#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.
Daniel Sonabend's book, 'We Fight Fascists', charts the rise of the #43Group of tough Jewish WWII vets, who regularly fought & attacked Oswald Mosley & other British fascists, showing that Jews would not meekly accept post-WWII racism & bigotry.
Want to know a secret that far-right politicians & right-wing newspaper editors have ruthlessly exploited for at least a century? Traditional ideologies, usually embodied by mainstream parties, are anchored in emotionality as much as ideology or what we call 'populism'.
Conservative thinking is often a response to a need to reduce #fear & #uncertainty (Jost, Kruglanski, Glaser & Sulloway 2003). Experimental evidence shows that priming 'mortality threats' results in post-manipulation conservative identification (Thorisdottir & Jost 2010). 🇬🇧
Liberals, on the other hand, are less concerned with fear, & rather characterized by a higher propensity for #empathy (Hsu, Anen, & Quartz 2008; Taber & Young 2013). This emotion emerges as a distinctive trait of liberal ideology in a number of studies, highlighting (Smith 2006).
🚨 Emergency services are at the Border Force migrant processing centre in Dover, Kent, after a Reuters witness says a man threw petrol bombs before killing himself. The man drove up to the centre and threw three petrol bombs, one of which did not go off. Also today, in the Mail:
🚨 A white man threw three petrol bombs attached with fireworks at a centre for processing migrants in the southern English port of Dover on Sunday (one did not go off) & then killed himself, a Reuters photographer said.
The suspect's blog, website & social media accounts are filled with anti-Semitic memes, Holocaust denial, references to far-right websites & conspiracy theories such as QAnon, debunked allegations of election fraud & a host of far-right talking points. 🤬
Having said this, the suspect is clearly a troubled person, likely homeless, with a history of violence & drug use. So while his interest in conspiracy theories & far-right extremism certainly APPEARS to some extent to have motivated the attack, this is currently speculative.
There seems to be compelling evidence that the suspect has a long & well documented history of writing & posting about conspiracy theories. But again, the extent to which his views did or did not motivate the attack remain unknown, & therefore speculative. independent.co.uk/news/world/ame…
We're told we have a 'representative democracy', but over the past fifty years, the proportion of MPs from manual work backgrounds has declined to ZERO, & the proportion of MPs who were elected representatives or worked in politics before becoming MPs is now over half.🇬🇧
The proportion of privately educated cabinet ministers has been much higher than the population for decades, even under @UKLabour. Truss (68%) & Johnson’s (64%) first cabinets had the highest proportions of private school-educated ministers since the early 1990s. Sunak's has 65%.
There has been a dramatic exclusion of those from lower middle & working class backgrounds from representation at the top of British politics.
There is also a difficulty in participation for the large majority of people who weren’t privately educated.
This #thread quotes extensively from the FT article above.
Many are fearful Musk's leadership could do more harm than good: he's pledged to restore “free speech” to the platform & undo permanent bans, paving the way for Trump to return as the US midterms loom just days away.
“We’ve seen people’s businesses and reputations rise and fall by what happens on Twitter, we’ve seen markets rise and fall by what happens on Twitter, we’ve seen elections rise and fall by what happens on Twitter,” says Joan Donovan.