CW: Racism, Xenophobia
Former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, recently appeared at the Oxford Union to share her views on law and politics in the UK and beyond. It is no secret that Braverman has voiced her opinions on a range of divisive issues in recent years, many of which have been widely criticised. This criticism was in full throttle at the event on Monday 10th March, with passionate protest seen not only outside the Union, but also within the chamber itself.
The current President of the Oxford Union, Israr Khan, led the interview with Braverman confidently and pragmatically, beginning with a query about Braverman’s alleged “dream to see asylum seekers deported to Rwanda”. He probed for Braverman’s views regarding whether the Home Secretary’s policies should be based around their “personal fantasies”. As a trained barrister, Braverman was likely aware that this question immediately put her on the defensive; she reframed the question around the notion of the “crisis” of UK national border security, referring to small boat arrivals. For the first, but not the only, time in the talk, Braverman proceeded to refer to new data published in The Telegraph concerning the proportion of “foreigners” convicted of sex crimes.
Before revealing the statistic, two members of the audience stood up, with one of them shouting, “Why do you hate migrants?” amongst various other remarks. Holding a Palestinian flag, the two members were removed by security as they continued to verbally protest the speaker. Moments after the protesters were escorted from the chamber, Braverman jested, “[one of the protesters] needs to lie down!”, asking the floor, “Is there anyone else [who wants to protest]?”.
Much of Braverman’s rhetoric about deporting asylum seekers was centred around the claims that the total number of sexual offences “likely to have been committed by foreigners [was] up to 23 per cent”. Data employed by Khan cited data which shows that 88% of defendants against accusations of Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) were white (though it should be noted that a proportion of this group will also be immigrants). Unless there is a large disparity between the ethnicities of perpetrators of sexual crimes against children and against the population at large, these two sets of data appear to disagree. Nevertheless, the politicisation of sexual assault was salient within the talk: a member of the audience, speaking from personal experience, questioned Braverman’s politicisation of the issue, asserting that “focusing on the statistics does not solve the problem”. In response, Braverman reiterated that the data was “rigorous” and “independent”, asserting that there are “too many people” entering the country and “committing crimes”.
A further theme that Braverman covered was the alleged “failure” of multiculturalism in the UK, embodied in the “loath[ing]” of British values and the “denigration” of national identity. In reference to this alleged disparagement of British values, Braverman referred to the governing body of Oriel College wanting to “pull down the [Cecil] Rhodes statue”. Khan noted that the removal of the statue did not go ahead, a comment that destabilised Braverman’s argument slightly. Braverman made it clear that one of her major concerns was the number of immigrants who could not speak English; when Khan pointed out that speaking English was a requirement for British citizenship, she argued that this requirement was “far too loosely applied”.
Suella Braverman was sacked from her position as Home Secretary twice, the second time being a result of her “stoking tension” ahead of protests in London, and accusing the Met Police of bias toward pro-Palestinian protesters. “Who are you to say that Israel is not an apartheid state?” – this was the penultimate question from the floor. Braverman responded saying that Israel is one of the few democracies in the Middle East where “minorities are treated equally”. She asserted that Israel has a “right to exist” and a “right to defend itself”, and proceeded to label the current Labour government as “disgusting”, given their continued funding for UNRWA, an organisation she alleged is “complicit with Hamas”.
Following the event, I asked a participant in the protest for comment. They refused to speak to me directly, but asked for my contact details to pass on to Oxford Action for Palestine (OA4P). The organisation’s comment on the event was as follows:
“The former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman is a known racist, zionist, and xenophobe. We do not tolerate nor welcome any of her genocidal worldviews at the University of Oxford. The protest outside the Oxford Union is to remind the University that we, Oxford’s students and community, are disgusted by the invitations of genocidaires and are committed to holding the University accountable.”