#LeakySue Braverman held secret meetings with her mentor, swivel-eyed ERG loon John Hayes, before she was forced to resign over leaking sensitive information to him.
She also looked to implement Policy Exchange's inhumane anti-refugee proposals.
Braverman appears to have instructed officials to look at potentially implementing grotesque proposals cooked up by opaquely funded right-wing free-market think tank Policy Exchange, that would in effect prohibit “genuine refugees” from settling in the UK. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Before her resignation, Home Office officials were tasked by Braverman to study a 2022 Policy Exchange report about tackling Channel crossings.
The extremist Policy Exchange has lots of form - they've recently attacked the police for being 'too woke'! 🤪
The Policy Exchange report, Stopping the Small Boats: a “Plan B”, states: “Genuine refugees would be resettled in a safe state other than the UK,” a move that despite their claim to the contrary, appears to breach the UN 1951 refugee convention (Britain was a founding signatory).
The report also states: “People attempting to enter the UK on small boats will be deported to a location outside the UK whether the Channel Islands, sovereign bases in Cyprus or Ascension Island” where their asylum claims will be considered. Something considered by Patel in 2020.
One of the report’s authors, Simon Murray, was appointed a Home Office minister responsible for “migration & borders legislation” several weeks ago, but on Saturday, the Home Office denied that officials had been asked by Braverman to look into the Policy Exchange findings! 🤥
Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said: “The options the home secretary is considering are deeply worrying and out of step with the majority of the public who support giving refugees protection.”
“Most of those coming to the UK on small boats are fleeing the unimaginable horror of war, conflict & persecution. They must not be expelled but given a fair hearing on UK soil. Prime Ministers since Winston Churchill have committed to the refugee convention.” 🇬🇧
Senior officials say even before she was forced to quit there was already significant disquiet over Braverman’s dealings with extremist ERG crank John Hayes, the swivel-eyed far-right leader of the “anti-woke” 'Common Sense Group' of right-wing MPs.
Braverman & Hayes, friends for many years, held meetings in the Home Office’s Marsham Street HQ after she became home secretary for the first time - before she stood down after admitting leaking sensitive government information to Hayes & his wife via her personal email address.
“There’s a dynamic around her leaking stuff. Civil servants had been raising concerns about her meetings with that backbencher [Hayes]; she was having them at Marsham Street,” a Home Office source said.
Braverman has also been accused of failing to act on legal advice that the government was illegally detaining asylum seekers at a processing centre for unlawfully long periods, & not signing off on providing accommodation for them. She received this advice over three weeks ago.
Asylum seekers are meant to be held at the Manston centre facility in Kent for 24 hours while they undergo checks before being moved to immigration detention centres or asylum accommodation: about 3,000 people are being held on the site designed for 1,000 with a maximum of 1,600.
Labour want the Govt to publish its assessments of Braverman’s security breach & breaking of the Ministerial Code. Sunak has resisted demands to launch an inquiry, & cowardly incompetent Braverman has so far refused to appear before MPs to explain herself.
To spell out why, we need to unpack both the underlying implication of Andrew Doyle's argument and the reasons why it fails to adequately account for contemporary political dangers.
Andrew Doyle asserts that the term "fascism" is misused to the point of recklessness, echoing George Orwell’s 1944 observation that the word had been rendered meaningless. Doyle’s concern is not uncommon—but imho, it’s ultimately misplaced, especially in today’s context.
While it’s true that “fascism” is sometimes deployed rhetorically or hyperbolically (eg by Trump), Doyle’s framing dangerously downplays the genuine resurgence of fascist-adjacent movements across the Western world and undermines the analytical clarity necessary to confront them.
Boris Johnson appears to have had a secret meeting with billionaire Peter Thiel - perhaps the most fanatical of the libertarian Oligarchs and co-founder of the controversial US data firm Palantir, the year before it was given a role at the heart of the UK’s pandemic response.
The hour-long afternoon meeting on 28 August 2019 was marked “private” in a log of Johnson’s activities that day and was not subsequently disclosed on the government’s public log of meetings.
Elon Musk has been amplifying far-right accounts again, including Tommy Robinson, Rupert Lowe, and numerous anonynmous known #disinformation superspreader accounts like 'End Wokeness'.
Let's examine the context for yesterday's march in Richard Tice's constituency, #Skegness.
After decades of neglect, Skegness (pop 20K), stands out on key socio-economic markers on national averages: residents are older; whiter; lower full-time employment; higher rates of few/no qualifications; and concentrated deprivation - it's far-more deprived than most of England.
History repeatedly teaches us that burdening already struggling communities is a recipe for disaster.
These communities have been crying out for help for DECADES, but successive UK Govts have largely ignored their pleas, and continued to increase inequality, which harms us all.
🧵 @Rylan Asylum seekers coming here aren’t technically "illegal." International law (the 1951 Refugee Convention) allows people to seek asylum in any country regardless of how they arrive or how many countries they pass through, as long as they're fleeing persecution or danger.
Allow me to explain why asylum seekers aren’t “illegal”, and how misinformation and nasty demonising and scapegoating rhetoric by certain politicians and media, including news media, has made some British people less welcoming of asylum seeekers.
@Rylan
People fleeing war, torture, or persecution have the legal right to seek asylum.
The 1951 Refugee Convention, which the UK helped write, says anyone escaping danger can apply for asylum in another country no matter how they arrive: claiming asylum isn't a crime.
Farage's illiberal, immoral, & unworkable authoritarian plan involves ripping up human rights laws forged after WWII, which protect British people, & wasting £billions of UK taxpayers' money, giving some of it to corrupt misogynistic totalitarian regimes. theguardian.com/politics/2025/…
Leaving the #ECHR, repealing the Human Rights Act and disapplying international conventions
The UK would be an outlier among European democracies, in the company of only Russia and Belarus, if it were to leave the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
Opting out of treaties such as the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, the UN Convention against torture and the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention would also be likely to do serious harm to the UK’s international reputation.
It could also undermine current return deals, including with France, and other cooperation agreements on people-smuggling with European nations such as Germany.
The Society of Labour Lawyers said the plan would “in all likelihood preclude further cooperation and law enforcement in dealing with small boats coming from the continent and so increase, rather than reduce, the numbers reaching our shores”.
Farage said he would legislate to remove the “Hardial Singh” safeguards – a reference to a legal precedent that sets limits on the Home Office’s immigration detention powers – to allow indefinite detention for immigration purposes. This would be highly vulnerable to legal challenge.
Many of the rights protected by the ECHR and the Human Rights Act are rooted in British case law, so judges would still be able to prevent deportations, even without international conventions.
Reform UK’s grotesque far-right mass deportation plan is not just economically and socially illiterate (Britain an ageing population and low birth rate) rely on striking “returns agreements” with countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Eritrea and Sudan, offering financial incentives to secure these deals, alongside visa restrictions and potential sanctions on countries that refuse.
These are countries where the Home Office’s risk reports warn of widespread torture and persecution.
It would risk the scenario of making payments to countries such as Iran, whose regime the UK government has accused of plotting terror attacks on British soil.
The Liberal Democrats called the payments “a Taliban tax”, saying the plan would entail sending billions “to an oppressive regime that British soldiers fought and died to defeat”. They said: “Not a penny of taxpayers’ money should go to a group so closely linked to terrorist organisations proscribed by the UK.”
A reminder of the one, viewed 310,000 times, for which she was jailed, which urged people to burn down asylum seeker hotels after the #Southport attack - which had nothing to do with asylum seekers.
While all these tweets of Connolly's were made before her incendiary post, they don't say which year they were posted.
They can be accessed here, via The Wayback Machine, which has archived more than 916 billion web pages.
Connolly's tweet (top right) was in response to the tweet on the left, which criticised Laurence Fox for posting an upskirt photograph of Narinder Kaur.
The next one (right centre) was Connolly asking Kaur if she had 'flashed her gash'.