EARLIER this week anti-racists welcomed the sacking of Suella Braverman as home secretary. After violent fascist and far-right mobs took to the streets of central London on Saturday, attacking police officers and others, Braverman’s position was obviously untenable in light of her article in the Times which said that “unfortunately, there is a perception that senior police officers play favourites when it comes to protesters. During Covid, why was it that lockdown objectors were given no quarter by public order police yet Black Lives Matter demonstrators were enabled, allowed to break rules and even greeted with officers taking the knee?”

There is no doubt that these comments emboldened far-right and fascist thugs — that is why she was sacked by a Prime Minister who had consistently supported her prior to last week’s Times article. 

Braverman will go down in history as the Conservative home secretary who galvanised the far right. It is worth remembering that last Saturday was not the first time comments by Braverman had wound up far-right and fascist thugs, leading to violence. This has been a permanent feature of Braverman’s tenure as home secretary. 

Let us remind ourselves of the toxicity unleashed by Braverman. Soon after being reappointed as home secretary by Rishi Sunak, she described desperate and vulnerable asylum-seekers crossing the English Channel as an invasion of the southern coast, sparking numerous attacks on places housing asylum-seekers, including the pogromist attack on a hotel in Knowsley earlier this year. 

This comment was condemned by Holocaust survivor Joan Salter, who said: “When I hear you using words against refugees like ‘swarms’ and an ‘invasion,’ I am reminded of the language used to dehumanise and justify the murder of my family and millions of others.” 

But this did not stop Braverman’s hate campaign. In September in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute Braverman attacked the right to asylum, undermined the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, the right to asylum of LGBT refugees and said multiculturalism had failed. 

In October her speech to the Conservative Party conference she described those seeking asylum as a “hurricane” and called the Human Rights Act the “Criminal Rights Act.” 

These speeches were designed to whip up the racist right in order to scapegoat the vulnerable and distract from the cost-of-living policy engineered and chosen by this government. 

The Tories allow energy companies to make profits to the tune of billions, while the working class struggle to pay for basic costs such as rent, mortgages, energy bills and food. The government is to blame — but it incessantly stirs up racism against the most vulnerable people in the world in order to encourage some sections of society to blame them instead. 

The upshot of this has been demonstrations by racists and fascists targeting asylum-seekers. They have taken place up and down the country: Erskine in Scotland, Llanelli in Wales, Skegness and Scrampton in Lincolnshire, Leeds, Birmingham, Honor Oak in south-east London, Portland, Dorset, and many other parts of the country. United campaigns involving local communities, trade unions, mostly led by Stand Up to Racism, have pushed back far-right mobilisations. 

Asylum-seekers were not Braverman’s only chosen target of attack. In an attempt to stir up racism and Islamophobia prior to the May elections, Braverman falsely claimed child grooming gangs in Britain were “almost all British-Pakistani,” in an article in the Mail on Sunday. 

She doubled-down on this in a speech to the right-wing National Conservatism conference in May. However in September press regulator Ipso said Braverman’s decision to link “the identified ethnic group and a particular form of offending was significantly misleading” because the Home Office’s own research had concluded offenders were mainly from white backgrounds. Sadly such corrections rarely make the headlines the way these original false claims do. 

Braverman has gone but the vile “stop the boats” campaign has not. Immediately after being appointed home secretary James Cleverly announced stopping the boats as one of his priorities. 

Braverman was the standard-bearer for the racist reactionary right but this racist agenda has been supported by Rishi Sunak. He launched the “stop the boats” campaign and has staunchly supported it, along with the Illegal Migration Act. 

Prior to that, under Boris Johnson’s administration, along with many other things, the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities claimed institutional racism did not exist — a line taken by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley in response to the Casey review’s damning verdict on racism, sexism and homophobia in the police. 

Braverman has gone, but clearly it is time for the whole lot to go. Opinion polls suggest there will be a Labour government or Labour-led coalition after the next general election. 

We should remember that the racist right is much bigger and more emboldened than in 1997, the last time a Labour government was elected after a long period of Tory rule. 

That is why building a movement against racism and fascism is crucial. These issues will be discussed at this Saturday’s Stand Up to Racism conference. TUC general secretary Paul Nowak, NEU general secretary Daniel Kebede, Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP and Kim Johnson MP are some of the speakers addressing the conference. 

Sabby Dhalu is co-convener of Stand Up to Racism.

Register here: bit.ly/SUTRconference23. For more information visit www.standuptoracism.org.uk.