Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
It's written with all the brilliance I would expect from a Cambridge educated lawyer.
It is blistering.
It's not really. I mean, she doesn't say that he takes his pizza with pineapple and watches Die Hard on Christmas Day.
'....As you know, I accepted your offer to serve as home secretary in October 2022 on certain conditions.
Despite you having been rejected by a majority of party members during the summer leadership contest and thus having no personal mandate to be prime minister, I agreed to support you because of the firm assurances you gave me on key policy priorities...It is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest and thus enabling you to become prime minister.
For a year, as home secretary I have sent numerous letters to you on the key subjects contained in our agreement, made requests to discuss them with you and your team, and put forward proposals on how we might deliver these goals.
I worked up the legal advice, policy detail and action to take on these issues. This was often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest.
You have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver on every single one of these key policies. Either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so. Or, as I must surely conclude now, you never had any intention of keeping your promises...These are not just pet interests of mine. They are what we promised the British people in our 2019 manifesto which led to a landslide victory. They are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit Referendum.
Our deal was no mere promise over dinner, to be discarded when convenient and denied when challenged...In October of last year you were given an opportunity to lead our country. It is a privilege to serve and one we should not take for granted. Service requires bravery and thinking of the common good.
It is not about occupying the office as an end in itself.
Someone needs to be honest: your plan is not working, we have endured record election defeats, your resets have failed and we are running out of time. You need to change course urgently.
I may not have always found the right words, but I have always striven to give voice to the quiet majority that supported us in 2019. I have endeavoured to be honest and true to the people who put us in these privileged positions.
I will, of course, continue to support the government in pursuit of policies which align with an authentic conservative agenda.'
I disagree - Howe's was more brutal because he used a cricket analogy - cricket, the quintessentially British game, an analogy which no Conservative MP would have missed or failed to appreciate.
That's why it was devastating - it also allowed Hesletine to launch his challenge.
Will Braverman's resignation letter incite a challenge to Sunak? If so, from whom? If not, it will all come with the stench of sour grapes.
I have just read Braverman's letter. Hell indeed hath no fury like a woman scorned. There may well be considered ways to reply in such a manner that shows she is in the wrong. No idea.
But be that as it may, is it remotely credible, in the mature democracy where the general public don't believe anything politicians say in any circumstances, that Braverman really thought that a politician's promises would necessarily be kept in her own special case? This is delusional.
'....As you know, I accepted your offer to serve as home secretary in October 2022 on certain conditions.
Despite you having been rejected by a majority of party members during the summer leadership contest and thus having no personal mandate to be prime minister, I agreed to support you because of the firm assurances you gave me on key policy priorities...It is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest and thus enabling you to become prime minister.
For a year, as home secretary I have sent numerous letters to you on the key subjects contained in our agreement, made requests to discuss them with you and your team, and put forward proposals on how we might deliver these goals.
I worked up the legal advice, policy detail and action to take on these issues. This was often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest.
You have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver on every single one of these key policies. Either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so. Or, as I must surely conclude now, you never had any intention of keeping your promises...These are not just pet interests of mine. They are what we promised the British people in our 2019 manifesto which led to a landslide victory. They are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit Referendum.
Our deal was no mere promise over dinner, to be discarded when convenient and denied when challenged...In October of last year you were given an opportunity to lead our country. It is a privilege to serve and one we should not take for granted. Service requires bravery and thinking of the common good.
It is not about occupying the office as an end in itself.
Someone needs to be honest: your plan is not working, we have endured record election defeats, your resets have failed and we are running out of time. You need to change course urgently.
I may not have always found the right words, but I have always striven to give voice to the quiet majority that supported us in 2019. I have endeavoured to be honest and true to the people who put us in these privileged positions.
I will, of course, continue to support the government in pursuit of policies which align with an authentic conservative agenda.'
I disagree - Howe's was more brutal because he used a cricket analogy - cricket, the quintessentially British game, an analogy which no Conservative MP would have missed or failed to appreciate.
That's why it was devastating - it also allowed Hesletine to launch his challenge.
Will Braverman's resignation letter incite a challenge to Sunak? If so, from whom? If not, it will all come with the stench of sour grapes.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Nah. I think the new top team- Sunak, Dowden, Cameron, Cleverley - will be pretty united and will happily face down the mutineers. There will be a battle after the election and I rather suspect Cleverley is being lined up by the party establishment with Badenoch as as the approved alternative. Braverman, or whoever the rightwing factionalists line up, will likely get squeezed out.
Braverman has rotten ratings with the public - she's no Boris - a paper tiger.
Braverman represents the heart and soul of the modern Conservative Party.
Braverman represents the heart and soul arsehole of the modern Conservative Party. FTFY
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
A couple of those epithets - “bombshell” and “damning” - are anything but universal. Vitriolic but naive would be my take.
- the team is ALWAYS bigger than the individual - it's always important to go with dignity, even if you don't think it's your fault
A bit late for that. I would imagine that she considers herself loyal to the true conservative team and it is dignified to challenge a usurper PM.
Yes I think that’s right. And she has a point. Sunak is unelected and has no mandate - his only mandate is from the winning manifesto of 2019
She’s arguing that the manifesto is bigger than him
As I said yesterday all Sunak has done is bring forward the Tory civil war so it now happens before the election, in public, and meanwhile his asinine promotion of Cameron is likewise unraveling - and will only get worse as people scrutinise his finances as he squats, unelected, in the Lords
Sunak made a howling error - despite all the praise he got oh here
For one, some people praised it but it was hardly universal, even from past Cameron fans. It made little sense, was of questionable utility, and said poor things about the options he must have had amongst MPs.
For two, the mandate point is a load of old bollocks, as it nearly always is, yet people act like it is some killer point every time. We all know parties are not bound to manifestos, for sound reasons as circumstances will sometimes justify a change, and I've gone through in the past just how common it is for PMs not to go to the country within a year of taking office.
So I'm down with calling him useless, and for saying appointing Cameron was a mistake, and that ostracising the Braverman wing will not help and is also a mistake, but the 'unelected' PM line never works for me whichever side or party tries it on, since it is self evidently done only when convenient to the speaker, and the MPs who use it are insincere.
Truss was promising a new direction and was Braverman going to say she was unelected and arguing the manifesto of 2019 should override it? Of course not, that'd be stupid. Sunak's choices are bad, or not, on their own merits.
Lastly, she cannot seriously claim to have a problem with usurping PMs and its dignified to challenge them when she backed Rishi as a usurper. She can argue he has not kept his promises, sure, she might well be right for all we know. But 'The usurper was ok when he was doing what I wanted' is not a principled argument against usurpers.
I have just read Braverman's letter. Hell indeed hath no fury like a woman scorned. There may well be considered ways to reply in such a manner that shows she is in the wrong. No idea.
But be that as it may, is it remotely credible, in the mature democracy where the general public don't believe anything politicians say in any circumstances, that Braverman really thought that a politician's promises would necessarily be kept in her own special case? This is delusional.
She thought she was good as Home Secretary and a source of useful legal advice for the government.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
Well you don't think it's a good letter either - I'm sure.
I think it’s first class in terms of achieving its purpose. Seriously damaging Sunak and exposing his flaws - while quietly exonerating herself
You can question whether she should have done it. You can say it will damage her own career - assassins rarely become kings
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Difficulty is that, under FPTP, to split is to lose.
But making promises that his audience wants to hear, irrespective of his intention/ability to keep them?
Maybe Rishi is just Boris with better trouser control
If we had PR Rishi and Cameron would be in different parties to Boris, Rees Mogg and Braverman (and Farage would probably be in the latter party too) and Blair and Starmer would be in a different party to Corbyn and McDonnell.
Only FPTP keeps them together
Yes, you are right, young HY. You are making very good progress.
But I think your politics tutor ought to ask you what you mean precisely by PR.
If you mean PR over the country as a whole, then they would probably remain in the same party.
But if you mean STV, then you are absolutely right, because then the electors would be able to decide just what variety of Conservative they wanted. It gives power back to people, you see, which is why Starmer and Sunk are opposed to it.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
It's written with all the brilliance I would expect from a Cambridge educated lawyer.
It is blistering.
She’s a lawyer - and this is pounding the table. You know what that means.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Nah. I think the new top team- Sunak, Dowden, Cameron, Cleverley - will be pretty united and will happily face down the mutineers. There will be a battle after the election and I rather suspect Cleverley is being lined up by the party establishment with Badenoch as as the approved alternative. Braverman, or whoever the rightwing factionalists line up, will likely get squeezed out.
Braverman has rotten ratings with the public - she's no Boris - a paper tiger.
You might be right on Braverman. I’m not a fan of hers - but this letter shows she’s smart and eloquent enough to really fuck with Sunak
So she may not become PM but she can advance her cause against the left
It’s another sign of Sunak’s mistake unravelling within 24 hours of him committing jt. As some of us predicted
I think it shows that she's convinced the election is already lost, and therefore cares more about her positioning post election
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
It's written with all the brilliance I would expect from a Cambridge educated lawyer.
It is blistering.
She’s a lawyer - and this is pounding the table. You know what that means.
If Cruella has 'the deal' in writing, and publishes it, Richi is screwed.
If she doesn't publish it, she is finished.
She doesn’t. Read her letter - she showed him a list of points, which she says he agreed to. That’s it.
Weak tea.
Which is mildly ironic, given our view of Sunak.
She seems to have fallen for the same trick Brown did, not realising that once the other person is in the top job any promises are worthless, and can easily be batted back as being currently impractical due to circumstances.
If he committed to certain things and did not follow them then I think it's reasonable to agitate on that basis. Political leaders who don't follow through on promises to underlines and supporters will lose their support eventually.
But it is one of those situations where the tone is so bitter and angry that despite explanations like giving him a decent change it makes it seem weird she lasted this long without calling him out and instead waiting to get sacked. Like when Carswell defected to UKIP with a litany of longstanding complaints about the Tories, which made it sound like he should have quit years before.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
It’s also a hostage to fortune as if the Rwanda plan is rejected tomorrow then all the Sunak outriders will be able to just point at her and say she’s clearly incompetent as her big policy was against the law and if she can’t get that right then what’s she for. They can say that she’s screwed up and set back the attempts at a plan to deter immigrants and that her actions are impotent.
A majority government can change the law if necessary, as she says in her letter, so that doesn't follow.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Ok but ideal world direction of travel, I mean. Also even if not enforceable it's good if you can put friction in the way of elected politicians wanting to do grim things that violate fundamental human rights like outright bans on abortion.
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
Lots of well intentioned nonsense here in your example. Abortion both now and historically is not an uncontested issue with a single obviously correct view - like say the use of bubonic plague in war, or torturing randomly chosen children for public entertainment.
It is therefore and excellent example of something which should be under democratic and accountable control in a democracy, exactly as it is in the UK. The USA was wrong to allow it through the courts, and would be just as wrong to ban it through the courts.
Full disclosure: I follow Bill Clinton on this one (if little else): abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
Disagree. An outright ban reduces women to chattels and is unambiguously and factually an outrage. No election can change this.
I’m guessing that if Suella becomes Tory leader she’s going to be rigorous on following agreements with backers to the T and will abandon the concept of collective responsibility.
She’s fucked if she becomes leader as she cannot complain about any of her MPs’ behaviour. She would have been best to keep very quiet and play the long game.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
Well you don't think it's a good letter either - I'm sure.
I think it’s first class in terms of achieving its purpose. Seriously damaging Sunak and exposing his flaws - while quietly exonerating herself
You can question whether she should have done it. You can say it will damage her own career - assassins rarely become kings
But as a brutal kicking? It’s brilliant
Oh well, I misjudged your likely opinion. Sorry about that. I think its just a list, and a rather pointless one, dressed up as a letter to give it a air of coherence.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
It's written with all the brilliance I would expect from a Cambridge educated lawyer.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
It's written with all the brilliance I would expect from a Cambridge educated lawyer.
It is blistering.
It's terrible and won't survive the ravages of time. It displays a certain understanding of how to draft legislation for the benefit of the ultra right media, but that isn't how politics works. Law writes on goatskin. Politicians write only on water.
'....As you know, I accepted your offer to serve as home secretary in October 2022 on certain conditions.
Despite you having been rejected by a majority of party members during the summer leadership contest and thus having no personal mandate to be prime minister, I agreed to support you because of the firm assurances you gave me on key policy priorities...It is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest and thus enabling you to become prime minister.
For a year, as home secretary I have sent numerous letters to you on the key subjects contained in our agreement, made requests to discuss them with you and your team, and put forward proposals on how we might deliver these goals.
I worked up the legal advice, policy detail and action to take on these issues. This was often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest.
You have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver on every single one of these key policies. Either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so. Or, as I must surely conclude now, you never had any intention of keeping your promises...These are not just pet interests of mine. They are what we promised the British people in our 2019 manifesto which led to a landslide victory. They are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit Referendum.
Our deal was no mere promise over dinner, to be discarded when convenient and denied when challenged...In October of last year you were given an opportunity to lead our country. It is a privilege to serve and one we should not take for granted. Service requires bravery and thinking of the common good.
It is not about occupying the office as an end in itself.
Someone needs to be honest: your plan is not working, we have endured record election defeats, your resets have failed and we are running out of time. You need to change course urgently.
I may not have always found the right words, but I have always striven to give voice to the quiet majority that supported us in 2019. I have endeavoured to be honest and true to the people who put us in these privileged positions.
I will, of course, continue to support the government in pursuit of policies which align with an authentic conservative agenda.'
I disagree - Howe's was more brutal because he used a cricket analogy - cricket, the quintessentially British game, an analogy which no Conservative MP would have missed or failed to appreciate.
That's why it was devastating - it also allowed Hesletine to launch his challenge.
Will Braverman's resignation letter incite a challenge to Sunak? If so, from whom? If not, it will all come with the stench of sour grapes.
In “normal” times such an explosive letter would elicit a challenge of some kind. But this is not normal times. The Tories have already changed leader twice - they can’t do it again before an election, an election which is only a year away or less
So Sunak will probably limp on, badly damaged by the Braverman clusterbomb and now saddled with his Cameron error. Its not exactly optimal for the Tories
Also, wasn’t one of the reasons Sunak appointed David Duke of Brexit to overshadow the Braverman sacking?
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
It’s also a hostage to fortune as if the Rwanda plan is rejected tomorrow then all the Sunak outriders will be able to just point at her and say she’s clearly incompetent as her big policy was against the law and if she can’t get that right then what’s she for. They can say that she’s screwed up and set back the attempts at a plan to deter immigrants and that her actions are impotent.
But then that just reflects terribly on Sunak for appointing her and agreeing to her plans
Which a lot of people said at the time, including those who had thought him taking over was going to be a positive.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
You think that’s well written? You surprise me.
The key passage is this one:
“For a year, as Home Secretary I have sent numerous letters to you on the key subjects contained in our agreement, made requests to discuss them with you and your team, and put forward proposals on how we might deliver these goals. I worked up the legal advice, policy detail and action to take on these issues. This was often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest”.
Weak. I am not Home Secretary and would not tolerate that in my job, if it was how I was treated. She is basically saying the Government is dreadful but she was willing to put up with it for £150k a year. Saying that undermines all of the rest and exposes the whole thing as a political game which she doesn’t really care about.
It’s not exactly resigning over a principle is it?
'....As you know, I accepted your offer to serve as home secretary in October 2022 on certain conditions.
Despite you having been rejected by a majority of party members during the summer leadership contest and thus having no personal mandate to be prime minister, I agreed to support you because of the firm assurances you gave me on key policy priorities...It is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest and thus enabling you to become prime minister.
For a year, as home secretary I have sent numerous letters to you on the key subjects contained in our agreement, made requests to discuss them with you and your team, and put forward proposals on how we might deliver these goals.
I worked up the legal advice, policy detail and action to take on these issues. This was often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest.
You have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver on every single one of these key policies. Either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so. Or, as I must surely conclude now, you never had any intention of keeping your promises...These are not just pet interests of mine. They are what we promised the British people in our 2019 manifesto which led to a landslide victory. They are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit Referendum.
Our deal was no mere promise over dinner, to be discarded when convenient and denied when challenged...In October of last year you were given an opportunity to lead our country. It is a privilege to serve and one we should not take for granted. Service requires bravery and thinking of the common good.
It is not about occupying the office as an end in itself.
Someone needs to be honest: your plan is not working, we have endured record election defeats, your resets have failed and we are running out of time. You need to change course urgently.
I may not have always found the right words, but I have always striven to give voice to the quiet majority that supported us in 2019. I have endeavoured to be honest and true to the people who put us in these privileged positions.
I will, of course, continue to support the government in pursuit of policies which align with an authentic conservative agenda.'
I disagree - Howe's was more brutal because he used a cricket analogy - cricket, the quintessentially British game, an analogy which no Conservative MP would have missed or failed to appreciate.
That's why it was devastating - it also allowed Hesletine to launch his challenge.
Will Braverman's resignation letter incite a challenge to Sunak? If so, from whom? If not, it will all come with the stench of sour grapes.
Sigh.
The rules have changed.
You don't have 'challenges' any more.
You have votes of confidence.
Be that as it may, the letter will be counter productive.
Conservatives value loyalty above everything else - or so @HYUFD tells us - blind, unquestioning loyalty to the leader under all circumstances or until they resign (Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss) after which loyalty is seamlessly transferred to the new leader.
Braverman has shown disloyalty - that won't be forgotten.
Are Suella’s sour grapes really going to do much damage? They could be a net positive if they reinforce in moderate Tories’ minds that the party has changed direction
- the team is ALWAYS bigger than the individual - it's always important to go with dignity, even if you don't think it's your fault
A bit late for that. I would imagine that she considers herself loyal to the true conservative team and it is dignified to challenge a usurper PM.
Yes I think that’s right. And she has a point. Sunak is unelected and has no mandate - his only mandate is from the winning manifesto of 2019
She’s arguing that the manifesto is bigger than him
As I said yesterday all Sunak has done is bring forward the Tory civil war so it now happens before the election, in public, and meanwhile his asinine promotion of Cameron is likewise unraveling - and will only get worse as people scrutinise his finances as he squats, unelected, in the Lords
Sunak made a howling error - despite all the praise he got oh here
it all dates back to the fault line created by Brexit. It's incurable
Brexit is not a fault line, its history. Its done, we've moved on.
Even Keir Starmer has moved on, its only diehards like you and Scott that haven't.
The next election will not be decided by Brexit..
Agreed. Everyone sees it for the massive error it was and the trendlines show rejoin consensus starting to emerge with us going back in around 10-15 years roughly. The issue has been decided. We screwed up.
No mucking around with opt-outs this time. Euro, Schengen, the full monty when we're back in our rightful place at the heart of Europe, rather than pissing around with half arsed "trade deals" with south sea islands on the other side of the globe.
You really believe that don’t you? I doubt even you will want to join what the EU has become in 15 years. These things aren’t static.
I’m guessing that if Suella becomes Tory leader she’s going to be rigorous on following agreements with backers to the T and will abandon the concept of collective responsibility.
She’s fucked if she becomes leader as she cannot complain about any of her MPs’ behaviour. She would have been best to keep very quiet and play the long game.
Corbyn got away with it.
And while she's as mad as he is she's also obviously quite a bit brighter.
'....As you know, I accepted your offer to serve as home secretary in October 2022 on certain conditions.
Despite you having been rejected by a majority of party members during the summer leadership contest and thus having no personal mandate to be prime minister, I agreed to support you because of the firm assurances you gave me on key policy priorities...It is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest and thus enabling you to become prime minister.
For a year, as home secretary I have sent numerous letters to you on the key subjects contained in our agreement, made requests to discuss them with you and your team, and put forward proposals on how we might deliver these goals.
I worked up the legal advice, policy detail and action to take on these issues. This was often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest.
You have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver on every single one of these key policies. Either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so. Or, as I must surely conclude now, you never had any intention of keeping your promises...These are not just pet interests of mine. They are what we promised the British people in our 2019 manifesto which led to a landslide victory. They are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit Referendum.
Our deal was no mere promise over dinner, to be discarded when convenient and denied when challenged...In October of last year you were given an opportunity to lead our country. It is a privilege to serve and one we should not take for granted. Service requires bravery and thinking of the common good.
It is not about occupying the office as an end in itself.
Someone needs to be honest: your plan is not working, we have endured record election defeats, your resets have failed and we are running out of time. You need to change course urgently.
I may not have always found the right words, but I have always striven to give voice to the quiet majority that supported us in 2019. I have endeavoured to be honest and true to the people who put us in these privileged positions.
I will, of course, continue to support the government in pursuit of policies which align with an authentic conservative agenda.'
I disagree - Howe's was more brutal because he used a cricket analogy - cricket, the quintessentially British game, an analogy which no Conservative MP would have missed or failed to appreciate.
That's why it was devastating - it also allowed Hesletine to launch his challenge.
Will Braverman's resignation letter incite a challenge to Sunak? If so, from whom? If not, it will all come with the stench of sour grapes.
Also, wasn’t one of the reasons Sunak appointed David Duke of Brexit to overshadow the Braverman sacking?
We have no idea if that is the case. Given the story of his appointment came about because of her sacking I personally doubt it. I think it was an attempt to signal a gentler direction without actually taking that direction (Cameron was frequently rated in perception polls as being more centrist than he actually was, IIRC), and an effort to minimise the reshuffle at the top by slotting in an outsider, because he was going to have enough problems with Braverman to upset too many others in Cabinet.
One thing this letter does convince me of: she really means this stuff. She’s not being performatively cross, she really is cross. That was a poison pen letter, not a cynically pitched bid for leadership.
This isn’t some careerist who’s landed on an ideology because it suits her ambitions (I’m looking at you Truss) or a professional bullshitter who’ll adopt whatever ideology the audience is most likely to lap up (Boris), or giant ego whose first objective is to get attention (Farage) or indeed just a nihilist who thinks everyone else is stupid and they alone have the genius to change things for the better (Dom).
No, this is one of those politicians who really really believes what she’s saying. Lives and breathes it. That puts her in company with characters like Steve Baker, or Jeremy Corbyn, but precious few other recent Tory or Labour front benchers.
Does that make her more dangerous for her foes than the likes of Johnson or Farage, or less?
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Ok but ideal world direction of travel, I mean. Also even if not enforceable it's good if you can put friction in the way of elected politicians wanting to do grim things that violate fundamental human rights like outright bans on abortion.
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
Lots of well intentioned nonsense here in your example. Abortion both now and historically is not an uncontested issue with a single obviously correct view - like say the use of bubonic plague in war, or torturing randomly chosen children for public entertainment.
It is therefore and excellent example of something which should be under democratic and accountable control in a democracy, exactly as it is in the UK. The USA was wrong to allow it through the courts, and would be just as wrong to ban it through the courts.
Full disclosure: I follow Bill Clinton on this one (if little else): abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
Disagree. An outright ban reduces women to chattels and is unambiguously and factually an outrage. No election can change this.
And the Clinton formulation is just a bit of clever sounding sophistry which means little in terms of actual policy.
If he committed to certain things and did not follow them then I think it's reasonable to agitate on that basis. Political leaders who don't follow through on promises to underlines and supporters will lose their support eventually.
But it is one of those situations where the tone is so bitter and angry that despite explanations like giving him a decent change it makes it seem weird she lasted this long without calling him out and instead waiting to get sacked. Like when Carswell defected to UKIP with a litany of longstanding complaints about the Tories, which made it sound like he should have quit years before.
Exactly. Whenever some scorned politician dishes the dirt upon being sacked it doesn't make them look good, it reminds us of how two-faced they are.
- the team is ALWAYS bigger than the individual - it's always important to go with dignity, even if you don't think it's your fault
A bit late for that. I would imagine that she considers herself loyal to the true conservative team and it is dignified to challenge a usurper PM.
Yes I think that’s right. And she has a point. Sunak is unelected and has no mandate - his only mandate is from the winning manifesto of 2019
She’s arguing that the manifesto is bigger than him
As I said yesterday all Sunak has done is bring forward the Tory civil war so it now happens before the election, in public, and meanwhile his asinine promotion of Cameron is likewise unraveling - and will only get worse as people scrutinise his finances as he squats, unelected, in the Lords
Sunak made a howling error - despite all the praise he got oh here
it all dates back to the fault line created by Brexit. It's incurable
Brexit is not a fault line, its history. Its done, we've moved on.
Even Keir Starmer has moved on, its only diehards like you and Scott that haven't.
The next election will not be decided by Brexit..
Agreed. Everyone sees it for the massive error it was and the trendlines show rejoin consensus starting to emerge with us going back in around 10-15 years roughly. The issue has been decided. We screwed up.
No mucking around with opt-outs this time. Euro, Schengen, the full monty when we're back in our rightful place at the heart of Europe, rather than pissing around with half arsed "trade deals" with south sea islands on the other side of the globe.
You really believe that don’t you? I doubt even you will want to join what the EU has become in 15 years. These things aren’t static.
He's not that naïve, he doesn't really believe that, he was just trying to get a rise out of me I think.
Are Suella’s sour grapes really going to do much damage? They could be a net positive if they reinforce in moderate Tories’ minds that the party has changed direction
The issue is how receptive the soft Tory voter is to a 'We're more moderate again' message. It might work on paper but those voters might be set against the party now. Whereas the red meat approach might drive still more of them away, but find a greater number receptive.
Starmer's got a fairly open goal this PMQs. Trouble is that means the pressure will be on.
Suella's letter helps because I think there's thinner gruel available on Cameron - more of a slow burner, let the newspapers reopen Greensill Capital rather than Labour forcing the point. On Cameron I think Starmer's best bet is probably to make the point that Sunak didn't think anyone within the current parliamentary party was good enough. But I think he'll use all his questions on Braverman.
Sunak's responses are already clear: he'll talk about "actions not words" as his spokesperson did this afternoon. Starmer's comeback will presumably involve a list of Tory failures on "actions" across various policy areas. and so on.
Although that might in turn depend on what happens in America this week. U.S. Manages Expectations of a Breakthrough Before Biden and Xi Meet President Biden and President Xi Jinping of China will try to defuse a year of bubbling tensions on Wednesday at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/us/politics/biden-xi-china-apec.html (£££)
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Ok but ideal world direction of travel, I mean. Also even if not enforceable it's good if you can put friction in the way of elected politicians wanting to do grim things that violate fundamental human rights like outright bans on abortion.
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
Lots of well intentioned nonsense here in your example. Abortion both now and historically is not an uncontested issue with a single obviously correct view - like say the use of bubonic plague in war, or torturing randomly chosen children for public entertainment.
It is therefore and excellent example of something which should be under democratic and accountable control in a democracy, exactly as it is in the UK. The USA was wrong to allow it through the courts, and would be just as wrong to ban it through the courts.
Full disclosure: I follow Bill Clinton on this one (if little else): abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
Disagree. An outright ban reduces women to chattels and is unambiguously and factually an outrage. No election can change this.
Personally I agree that a literal outright ban is just plain wrong, and generally even the most conservative permit it when the mother's like is in danger.
But this is all contested territory, and given that all women have the vote, this is a matter for voters and legislators, as it is in this country.
Incidentally it can be perfectly properly argued that completely unfettered abortion reduces the unborn to a mere object or, in your word 'chattel'.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Ok but ideal world direction of travel, I mean. Also even if not enforceable it's good if you can put friction in the way of elected politicians wanting to do grim things that violate fundamental human rights like outright bans on abortion.
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
Lots of well intentioned nonsense here in your example. Abortion both now and historically is not an uncontested issue with a single obviously correct view - like say the use of bubonic plague in war, or torturing randomly chosen children for public entertainment.
It is therefore and excellent example of something which should be under democratic and accountable control in a democracy, exactly as it is in the UK. The USA was wrong to allow it through the courts, and would be just as wrong to ban it through the courts.
Full disclosure: I follow Bill Clinton on this one (if little else): abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
Disagree. An outright ban reduces women to chattels and is unambiguously and factually an outrage. No election can change this.
Personally I agree that a literal outright ban is just plain wrong, and generally even the most conservative permit it when the mother's like is in danger.
But this is all contested territory, and given that all women have the vote, this is a matter for voters and legislators, as it is in this country.
Incidentally it can be perfectly properly argued that completely unfettered abortion reduces the unborn to a mere object or, in your word 'chattel'.
The unborn are neither objects nor people. They're nothing, they're a mass of cells within an actual person's body.
The letter is so deranged I think it's probably neutral at worst for Sunak. The petulant childishness of it does rather justify him sacking her. Hard to imagine Cameron writing a letter like that.
Yawn. People who don’t like Suella also don't like her letter in non-shock. The fact everyone is feeling the need to tell us how insignificant it is is somewhat telling.
It makes me appreciate Suella more that she tried to hold the pathetic invertebrate to a set of firm proposals - it wasn't just political ambition; she wanted to do stuff. The biggest criticism of Suella from the right was that she talked a big game but achieved little - this background tells us that wasn't her fault, it was the dismal decline manager, at the root of every pathetic disappointment doled out by his joke of a Government.
Last word to Su:
"In October of last year you were given an opportunity to lead our country. It is a privilege to serve and one we should not take for granted. Service requires bravery and thinking of the common good. It is not about occupying the office as an end in itself.
Someone needs to be honest: your plan is not working, we have endured record election defeats, your resets have failed and we are running out of time. You need to change course urgently."
*The only remaining change of course being that which leads out of Downing Street to see if Elon Musk will give him a job.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Nah. I think the new top team- Sunak, Dowden, Cameron, Cleverley - will be pretty united and will happily face down the mutineers. There will be a battle after the election and I rather suspect Cleverley is being lined up by the party establishment with Badenoch as as the approved alternative. Braverman, or whoever the rightwing factionalists line up, will likely get squeezed out.
Braverman has rotten ratings with the public - she's no Boris - a paper tiger.
You might be right on Braverman. I’m not a fan of hers - but this letter shows she’s smart and eloquent enough to really fuck with Sunak
So she may not become PM but she can advance her cause against the left
It’s another sign of Sunak’s mistake unravelling within 24 hours of him committing jt. As some of us predicted
I think it shows that she's convinced the election is already lost, and therefore cares more about her positioning post election
She's not wrong there, is she?
If Sunak's reshuffle plan was to abandon the red wall and try to defend the blue, he may be thinking the same.
One thing this letter does convince me of: she really means this stuff. She’s not being performatively cross, she really is cross. That was a poison pen letter, not a cynically pitched bid for leadership.
This isn’t some careerist who’s landed on an ideology because it suits her ambitions (I’m looking at you Truss) or a professional bullshitter who’ll adopt whatever ideology the audience is most likely to lap up (Boris), or giant ego whose first objective is to get attention (Farage) or indeed just a nihilist who thinks everyone else is stupid and they alone have the genius to change things for the better (Dom).
No, this is one of those politicians who really really believes what she’s saying. Lives and breathes it. That puts her in company with characters like Steve Baker, or Jeremy Corbyn, but precious few other recent Tory or Labour front benchers.
Does that make her more dangerous for her foes than the likes of Johnson or Farage, or less?
I'm sure you're right in that she believes what she says. So did Truss. I think both are overly influenced by Thatcher's legacy.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
It's written with all the brilliance I would expect from a Cambridge educated lawyer.
It is blistering.
The letter is no better than anyone who can write a bit and takes their time with it could manage. Its impact comes from her dropping the usual bland courtesies of the genre.
What worries me is this 'silent majority' she refers to. Is she right on that? Are 6 in 10 people in this country almost bursting with repressed xenophobia? Is that why tempers out there are so short sometimes?
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
You think that’s well written? You surprise me.
The key passage is this one:
“For a year, as Home Secretary I have sent numerous letters to you on the key subjects contained in our agreement, made requests to discuss them with you and your team, and put forward proposals on how we might deliver these goals. I worked up the legal advice, policy detail and action to take on these issues. This was often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest”.
Weak. I am not Home Secretary and would not tolerate that in my job, if it was how I was treated. She is basically saying the Government is dreadful but she was willing to put up with it for £150k a year. Saying that undermines all of the rest and exposes the whole thing as a political game which she doesn’t really care about.
It’s not exactly resigning over a principle is it?
It's a hard thing to write a resignation or sacking letter, or an equivalent like this one. Several of the resignation letters to Boris, including Rishi's, were risible, full of self praise and sometimes more praise for him than indication they felt he needed to go, so just came across as confused.
And if you are sacked and you reveal a litany of reasons why the sacker is a shit and you're actually glad about this, well, you have to answer why you didn't quit, when presumably it would have made a bigger splash and been justified.
It's not impossible - team player, giving the leader a chance, tried to do as much good as I could etc - but it is just another element to address.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
It's written with all the brilliance I would expect from a Cambridge educated lawyer.
It is blistering.
The letter is no better than anyone who can write a bit and takes their time with it could manage. Its impact comes from her dropping the usual bland courtesies of the genre.
What worries me is this 'silent majority' she refers to. Is she right on that? Are 6 in 10 people in this country almost bursting with repressed xenophobia? Is that why tempers out there are so short sometimes?
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Nah. I think the new top team- Sunak, Dowden, Cameron, Cleverley - will be pretty united and will happily face down the mutineers. There will be a battle after the election and I rather suspect Cleverley is being lined up by the party establishment with Badenoch as as the approved alternative. Braverman, or whoever the rightwing factionalists line up, will likely get squeezed out.
Braverman has rotten ratings with the public - she's no Boris - a paper tiger.
It is faintly disgusting that you're so delighted by the concept of an 'approved alternative'. Some people really don't deserve to live in a democracy.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Ok but ideal world direction of travel, I mean. Also even if not enforceable it's good if you can put friction in the way of elected politicians wanting to do grim things that violate fundamental human rights like outright bans on abortion.
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
Lots of well intentioned nonsense here in your example. Abortion both now and historically is not an uncontested issue with a single obviously correct view - like say the use of bubonic plague in war, or torturing randomly chosen children for public entertainment.
It is therefore and excellent example of something which should be under democratic and accountable control in a democracy, exactly as it is in the UK. The USA was wrong to allow it through the courts, and would be just as wrong to ban it through the courts.
Full disclosure: I follow Bill Clinton on this one (if little else): abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
Disagree. An outright ban reduces women to chattels and is unambiguously and factually an outrage. No election can change this.
And the Clinton formulation is just a bit of clever sounding sophistry which means little in terms of actual policy.
This could go on a long time, but just to point out that in the world of responsible and accountable educated adults, and accessible contraception there is actually no very good reason why abortion should not be quite rare. Not all policies are legislated ones.
I’m guessing that if Suella becomes Tory leader she’s going to be rigorous on following agreements with backers to the T and will abandon the concept of collective responsibility.
She’s fucked if she becomes leader as she cannot complain about any of her MPs’ behaviour. She would have been best to keep very quiet and play the long game.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Ok but ideal world direction of travel, I mean. Also even if not enforceable it's good if you can put friction in the way of elected politicians wanting to do grim things that violate fundamental human rights like outright bans on abortion.
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
Lots of well intentioned nonsense here in your example. Abortion both now and historically is not an uncontested issue with a single obviously correct view - like say the use of bubonic plague in war, or torturing randomly chosen children for public entertainment.
It is therefore and excellent example of something which should be under democratic and accountable control in a democracy, exactly as it is in the UK. The USA was wrong to allow it through the courts, and would be just as wrong to ban it through the courts.
Full disclosure: I follow Bill Clinton on this one (if little else): abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
Disagree. An outright ban reduces women to chattels and is unambiguously and factually an outrage. No election can change this.
And the Clinton formulation is just a bit of clever sounding sophistry which means little in terms of actual policy.
This could go on a long time, but just to point out that in the world of responsible and accountable educated adults, and accessible contraception there is actually no very good reason why abortion should not be quite rare. Not all policies are legislated ones.
Its also worth pointing out that across America a convenient access to contraception is not available.
Its also worth pointing out that contraception fails.
Its also worth point out that people are human and don't make perfect choices, especially if eg inebriated.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
It's written with all the brilliance I would expect from a Cambridge educated lawyer.
It is blistering.
She’s a lawyer - and this is pounding the table. You know what that means.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Ok but ideal world direction of travel, I mean. Also even if not enforceable it's good if you can put friction in the way of elected politicians wanting to do grim things that violate fundamental human rights like outright bans on abortion.
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
Lots of well intentioned nonsense here in your example. Abortion both now and historically is not an uncontested issue with a single obviously correct view - like say the use of bubonic plague in war, or torturing randomly chosen children for public entertainment.
It is therefore and excellent example of something which should be under democratic and accountable control in a democracy, exactly as it is in the UK. The USA was wrong to allow it through the courts, and would be just as wrong to ban it through the courts.
Full disclosure: I follow Bill Clinton on this one (if little else): abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
Disagree. An outright ban reduces women to chattels and is unambiguously and factually an outrage. No election can change this.
An outright ban existed in part of the UK for most of your lifetime.
'....As you know, I accepted your offer to serve as home secretary in October 2022 on certain conditions.
Despite you having been rejected by a majority of party members during the summer leadership contest and thus having no personal mandate to be prime minister, I agreed to support you because of the firm assurances you gave me on key policy priorities...It is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest and thus enabling you to become prime minister.
For a year, as home secretary I have sent numerous letters to you on the key subjects contained in our agreement, made requests to discuss them with you and your team, and put forward proposals on how we might deliver these goals.
I worked up the legal advice, policy detail and action to take on these issues. This was often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest.
You have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver on every single one of these key policies. Either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so. Or, as I must surely conclude now, you never had any intention of keeping your promises...These are not just pet interests of mine. They are what we promised the British people in our 2019 manifesto which led to a landslide victory. They are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit Referendum.
Our deal was no mere promise over dinner, to be discarded when convenient and denied when challenged...In October of last year you were given an opportunity to lead our country. It is a privilege to serve and one we should not take for granted. Service requires bravery and thinking of the common good.
It is not about occupying the office as an end in itself.
Someone needs to be honest: your plan is not working, we have endured record election defeats, your resets have failed and we are running out of time. You need to change course urgently.
I may not have always found the right words, but I have always striven to give voice to the quiet majority that supported us in 2019. I have endeavoured to be honest and true to the people who put us in these privileged positions.
I will, of course, continue to support the government in pursuit of policies which align with an authentic conservative agenda.'
Now then young Rev'd HY. Will you be supporting: a) the indignantly righteous Mrs Braverman and her band of right wing culture warriors b) the rejected unelected Prime Minister who I expect will very quickly find his authority and his support sweeping away from him c) Whoever wins, and whats more you have *always* supported whoever wins
I support Sunak staying until the next general election as PM, let the voters decide if he stays beyond that, if not then he can resign and a new Tory leader be elected in Opposition
One area I suspect the Braverman clique are right is that a steady as she goes approach is not working. If things were going better after a year Sunak would probably already be trying more radical things, in fact I assumed that was the plan - a sort of Truss 2.0 approach, once the rot had been stopped.
So while she personally might not be the best alternative (at least to me), the general thrust of a need to go big to have a shot, and that there's more fertile ground for votes on the right than the centre for them right now, seems reasonably sound, at least as far as minimising defeat.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Ok but ideal world direction of travel, I mean. Also even if not enforceable it's good if you can put friction in the way of elected politicians wanting to do grim things that violate fundamental human rights like outright bans on abortion.
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
Lots of well intentioned nonsense here in your example. Abortion both now and historically is not an uncontested issue with a single obviously correct view - like say the use of bubonic plague in war, or torturing randomly chosen children for public entertainment.
It is therefore and excellent example of something which should be under democratic and accountable control in a democracy, exactly as it is in the UK. The USA was wrong to allow it through the courts, and would be just as wrong to ban it through the courts.
Full disclosure: I follow Bill Clinton on this one (if little else): abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
Disagree. An outright ban reduces women to chattels and is unambiguously and factually an outrage. No election can change this.
And the Clinton formulation is just a bit of clever sounding sophistry which means little in terms of actual policy.
This could go on a long time, but just to point out that in the world of responsible and accountable educated adults, and accessible contraception there is actually no very good reason why abortion should not be quite rare. Not all policies are legislated ones.
Its also worth pointing out that across America a convenient access to contraception is not available.
Its also worth pointing out that contraception fails.
Its also worth point out that people are human and don't make perfect choices, especially if eg inebriated.
All good points, as good as mine, and they don't of course undermine my principle. I am not planning to opine on the USA thanks.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Nah. I think the new top team- Sunak, Dowden, Cameron, Cleverley - will be pretty united and will happily face down the mutineers. There will be a battle after the election and I rather suspect Cleverley is being lined up by the party establishment with Badenoch as as the approved alternative. Braverman, or whoever the rightwing factionalists line up, will likely get squeezed out.
Braverman has rotten ratings with the public - she's no Boris - a paper tiger.
It is faintly disgusting that you're so delighted by the concept of an 'approved alternative'. Some people really don't deserve to live in a democracy.
The Conservative party is hardly a democracy. And its leadership election rules enable pretty well what Burgessian described.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
It's written with all the brilliance I would expect from a Cambridge educated lawyer.
It is blistering.
The letter is no better than anyone who can write a bit and takes their time with it could manage. Its impact comes from her dropping the usual bland courtesies of the genre.
What worries me is this 'silent majority' she refers to. Is she right on that? Are 6 in 10 people in this country almost bursting with repressed xenophobia? Is that why tempers out there are so short sometimes?
I can't believe that she has much support except maybe among Conservative Party members. She still supports Brexit and supported Truss for PM, both rather unpopular now in the country.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Ok but ideal world direction of travel, I mean. Also even if not enforceable it's good if you can put friction in the way of elected politicians wanting to do grim things that violate fundamental human rights like outright bans on abortion.
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
Lots of well intentioned nonsense here in your example. Abortion both now and historically is not an uncontested issue with a single obviously correct view - like say the use of bubonic plague in war, or torturing randomly chosen children for public entertainment.
It is therefore and excellent example of something which should be under democratic and accountable control in a democracy, exactly as it is in the UK. The USA was wrong to allow it through the courts, and would be just as wrong to ban it through the courts.
Full disclosure: I follow Bill Clinton on this one (if little else): abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
Disagree. An outright ban reduces women to chattels and is unambiguously and factually an outrage. No election can change this.
And the Clinton formulation is just a bit of clever sounding sophistry which means little in terms of actual policy.
I think that's unfair. It implies pretty obviously that abortion should be safe and legal, and by rare the implication is also pretty obvious that contraception should be made result obtainable so that women who don't want to become pregnant don't do so, and abortion is a rare backup.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
A couple of those epithets - “bombshell” and “damning” - are anything but universal. Vitriolic but naive would be my take.
FWIW - I do expect a vote of confidence in Sunak soon but that the rebels will struggle to muster a maximum of 80 votes.
Then the Tories are fools, staying on board the Titanic even after the iceberg was struck and with an available lifeboat.
Not because of Braverman, the government is well shot of her, but they'd be well shot of Sunak too. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
If the ERG have the numbers to remove Sunak now then Braverman would be the likely favourite to replace him as PM
Bullshit.
Braverman would not make the top 2 in the MP choice. She'd barely have the numbers to be nominated.
Quite right too.
Judging by TwiX she’s rallied the right to her cause. Question is - how big is that faction in the PCP?
Whatever happens, she has made herself a significant voice in Toryism. When Sunak goes - as he will - she will be extremely hard to ignore. And her large majority means she is highly likely to survive a bad defeat
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Ok but ideal world direction of travel, I mean. Also even if not enforceable it's good if you can put friction in the way of elected politicians wanting to do grim things that violate fundamental human rights like outright bans on abortion.
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
Lots of well intentioned nonsense here in your example. Abortion both now and historically is not an uncontested issue with a single obviously correct view - like say the use of bubonic plague in war, or torturing randomly chosen children for public entertainment.
It is therefore and excellent example of something which should be under democratic and accountable control in a democracy, exactly as it is in the UK. The USA was wrong to allow it through the courts, and would be just as wrong to ban it through the courts.
Full disclosure: I follow Bill Clinton on this one (if little else): abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
Disagree. An outright ban reduces women to chattels and is unambiguously and factually an outrage. No election can change this.
An outright ban existed in part of the UK for most of your lifetime.
And women were second class citizens for most of his lifetime too.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Ok but ideal world direction of travel, I mean. Also even if not enforceable it's good if you can put friction in the way of elected politicians wanting to do grim things that violate fundamental human rights like outright bans on abortion.
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
Lots of well intentioned nonsense here in your example. Abortion both now and historically is not an uncontested issue with a single obviously correct view - like say the use of bubonic plague in war, or torturing randomly chosen children for public entertainment.
It is therefore and excellent example of something which should be under democratic and accountable control in a democracy, exactly as it is in the UK. The USA was wrong to allow it through the courts, and would be just as wrong to ban it through the courts.
Full disclosure: I follow Bill Clinton on this one (if little else): abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
Disagree. An outright ban reduces women to chattels and is unambiguously and factually an outrage. No election can change this.
And the Clinton formulation is just a bit of clever sounding sophistry which means little in terms of actual policy.
This could go on a long time, but just to point out that in the world of responsible and accountable educated adults, and accessible contraception there is actually no very good reason why abortion should not be quite rare. Not all policies are legislated ones.
No, it’s the same as saying I believe in motherhood and apple pie. It’s just political pabulum.
‘The world of responsible and educated adults ‘ sounds great, too - but it’s not political reality.
Since he got the FO job, he’s proved cannier that he ever showed previously.
After all the brouhaha within the Tory party - pirouetting narcissists et al - there may be a market in the Tory Party for a solid, sensible, tough, loyal, experienced old-style politician as leader. Cleverley, if he makes a reasonable job of the Home Office, will prove difficult to beat in any future leadership contest.
On topic, I'm not sure how I feel about politicians using props - especially LDs after local elections - but the argentine chap at least goes bold with it. I feel like other options are better for slashing bureaucracy.
FWIW - I do expect a vote of confidence in Sunak soon but that the rebels will struggle to muster a maximum of 80 votes.
Then the Tories are fools, staying on board the Titanic even after the iceberg was struck and with an available lifeboat.
Not because of Braverman, the government is well shot of her, but they'd be well shot of Sunak too. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
If the ERG have the numbers to remove Sunak now then Braverman would be the likely favourite to replace him as PM
Bullshit.
Braverman would not make the top 2 in the MP choice. She'd barely have the numbers to be nominated.
Quite right too.
Judging by TwiX she’s rallied the right to her cause. Question is - how big is that faction in the PCP?
Whatever happens, she has made herself a significant voice in Toryism. When Sunak goes - as he will - she will be extremely hard to ignore. And her large majority means she is highly likely to survive a bad defeat
FWIW - I do expect a vote of confidence in Sunak soon but that the rebels will struggle to muster a maximum of 80 votes.
Then the Tories are fools, staying on board the Titanic even after the iceberg was struck and with an available lifeboat.
Not because of Braverman, the government is well shot of her, but they'd be well shot of Sunak too. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
If the ERG have the numbers to remove Sunak now then Braverman would be the likely favourite to replace him as PM
Bullshit.
Braverman would not make the top 2 in the MP choice. She'd barely have the numbers to be nominated.
Quite right too.
Judging by TwiX she’s rallied the right to her cause. Question is - how big is that faction in the PCP?
Whatever happens, she has made herself a significant voice in Toryism. When Sunak goes - as he will - she will be extremely hard to ignore. And her large majority means she is highly likely to survive a bad defeat
The next leader will have to placate her
Go on then, sing the Braverman song. Or write the Braverman poetry.
FWIW - I do expect a vote of confidence in Sunak soon but that the rebels will struggle to muster a maximum of 80 votes.
Then the Tories are fools, staying on board the Titanic even after the iceberg was struck and with an available lifeboat.
Not because of Braverman, the government is well shot of her, but they'd be well shot of Sunak too. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
If the ERG have the numbers to remove Sunak now then Braverman would be the likely favourite to replace him as PM
Bullshit.
Braverman would not make the top 2 in the MP choice. She'd barely have the numbers to be nominated.
Quite right too.
Judging by TwiX she’s rallied the right to her cause. Question is - how big is that faction in the PCP?
Whatever happens, she has made herself a significant voice in Toryism. When Sunak goes - as he will - she will be extremely hard to ignore. And her large majority means she is highly likely to survive a bad defeat
The next leader will have to placate her
100+ MPs wanted Boris to return a year ago, Sunak had the most support but still plenty of opponents.
I think she has an excellent chance of being the next leader, we can be pretty confident the next leader will be someone who puts the boot into the last one and that they needed to be firmer, party members will eat that up, and she has a head start on the other candidates.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Nah. I think the new top team- Sunak, Dowden, Cameron, Cleverley - will be pretty united and will happily face down the mutineers. There will be a battle after the election and I rather suspect Cleverley is being lined up by the party establishment with Badenoch as as the approved alternative. Braverman, or whoever the rightwing factionalists line up, will likely get squeezed out.
Braverman has rotten ratings with the public - she's no Boris - a paper tiger.
It is faintly disgusting that you're so delighted by the concept of an 'approved alternative'. Some people really don't deserve to live in a democracy.
The Conservative party is hardly a democracy. And its leadership election rules enable pretty well what Burgessian described.
Nor do most of us live in it.
Apart from that, great post.
For the hard of thinking, my post suggests that those who approve of an attempt by an unspecified authority to game a supposedly fair election in a political scenario, do not deserve to live in a democracy like the UK. Why on earth would I be suggesting that people live in the Conservative Party?
Since he got the FO job, he’s proved cannier that he ever showed previously.
After all the brouhaha within the Tory party - pirouetting narcissists et al - there may be a market in the Tory Party for a solid, sensible, tough, loyal, experienced old-style politician as leader. Cleverley, if he makes a reasonable job of the Home Office, will prove difficult to beat in any future leadership contest.
He is a bit lightweight but will be a contender as will Barclay, I would make one of those 2 the favourite with Tory MPs certainly when Sunak goes but if Braverman or Badenoch got to the membership then they would also have a chance
FWIW - I do expect a vote of confidence in Sunak soon but that the rebels will struggle to muster a maximum of 80 votes.
Then the Tories are fools, staying on board the Titanic even after the iceberg was struck and with an available lifeboat.
Not because of Braverman, the government is well shot of her, but they'd be well shot of Sunak too. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
If the ERG have the numbers to remove Sunak now then Braverman would be the likely favourite to replace him as PM
Bullshit.
Braverman would not make the top 2 in the MP choice. She'd barely have the numbers to be nominated.
Quite right too.
Judging by TwiX she’s rallied the right to her cause. Question is - how big is that faction in the PCP?
Whatever happens, she has made herself a significant voice in Toryism. When Sunak goes - as he will - she will be extremely hard to ignore. And her large majority means she is highly likely to survive a bad defeat
The next leader will have to placate her
Being out of office but in the limelight will also give her the opportunity to build up her profile with some more informal TV interviews.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
It's written with all the brilliance I would expect from a Cambridge educated lawyer.
It is blistering.
She’s a lawyer - and this is pounding the table. You know what that means.
Someone will have a very large bill to pay?
“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell”
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Ok but ideal world direction of travel, I mean. Also even if not enforceable it's good if you can put friction in the way of elected politicians wanting to do grim things that violate fundamental human rights like outright bans on abortion.
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
Lots of well intentioned nonsense here in your example. Abortion both now and historically is not an uncontested issue with a single obviously correct view - like say the use of bubonic plague in war, or torturing randomly chosen children for public entertainment.
It is therefore and excellent example of something which should be under democratic and accountable control in a democracy, exactly as it is in the UK. The USA was wrong to allow it through the courts, and would be just as wrong to ban it through the courts.
Full disclosure: I follow Bill Clinton on this one (if little else): abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
Disagree. An outright ban reduces women to chattels and is unambiguously and factually an outrage. No election can change this.
And the Clinton formulation is just a bit of clever sounding sophistry which means little in terms of actual policy.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
It's written with all the brilliance I would expect from a Cambridge educated lawyer.
It is blistering.
The letter is no better than anyone who can write a bit and takes their time with it could manage. Its impact comes from her dropping the usual bland courtesies of the genre.
What worries me is this 'silent majority' she refers to. Is she right on that? Are 6 in 10 people in this country almost bursting with repressed xenophobia? Is that why tempers out there are so short sometimes?
I can't believe that she has much support except maybe among Conservative Party members. She still supports Brexit and supported Truss for PM, both rather unpopular now in the country.
Are you actually claiming her letter is incoherent?
Unfortunately for Sunak it is notably coherent. Articulate, sharp, well written, scathing - and deeply hostile and destructive
I's a terrible letter. If you're going to write a letter make it good, and this is far from that.
Well you seem to be in a small minority
Everyone else is saying “bombshell”, “scathing”, “vitriolic”, “explosive”, “damning”, “excoriating” - and given that Braverman clearly wanted it to be all those things it looks she hit the target. Bullseye, even
It's written with all the brilliance I would expect from a Cambridge educated lawyer.
It is blistering.
The letter is no better than anyone who can write a bit and takes their time with it could manage. Its impact comes from her dropping the usual bland courtesies of the genre.
What worries me is this 'silent majority' she refers to. Is she right on that? Are 6 in 10 people in this country almost bursting with repressed xenophobia? Is that why tempers out there are so short sometimes?
I can't believe that she has much support except maybe among Conservative Party members. She still supports Brexit and supported Truss for PM, both rather unpopular now in the country.
The latter is, afaik, still far more popular than the Tory Party, despite massive campaigns to delay, disregard and discredit it.
FWIW - I do expect a vote of confidence in Sunak soon but that the rebels will struggle to muster a maximum of 80 votes.
Then the Tories are fools, staying on board the Titanic even after the iceberg was struck and with an available lifeboat.
Not because of Braverman, the government is well shot of her, but they'd be well shot of Sunak too. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
If the ERG have the numbers to remove Sunak now then Braverman would be the likely favourite to replace him as PM
Bullshit.
Braverman would not make the top 2 in the MP choice. She'd barely have the numbers to be nominated.
Quite right too.
Judging by TwiX she’s rallied the right to her cause. Question is - how big is that faction in the PCP?
Whatever happens, she has made herself a significant voice in Toryism. When Sunak goes - as he will - she will be extremely hard to ignore. And her large majority means she is highly likely to survive a bad defeat
The next leader will have to placate her
Being out of office but in the limelight will also give her the opportunity to build up her profile with some more informal TV interviews.
Kind of surprised she does not already have a show up on GB News to be honest. Surely they need to cater to a full range of Tory MP hosts, from loyalists, to radical revolutionaries pretending to be conservative like Rees-Mogg, to populist champions, to liberal wets, to hang 'em and flog 'em advocates.
This letter is just too long. In this type of contemporary discourse, you need to put your point across in a single paragraph, or a few lines. A one sider with decent margins and spacing, max. This letter just goes off in to the long grass, droning on about what was promised a year ago, being honest about plan B. Something about the supreme court. A leadership election a year ago. All stuff of no general interest.
IE she could have just said - there is - no way of stopping the boats, - no interest in culture war issues - no commitment to sorting out the ECHR - no interest despite promises = so what's the point?
According to Ipsos only 17% of voters disagree with Sunak sacking her .
And after her tirade I expect that to drop .
The Braverman letter isn’t aimed at the average voter. It’s aimed at a particular audience - Tory MPs, members, activists, and Tory inclined pundits and writers - who will then take the message to the voters - or not
As it happens I have my doubts she will make the leadership. But - as I say - whoever does will surely need her on board, after this. She’s now one of the more significant figures in the party - for good or ill
Moreover: as @TimS rightly notes, it’s clear she really means all this stuff, she’s a conviction politician. Tories will warm to that after so much tepid careerism
The best bit in Braverman's letter is where she says she was prepared to accept Sunak despite him having no public mandate as long as he agreed to her secret deal the public didn't even know about.
Comments
That's why it was devastating - it also allowed Hesletine to launch his challenge.
Will Braverman's resignation letter incite a challenge to Sunak? If so, from whom? If not, it will all come with the stench of sour grapes.
But be that as it may, is it remotely credible, in the mature democracy where the general public don't believe anything politicians say in any circumstances, that Braverman really thought that a politician's promises would necessarily be kept in her own special case? This is delusional.
The rules have changed.
You don't have 'challenges' any more.
You have votes of confidence.
FTFY
As luck would have it I have been able to do this.
Fuck off Suella. And the horse you rode in on.
Whiny dipshit of a sore loser.
Vitriolic but naive would be my take.
For two, the mandate point is a load of old bollocks, as it nearly always is, yet people act like it is some killer point every time. We all know parties are not bound to manifestos, for sound reasons as circumstances will sometimes justify a change, and I've gone through in the past just how common it is for PMs not to go to the country within a year of taking office.
So I'm down with calling him useless, and for saying appointing Cameron was a mistake, and that ostracising the Braverman wing will not help and is also a mistake, but the 'unelected' PM line never works for me whichever side or party tries it on, since it is self evidently done only when convenient to the speaker, and the MPs who use it are insincere.
Truss was promising a new direction and was Braverman going to say she was unelected and arguing the manifesto of 2019 should override it? Of course not, that'd be stupid. Sunak's choices are bad, or not, on their own merits.
Lastly, she cannot seriously claim to have a problem with usurping PMs and its dignified to challenge them when she backed Rishi as a usurper. She can argue he has not kept his promises, sure, she might well be right for all we know. But 'The usurper was ok when he was doing what I wanted' is not a principled argument against usurpers.
She is definitely delusional.
You can question whether she should have done it. You can say it will damage her own career - assassins rarely become kings
But as a brutal kicking? It’s brilliant
But I think your politics tutor ought to ask you what you mean precisely by PR.
If you mean PR over the country as a whole, then they would probably remain in the same party.
But if you mean STV, then you are absolutely right, because then the electors would be able to decide just what variety of Conservative they wanted. It gives power back to people, you see, which is why Starmer and Sunk are opposed to it.
You know what that means.
But it is one of those situations where the tone is so bitter and angry that despite explanations like giving him a decent change it makes it seem weird she lasted this long without calling him out and instead waiting to get sacked. Like when Carswell defected to UKIP with a litany of longstanding complaints about the Tories, which made it sound like he should have quit years before.
They are naiive if they fall for that one. I'm sure all politicians go in intending not to do that, but it's often an easy out.
She’s fucked if she becomes leader as she cannot complain about any of her MPs’ behaviour. She would have been best to keep very quiet and play the long game.
She will be Suella Who? in a short time.
So Sunak will probably limp on, badly damaged by the Braverman clusterbomb and now saddled with his Cameron error. Its not exactly optimal for the Tories
Also, wasn’t one of the reasons Sunak appointed David Duke of Brexit to overshadow the Braverman sacking?
How’s that working out? Hahahahahaha
The key passage is this one:
“For a year, as Home Secretary I have sent numerous letters to you on the key subjects contained in our agreement, made requests to discuss them with you and your team, and put forward proposals on how we might deliver these goals. I worked up the legal advice, policy detail and action to take on these issues. This was often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest”.
Weak. I am not Home Secretary and would not tolerate that in my job, if it was how I was treated. She is basically saying the Government is dreadful but she was willing to put up with it for £150k a year. Saying that undermines all of the rest and exposes the whole thing as a political game which she doesn’t really care about.
It’s not exactly resigning over a principle is it?
Conservatives value loyalty above everything else - or so @HYUFD tells us - blind, unquestioning loyalty to the leader under all circumstances or until they resign (Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss) after which loyalty is seamlessly transferred to the new leader.
Braverman has shown disloyalty - that won't be forgotten.
Not because of Braverman, the government is well shot of her, but they'd be well shot of Sunak too. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
And while she's as mad as he is she's also obviously quite a bit brighter.
Not that I think she will become leader.
This isn’t some careerist who’s landed on an ideology because it suits her ambitions (I’m looking at you Truss) or a professional bullshitter who’ll adopt whatever ideology the audience is most likely to lap up (Boris), or giant ego whose first objective is to get attention (Farage) or indeed just a nihilist who thinks everyone else is stupid and they alone have the genius to change things for the better (Dom).
No, this is one of those politicians who really really believes what she’s saying. Lives and breathes it. That puts her in company with characters like Steve Baker, or Jeremy Corbyn, but precious few other recent Tory or Labour front benchers.
Does that make her more dangerous for her foes than the likes of Johnson or Farage, or less?
I enjoyed the latter more, and must commiserate with Alan on having his excellent piece hijacked.
Sunak has his supporters, so does Braverman. Probably more than anyone else.
David Cameron is “a poster boy for elite capture by Beijing”
Bob Pickard, a whistleblower from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, says the new Foreign Secretary is a mark of British decline.
https://www.newstatesman.com/business/2023/11/david-cameron-foreign-secretary-poster-boy-elite-capture-beijing (£££)
Although that might in turn depend on what happens in America this week.
U.S. Manages Expectations of a Breakthrough Before Biden and Xi Meet
President Biden and President Xi Jinping of China will try to defuse a year of bubbling tensions on Wednesday at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/us/politics/biden-xi-china-apec.html (£££)
I also think most will cling to nurse for fear of worse.
But this is all contested territory, and given that all women have the vote, this is a matter for voters and legislators, as it is in this country.
Incidentally it can be perfectly properly argued that completely unfettered abortion reduces the unborn to a mere object or, in your word 'chattel'.
Once a person is born, their life begins.
It makes me appreciate Suella more that she tried to hold the pathetic invertebrate to a set of firm proposals - it wasn't just political ambition; she wanted to do stuff. The biggest criticism of Suella from the right was that she talked a big game but achieved little - this background tells us that wasn't her fault, it was the dismal decline manager, at the root of every pathetic disappointment doled out by his joke of a Government.
Last word to Su:
"In October of last year you were given an opportunity to lead our country. It is a privilege to serve and one we should not take for granted. Service requires bravery and thinking of the common good. It is not about occupying the office as an end in itself.
Someone needs to be honest: your plan is not working, we have endured record election defeats, your resets have failed and we are running out of time. You need to change course urgently."
*The only remaining change of course being that which leads out of Downing Street to see if Elon Musk will give him a job.
If Sunak's reshuffle plan was to abandon the red wall and try to defend the blue, he may be thinking the same.
What worries me is this 'silent majority' she refers to. Is she right on that? Are 6 in 10 people in this country almost bursting with repressed xenophobia? Is that why tempers out there are so short sometimes?
And if you are sacked and you reveal a litany of reasons why the sacker is a shit and you're actually glad about this, well, you have to answer why you didn't quit, when presumably it would have made a bigger splash and been justified.
It's not impossible - team player, giving the leader a chance, tried to do as much good as I could etc - but it is just another element to address.
Its also worth pointing out that contraception fails.
Its also worth point out that people are human and don't make perfect choices, especially if eg inebriated.
Braverman would not make the top 2 in the MP choice. She'd barely have the numbers to be nominated.
Quite right too.
I mean. FFS
Yes Cleverly fits the bill. So do others.
So while she personally might not be the best alternative (at least to me), the general thrust of a need to go big to have a shot, and that there's more fertile ground for votes on the right than the centre for them right now, seems reasonably sound, at least as far as minimising defeat.
She didn't have the numbers when Boris was removed and s he won't today either.
And its leadership election rules enable pretty well what Burgessian described.
Nor do most of us live in it.
Apart from that, great post.
I see I am in good company, and TSE's.
Whatever happens, she has made herself a significant voice in Toryism. When Sunak goes - as he will - she will be extremely hard to ignore. And her large majority means she is highly likely to survive a bad defeat
The next leader will have to placate her
It’s just political pabulum.
‘The world of responsible and educated adults ‘ sounds great, too - but it’s not political reality.
I feel like other options are better for slashing bureaucracy.
You hear the crunch and you actually wince. You want to look away. But it is also compelling viewing
There also might yet be a reply this evening so she doesn’t have the papers to herself.
I think she has an excellent chance of being the next leader, we can be pretty confident the next leader will be someone who puts the boot into the last one and that they needed to be firmer, party members will eat that up, and she has a head start on the other candidates.
And after her tirade I expect that to drop .
IE she could have just said - there is
- no way of stopping the boats,
- no interest in culture war issues
- no commitment to sorting out the ECHR
- no interest despite promises
= so what's the point?
As it happens I have my doubts she will make the leadership. But - as I say - whoever does will surely need her on board, after this. She’s now one of the more significant figures in the party - for good or ill
Moreover: as @TimS rightly notes, it’s clear she really means all this stuff, she’s a conviction politician. Tories will warm to that after so much tepid careerism
https://x.com/samfr/status/1724472099790573950
Fenn Poly lawyers- what do you expect?