UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak continues to defy calls to sack Home Secretary Suella Braverman after she wrote an article accusing the police of bias.
Published in The Times on Wednesday, Braverman claimed aggressive right-wing protesters were “rightly met with a stern response” by the police, while “pro-Palestinian mobs” were “largely ignored”.
She went on to say the Met were applying “double standards” and “played favourites when it comes to demonstrators”.
Her comments, and the timing of them, have been met with widespread backlash from across the political spectrum.
In the House of Commons on Wednesday, Labour leader Keir Starmer said Braverman was “doing the complete opposite” of the proper role of a home secretary and she was “out of control”.
Echoing this sentiment, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper accused Braverman of attacking the police “when she should be backing them”.
She claimed the home secretary’s comments on protest marches planned for Armistice Day this Saturday, were “encouraging extremists on all sides”.
Meanwhile, George Osborne, the former Tory chancellor, said the prime minister risked looking weak if he decided not to axe Ms Braverman.
Earlier today, current Chancellor Jeremy Hunt distanced himself from the Home Secretary’s views, saying her comments “are not words that I would have used”.
Since the article was published, it has emerged that Braverman defied a Downing Street request to tone the piece down.
Subsequently, Downing Street said it had launched an informal investigation into how the article came to be published without the changes they had requested.
The ministerial code states that the policy content and timing of all major releases should be cleared by No 10 “to ensure the effective coordination of cabinet business”.
But the prime minister’s spokeswoman said the government’s “collective focus” was on making sure the weekend’s events would go ahead without disruption.
And according to Number 10, Sunak still has “full confidence” in Braverman.
Regardless, a decision on the home secretary’s future is unlikely to be made ahead of the pro-Palestinian protest march and Armistice Day on Saturday.
The pro-Palestinian rally looks set to take place, despite government concerns that it could clash with the solemn annual commemorations for Britain’s military war dead.
Sunak’s government had put pressure on the police to ban the protest in the British capital.
But Met chief Mark Rowley has so far rejected to formally request the march be cancelled, citing the protestors’ right to freedom of speech.
Some reports suggest that gangs of football hooligans, and other right-wing groups are planning to come together this weekend to organise a mass movement to “protect” the Cenotaph from pro-Palestine protesters during the Remembrance Day events in London.
Ahead of a potentially volatile weekend of protest, Tory MPs are now said to be receiving complaints from constituents about Suella Braverman’s inflammatory rhetoric, a former minister has said.
Tim Loughton, the MP for Worthing and Shoreham, also accused the home secretary of “plying her own agenda” in open defiance of No 10.
“She’s not making it easy, I have to say,” he told the News Agentspodcast when asked if Braverman’s position was now untenable.
“And this needs to come to a head, it’s doing quite a lot of damage. We cannot have senior members of the cabinet, on the face of it, defying No 10 and plying her own agenda.”
He added: “And some of the comments she has made have been unhelpful. And many of us are getting emails from constituents to that effect as well, so it needs to stop.”
Politicians from Northern Ireland claimed Braverman’s article had damaged the likelihood of a return to a functioning democracy in Stormont after Braverman described recent protests in central London as an “assertion of primacy by certain groups – particularly Islamists – of the kind we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland”.
The Met Police force says it has seen a 13-fold upsurge in reports of antisemitic offences in October compared to last year, following the Hamas attacks and Israel’s retaliation.
The Met also found that anti-Muslim crimes have more than doubled, compared to last year.
Braverman had controversially warned that it is “widely understood”, that the chanting of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” calls for the total destruction of Israel and is in support of Hamas’ ideology.
However, the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is also recognised as a political call to put an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Despite the Met declaring that the chant does not constitute a criminal offence, Braverman has previously urged the service to “consider… whether its use in certain contexts may amount to a racially aggravated crime”.
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