Suella Braverman enjoys attacking lawyers – but even home secretaries can’t make justice illegal

The home secretary’s focus on a few dodgy solicitors – instead of the real problems the country is facing – is the start of leadership bid that will get even nastier, writes Sean O’Grady

9 August 2023 (Dave Brown)

I must say that I was surprised to learn that the maximum penalty for helping someone remain in the UK by fraudulent means is life imprisonment, under the Immigration Act 1971. That, presumably, should be sanction enough for any lawyers trying to fabricate tales of persecution, trafficking and torture for an economic migrant, as has been alleged in recent days.

Even for our home secretary, Suella Braverman, herself some sort of lawyer (and therefore living proof that they are by no means all progressives), being banged up for the rest of one’s natural life ought to be a stiff enough sentence.

So the question arises as to what her new “Professional Enablers Taskforce” is supposed to do that isn’t capable of being done already by the criminal justice system. Backed by zero extra resources, the taskforce is unlikely to be in a position to go on lengthy fishing expeditions in solicitors’ offices or use press-style agent provocateur tactics to ensnare other legal practitioners who might not otherwise have committed any offence were they not lured into doing so.

It’s true that the government has trouble with the crime statistics, but that’s really no cause for fabricating entirely new ones. Entrapment is, in its way, just another form of fraud, whether undertaken by the press or a politicised civil service.

The fact is that we don’t need a taskforce to deal with a problem that hardly exists and can be dealt with perfectly well under existing laws and the self-regulatory activities of the Law Society. There are plenty of real societal problems that the home secretary and the justice secretary, Alex Chalk (seemingly a good man captured by rogues) can be getting along with, aside from a few dodgy solicitors.

If you believe their propaganda, you’d be forgiven for thinking that every lawyer breaks the law, every police force is enfeebled by attending Pride events and the judiciary is basically an extension of Momentum. All are willingly and actively engaged in an anti-British conspiracy to help “invaders” and ubiquitous grooming gangs. And then you might ask which party has been presiding over this bizarre state of affairs for the past 13 years.

Given the tiny number of cases of crooked lawyers uncovered in any context in the UK, I’m afraid to say that the taskforce does look rather like one of those stunts that Braverman dreams up to assist her all-too-blatant leadership ambitions. She may as well go around wearing a T-shirt with “Suella4leader” these days. To me, everything she says and does in government and around the party seems an embarrassingly blatant attempt to become the next leader of the opposition.

She courts the right-wing press and feeds her favourite organs with the most absurd of exclusives, such as the notion that refugees were going to be deported to Ascension Island. She’s made it clear she wants the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights, cutting against Rishi Suank’s attempts to delicately sidestep it. She “dreams” of packing quite genuine victims of torture on a one-way journey to Kigali. When Braverman isn’t guest speaker at some rubber chicken Conservative association (check out her Twitter feed), she’s making a batty speech to one of the right-wing splinter groups that now ingest Tory politics.

She’s “done” the European Research Group, the New Conservatives (aka the “Nat Cs”), the Conservative Democratic Organisation, and one dreads to think what trouble she might make for Sunak at the Manchester conference in October. If there is such a thing as Suella-ism, it isn’t a very sophisticated creed – “Get rid of all this woke rubbish.” Which, of course, she hasn’t, because you can’t actually make having an awareness of racial and social justice illegal, even if you’re the home secretary. I imagine that, however, won’t stop her from demonising refugees, trans people and the poor – the very definition of a political bully.

Based on what I’ve seen, I reckon in about a year’s time Braverman and Kemi Badenoch will be engaged in a life-and-death struggle to see who can be the most offensive, reactionary and intolerant person to lead the Conservative Party in its long and sometimes distinguished history. It will be quite something when Braverman manages to make Badenoch look like a moderate.

Though he’ll probably be an ex-MP, I expect that both of these leadership contenders will be begging for the blessing of Lee Anderson, a man who thinks that a barge full of refugees should just be towed over to France, and if they don’t like that they should “f*** off” anyway. Both will have to offer the party membership full power over electing the leader and much more say on policy. They will also have to promise to “bring back Boris” – a problematic proposition if you want to be in charge. They’ll run on ditching the ECHR and net zero, more Brexit, abolishing the BBC, kamikaze tax cuts and running down the NHS.

That’s the state of tomorrow’s Tory party. A figure such as Penny Mordaunt won’t stand a chance in such a contest. The succession to Sunak will be an unedifying spectacle, for sure, but it feels inevitable. The “nasty party” is coming back. All these exercises in refugee-hate lawyer-bashing are just the opening skirmishes.