Dear All,

ome of the reactions to the sacking of the UK’s controversial home secretary Suella Braverman last week were interesting in the context of the xenophobia that the Tories have stoked ever since they have been in government.

#SuellaWasRight started trending on social media (X, formerly Twitter) soon after Braverman’s departure from the Home Office. Yes indeed, Braverman is right – far-right in fact. Braverman’s words and actions were outrageous – racist and divisive – and she soon began to be referred to as Cruella, a reference to the frightening villain of The 101 Dalmatians.

Even though Braverman is brown-skinned and of Indian descent (her parents were immigrants from Kenya and Mauritius), her policies were xenophobic and targeted ‘foreigners’, especially non-white ones. Her ministerial career is certainly interesting for what it reveals about the promotion of the xenophobic narrative in Britain.

Braverman stoked the flames of hatred and xenophobia. She was the main proponent of scheme to pack off all the asylum seekers coming to the UK to Rwanda. Their cases were to be processed in Rwanda and the successful ones would have been allowed to remain… in Rwanda. The others would presumably have been ‘repatriated’. Even though this was widely criticised as immoral and contrary to Britain’s stance of granting refuge to those fleeing war and persecution, Braverman persisted with the plan, making several trips to Rwanda, paying the Rwandan authorities quite a lot of money and even telling the Daily Telegraph that a front page with reports and pictures of a (asylum seekers’) plane taking off for Rwanda was her “dream” and her “obsession.”

Braverman also kept repeating the “Stop the Boats” mantra to reinforce the message that the cause of all Britain’s problems were the desperate foreigners trying to cross the Channel to the UK for refuge. She then put asylum seekers on a large boat (a barge that it turned out was infested with Legionnaires Disease bacteria and was a fire hazard) on the basis that housing them elsewhere was costing taxpayers too much.

Braverman basically continued the xenophobic narrative of the Brexiteers: blaming ‘foreigners’ for all of Britain’s problems. The Brexit campaign was so nasty and hate-filled that in the run-up to, as well as in the aftermath of, the 2016 referendum, Europeans in Britain faced all sorts of abuse.

The day after the referendum The Polish Social and Cultural Association in London was attacked. In a separate incident, a Polish man was killed. Europeans who had lived and worked in Britain for decades were insulted by random ‘nationalists’ and told to go ‘home.’ Amnesty International said that after the Brexit, they documented a sharp increase in hate crimes and noted that some abusive terms such Paki which had been not used for years were revived in this climate of hate.

Human rights campaigners took the government to court over the Rwanda deportation policy and although the High Court deemed it was not unlawful, an injunction from the European court of Human Rights stopped the first flight from taking off last year.

Just two days after Braverman was sacked, the Supreme Court of Britain delivered its verdict on the case and dismissed the government’s Rwanda plan in a unanimous judgment. The head of the Supreme Court, Lord Reed, said the court had decided that there were “serious and systematic defects in Rwanda’s procedures and institutions for processing asylum claims” and there was a risk that asylum seekers might be returned to countries where their lives were at risk. He stressed that the judgment was based on international law and was not linked to the political debate around the issue.

Braverman’s political positioning and posturing; deriding so-called ‘woke’ culture and promoting chauvinist nationalism was again evident in her statement that “homelessness was a lifestyle choice” – yet another example of her politics of blaming the poor and wretched for their condition. She also called all the peaceful protests against the Israeli onslaught in Gaza “hate marches” and she kept trying to get the Met Police to crack down on the anti-war protestors.

No wonder then that in a profile, CNN described Braverman as a “Trump tribute act.” She has whipped up the same sort of nastiness and xenophobia as Trump. “Stop the Boats” echoes “Build the Wall” and reinforces the idea of an alien invasion, of the need to resist and expel the evil foreigners. It’s a useful political tool and a convenient diversionary tactic for governments.

The Pakistani government announced last month that that they would crack down on ‘undocumented’ foreign nationals in Pakistan. It then proceeded to target Afghans. ABC News has reported that “more than 250,000 Afghans have left Pakistan in recent weeks.” Others have been moved to “holding centres.”

Some of the young people forced to leave as a result of this crackdown were born and raised in Pakistan and had never been to Afghanistan. Some, like the young woman who was working on a medical diploma in Peshawar, will now be unable to complete their education and training. The woman’s brother told the Christian Science Monitor that “she had spent 16 months on the course, and as a family we’d used all our money to educate her…. Now, with about five months left, she’s being forced to abandon her studies. ... It hurts.”

There have also been reports of families and individuals not being allowed to take their belongings and assets or vehicles with them and of people with ID cards being deported anyway.

Quite a number of those who have been deported had fled to Pakistan after the sudden withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan and the Taliban takeover. They included journalists and others who may have worked as translators for Western forces or organisations and who say they are on Taliban hit-lists.

Why was this necessary? As in the Braverman rhetoric, it serves as a useful diversion. Policy/ security decisions such as this should be made by an elected government but here an appointed caretaker government has decided to crack down on undocumented Afghans by implying that they are a drain on national resources and are linked to terrorism. The action is a diversion from what really is a problem: the ongoing crackdown on political parties and leaders in Pakistan, the abduction, mala fide prosecutions and detention of the supporters of a particular party. Deporting ‘foreigners’ is a useful way of diverting the country’s attention.

Indeed, xenophobia is a useful tool. But it is also a tinderbox, it ignites the flames of hatred and it divides people. It encourages people to choose prejudice over compassion and it enables violence. And it obscures the real issues – it is a sort of cloaking device.

Best wishes,

Umber Khairi

The author is a former BBC broadcaster and producer, and one of the founding editors of Newsline.