, despite not having education or experience in any of these fields.

And unlike the US’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Braverman serves at the will of Rishi Sunak, the third unelected Conservative Prime Minister in a row.

And boy, does she hate refugees.

At this point, it almost seems like a torture fetish.

Here are a few of her despicable and despotic ideas for making life miserable for people fleeing from impoverished war-torn nations:

1. Send them to Africa

The policy that made Braverman famous was definitely her wicked plot to essentially kidnap refugees and put them on planes to Rwanda.

How creepy is this statement by Braverman at the Conservative Party conference?

“I would love to have a front page of The Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession.”

During the first flight, after unwilling passengers self-harmed and attempted suicide, Braverman’s minions literally tied them to plane seats.

Forms filled out by custody staff afterward show how the detainees started crying, screaming, shouting and frantically calling lawyers and loved ones after being told they would be sent to Rwanda.

2. Put them in tents

Last week, Braverman’s new idea was to buy tents, with plans to “house” thousands of men, women, and children in flimsy carnival marquees.

3. Stow them on barges

Her newest idea is to lock 506 refugees on a boat off the coast.

For real.

Here are some photos:

Do these photos remind anyone else of Escape Plan, the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone movie where they’re prisoners on a ship?

There are two major problems with Braverman's big boat buffoonery:

1. When you house 506 impoverished males on a boat during the height of summer, things don’t usually go great. The port town is terrified.
2. It’s a tragic accident waiting to happen:

“The Fire Service has assessed the barges and deemed them a floating Grenfell. Massively overcrowded with narrow corridors, escape-proof windows, and few fire escapes a fire anywhere on the ship would leave hundreds with no escape.”

Does anyone think Braverman cares?

4. Starve them to death

During Covid, times were particularly tough for refugees.

So what did Braverman do?

She illegally withheld payments of £3 a week to provide healthy food for thousands of pregnant mothers and children aged one to three.

The High Court later ruled she broke international human rights law. (Which is awkward, because she used to be the Attorney General… the nation’s top lawyer.)

Folks, Suella Braverman shouldn’t be the Home Secretary — she should be in prison or a psych ward.

What’s ironic about all this is that she’s a child of immigrants from Kenya and Mauritius who came to the UK in the 1960s.

Unlike the regular old rich white aristocratic anti-immigrant racists in the Conservative party who’ve been ruling the UK for centuries, Braverman should know better.

How can she muster these levels of cruelty and callousness?

Can you imagine growing up with immigrant parents, only to turn around and do everything in your power to make life a living hell for other immigrant parents?

This woman seriously needs to see a psychologist.

The world has a serious refugee problem

• There’s Venezuela, where over 5.6 million people have left due to economic corruption by elites
• There’s Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin has displaced 5.4 million people and counting.
• There are the Islamic states: 85% of all refugees in the world — 30+ million — come from Muslim-majority countries.

In sheer desperation, tens of thousands of small boats make the treacherous Channel crossing to the UK each year, all in hopes of a better and more peaceful life.

Clearly, the world needs to help these precious people.

But to be clear, the UK does have a serious overpopulation problem.

• The UK has a high population density of 434 people per square kilometer in England, which is the most overcrowded large nation in Europe.
• The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, with more than one in seven species at risk of extinction and more than half in decline. A quarter of native mammal species face imminent extinction due to habitat loss.
• The UK faces challenges in providing adequate housing, water, and healthcare for its growing (and aging) population.
• The UK consumes more resources than it can produce and relies heavily on imports for food, producing just 60% domestically. UK food imports require additional land equivalent to two-thirds the size of the UK. The UK also emits 64% of its food-related greenhouse gases on foreign soil.
• The UK imports around 40% of its energy needs.

At present, the UK population is 67.33 million. To achieve natural sustainability, it should be somewhere less than 30 million. Instead, it’s heading for 74.08 million in 2050 and 78.05 million by 2100.

Like so many issues, hyper-right-wingers are excellent at pointing out society’s problems… and then disastrous in offering moral, humane, legal, workable solutions.

The answer isn’t to take in refugees and treat them like garbage until they either leave or hate the UK so much that they foment crime and terrorism — it’s to act as a conduit for re-settlement.

Take Canada, for instance. It’s the fourth least-populated sovereign state on earth, with more than 2 billion acres of public land still available for development and settlement. And it’s desperate for immigrants to offset its aging population, low birth rate, and skills shortage.

Why doesn’t the UK ink a deal with Canada to act as a processing and pass-through entity? “We’ll take in Africa and the Middle East’s refugees via Europe and send them over the pond to help build up your tiny little baby nation.” The UK could do the same thing with other massively under-populated nations like Australia, Namibia, and Denmark/Greenland.

The British Immigration Service could become the global gold standard in refugee re-settlement, helping tens of millions of people each year.

1. It could head toward domestic sustainability…
2. While helping other nations grow…
3. While aiding people in desperate need of re-location…
4. So they can build lives that contribute to the well-being of others.

It’s a win-win-win-win-win.

But people like Suella Braverman don’t see it that way. They got into the lifeboat and are now content to bash drowning people with their gold-gilded oars.

Ironically, Braverman-the-daughter-of-immigrants is also a Buddhist who took her oath of office on the Dhammapada. Wasn’t the Buddha all about compassion for all living beings, regardless of their origin, status, or background?

Evidently, Cruella Suella hasn’t read her own scripture:

“Not by harming life does one become noble; one is called noble for being gentle to all living beings. Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.”

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