The home secretary has attacked the “unexamined drive towards multiculturalism” in a wide-ranging speech that will be seen as a pitch for the future leadership of the Conservative Party.
Suella Braverman said immigrants must learn English and “understand British social norms” in order for multiculturalism to succeed. She said that immigration must go hand in hand with a firm policy on integration in order to “conserve” the British way of life.
Speaking at the National Conservatism conference in London, organised by a right-wing American think tank, she addressed issues including migration, race and gender.
• Anti-fascist protester disrupts Rees-Mogg speech
• Britons will forget how to work, says Suella Braverman
Braverman claimed that a growing campaign was trying to push an “identity politics” on the rest of the country that also threatened social cohesion and Britain’s liberal and tolerant tradition.
Advertisement
She said it is a “politics of grievance and division” and was “illiberal”. “It defines people based on their external characteristics rather than on the content of their character or their natural abilities.”
The cabinet minister used the example of her own immigrant parents, who came from Mauritius and Kenya, as examples of those who had “signed up to be part of our shared project”.
She said: “That didn’t mean eradicating their heritage but it did mean adopting British identity.”
She used her parents as an example of how the country should expect today’s migrants to behave on arrival in the UK, saying they should “embrace and respect this country”.
“They need to learn English and understand British social norms and mores — which is not to say that they cannot enrich and add to our culture,” Braverman added.
Advertisement
“Above all, they cannot simply turn up and say, ‘I live here now and you have to look after me’.”
Warning of the consequences if immigration fails to go hand-in-hand with a policy of integration, Braverman said: “The unexamined drive towards multiculturalism as an end in itself, combined with identity politics, is a recipe for communal disaster . . . We cannot have immigration without integration.
• More prisoners on day release to plug labour shortages
• Britain’s tech superpower dreams turn sour as investment slumps
“And if we lack the confidence to promote our culture, defend our values, and venerate our past, then we have nothing to integrate people into.
“We have a nation, and more than that, a national character to conserve.”
‘White people shouldn’t feel guilty about Britain’s history’
Advertisement
White people must not live in a “special state of sin or collective guilt” about the past, Suella Braverman said as she accused Labour of being “ashamed” of Britain’s history (Matt Dathan writes).
Laying out her view of conservatism, the home secretary said that a “love of country” is a condition of being a conservative.
She said Britain has “no future without reverence for its past” and said the British should be “proud of who we are”. Braverman contrasted conservatives with “large parts of the contemporary left” who are “embarrassed by the sentiments and desires expressed by the British public”.
She said the defining feature of Britain’s relationship with slavery should be the fact that the country “led the way in abolishing it” rather than the fact that it profited from it.
The home secretary told the National Conservatism conference: “I think the left can only sell its vision for the future by making people feel terrible about our past.
Advertisement
“White people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt. Nobody should be blamed for things that happened before they were born.”
Braverman taunts Starmer over trans stance
Braverman joked during her speech that Sir Keir Starmer could campaign to become “Labour’s first female prime minister” as she accused him of flip-flopping on transgender issues (Matt Dathan writes).
The Labour leader has been criticised by some in his party for failing to set out a consistent stance on transgender issues and the definition of a woman. Starmer has also been accused of making U-turns on major policies since becoming leader in 2020.
The home secretary said: “Conservatives must always be honest with the public. Honest about our principles and honest about our priorities.
“In that way, we distinguish ourselves from the leader of the left, Sir Keir Starmer. He opposes today the things he stood for yesterday.
Advertisement
“Given his definition of a woman, we can’t rule him out from running to be Labour’s first female prime minister.”
Earlier, Braverman won applause from her audience as she said it was an “unfashionable fact” to say that “100 per cent of women do not have a penis”.
China is our biggest threat, warns Truss
Liz Truss has said that Britain must not listen to “rhetorical bullying” from authoritarian regimes as she claimed that China was “the largest threat that we face to the free world” (Geraldine Scott writes).
Speaking at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit ahead of a visit to Taiwan, the former prime minister said that the UK needed to take stronger action against China to prevent a repeat of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“We really need to learn the lesson,” Truss said. “What we need to be doing is taking the practical steps to make sure Taiwan is able to defend itself. And to make sure that Taiwan has the economic engagement with the rest of the world.
“We also, by the way, have to ensure that we are not overexposed to China. And I think we’ve seen all of this play out in the very tragic conflict that is now taking place in Ukraine. If we had acted earlier, if we had fast-tracked Ukraine’s membership of Nato, if we had put sanctions on when Putin took action in Crimea, or in the Donbas, then I believe the conflict would have been less likely to happen.”
Truss said the Russian invasion was “inherently linked” to the threat from China. She said: “I stand by my assertion that we should designate China as a threat, I think they are a very clear threat. I think they’re the largest threat that we face to the free world.”
She added: “If we take our eye off the ball on China, we’ll be facing a very, very serious problem down the road.”
Protesters interrupt Braverman’s speech on immigration
Suella Braverman was interrupted seconds into a speech on migration and the future of the Conservative Party by protesters (Matt Dathan writes).
A man in the audience stood up four rows back and began reading out a statement against the home secretary’s illegal migration bill, claiming it was racist.
As Braverman resumed her speech she was heckled again by a woman who reeled off a similar statement opposing her crackdown on small boats.
Braverman used her speech to say that migration levels are “unsustainable”. In a warning shot to cabinet colleagues who disagree with her plans to make it harder to bring in lower-skilled workers, she warned that Britain has become too “dependent” on foreign labour.
As Conservative tensions over immigration broke into the open today, Nigel Huddleston, the trade minister, insisted that higher numbers were “often a good thing”.
Huddleston downplayed concerns over figures that will show another record high for net migration and told Times Radio that there were “always peaks, depending on economic circumstances and a whole host of other reasons”.
With Braverman warning that Britain “mustn’t forget how to do things for ourselves” and call for homegrown fruit-pickers and HGV drivers, Huddleston insisted that this was not a problem and that “people know how to work very, very hard in this country”.
Sunak backs Braverman
Rishi Sunak agrees with Suella Braverman about cutting overall migration, No 10 has said (Chris Smyth writes).
The prime minister’s official spokesman insisted that the home secretary will speak for the government when she criticises “unsustainable” immigration numbers this afternoon.
“She continues to represent the UK government views on all issues relating to the Home Office, as you would expect,” he said.
The spokesman added: “We want to see employers make long-term investments in the UK domestic workforce instead of relying on overseas labour as part of building a high-wage and high-skilled economy, and we are supporting those industries in doing that.”
Addressing migration in their 2019 manifesto, the Tories promised that “overall numbers will come down”. But asked about what level the numbers would come down from, the spokesman said: “I don’t think we’ve set out a baseline.”
Nurses cheer calls to ‘defeat the government’
As the Tory right met in London a separate conference in Brighton offered a reminder of a different challenge faced by the prime minister (Kat Lay writes).
Delegates at the Royal College of Nursing’s annual meeting cheered calls to “defeat the government”.
Health service bosses are extremely concerned about patient safety should nurses and doctors walk off wards at the same time.
• The Times view on nursing strikes
Anna Pichierri, a healthcare assistant working in child and adolescent mental health services, said the nurses’ pay dispute with the government was “part of a social and political struggle to save the NHS, and also to defeat this Tory, racist and anti-working class government, and to defend all our public services”.
She said that the union was “not striking to get back to the negotiating table”. Instead, she said: “We are striking to win. We cannot call off the action just because we are called to negotiation. That’s when we need to keep the pressure up.”
She called for a “united force in the NHS” and added: “Wherever possible nurses should be striking together with other unions, with the BMA. There shouldn’t be any competition.”
Responding to her, Jason Warriner, a member of the RCN’s public health forum, said: “Strike to win, that’s what it is all about. We have got to bring this government down and get a fresher vote, not just about pay but about safer staffing.”
The RCN’s members voted to reject a pay offer from the government. The union will reballot its members this month in an attempt to get a renewed six-month strike mandate.
Labour could give settled migrants voting rights
Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed that he is considering giving the vote to 16-year-olds and settled migrants, saying that it “feels wrong” to deny the right to those who have worked in Britain for decades (Chris Smyth writes).
The Labour leader said it was “not such an outlandish idea” for younger people to be able to vote, stressing: “These are some of the ideas that are going into the mix but they’re not policy, we’re just looking at them.”
He told LBC that it did not pass the “common sense test” that settled migrants who had worked in the UK for decades did not have full voting rights. He said that it “feels wrong and something ought to be done about it”.
Anti-fascist protester disrupts Rees-Mogg speech
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s speech to a right-wing conference was disrupted after a protester got on stage and accused him of promoting fascism (Oliver Wright writes).
The former business secretary was addressing the National Conservatism conference in London, at which the home secretary, Suella Braverman, is due to speak today.
Rees-Mogg had only just begun his speech to about 300 people when a smartly dressed man came up behind him and asked for the microphone.
The MP moved aside and the man began accusing the conference of being a forum for fascism. He was taken off the stage by security guards.
Falling birthrates threaten whole of western society, says MP
Families must be encouraged to have more children, a Conservative MP has insisted, as she blamed falling birthrates and rising levels of self-harm on “cultural Marxism” (Chris Smyth writes).
Miriam Cates, the MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, told the NatCon conference in Westminster that falling birthrates were “the one overarching threat to British conservatism and indeed the whole of western society”.
She insisted: “We must seek to restore the value of children in British society.”
• Miriam Cates: ‘Sex ed guidance is a mess’
• Some sex education has no basis in science, says Ofsted chief
Cates argued: “You cannot be socially liberal and economically conservative. If you think that government and society should have nothing to say about the conditions that promote strong families, don’t be surprised if you end up with a high-tax, high-spend economy, with a nation of broken people dependent on the state.”
Describing children as “the symptom and the cause of a society that has hope”, she argued that young people would not reproduce without “hope for the future”.
Cates said: “That hope is sadly diminishing in so many of our young people today, because liberal individualism has proven to be completely powerless to resist the cultural Marxism that is systematically destroying our children’s souls.”
She linked self-harm, suicide and “epidemic levels of anxiety” to schools, universities and a wider culture that “openly teach that our country is racist, our heroes are villains, humanity is killing the Earth, you are what you desire, diversity is theology, boundaries are tyranny and self-restraint is oppression”.
She added: “We must end the indoctrination of our children with destructive and narcissistic ideologies, instead protecting childhood, training children in the timeless virtues and teaching them how to love our country.”
Tory right gather to ‘thrash out ideas’
The past year has taught us that the Conservatives need little excuse to indulge in in-fighting and proxy leadership battles (Chris Smyth writes).
But the latest bout is prompted by two things: the party’s poor showing in this month’s local elections and a conference today that is being seen as a dress rehearsal for some of the arguments that the party will have in opposition.
The NatCon conference, organised by a right-wing US think tank, will see the right of the Conservative Party lay out diagnoses of the problems facing the country and debate possible solutions from a “national conservative” perspective.
National Conservatism describes itself as a riposte to free-market libertarianism that focuses on “unique national traditions” and is often described as socially conservative while economically interventionist.
The idea has been associated with the right of the US Republican Party as well as the Polish Law and Justice party and Hungary’s Viktor Orban, which has led to accusations from some Tory MPs that this week’s conference is a “nefarious” attempt to import “far-right” ideas and culture wars.
The organisers insist that it is “not an attempt to create mischief” but an opportunity to “thrash out ideas” for the future of the Conservative Party.
Suella Braverman, the home secretary, Michael Gove, the levelling-up secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former business secretary, and Lord Frost, Boris Johnson’s former Brexit negotiator, are among speakers.
Braverman is often seen as the right’s standard bearer in a leadership contest should the Conservatives lose the next election, after Kemi Badenoch, another likely candidate, provoked Brexiteer wrath last week after ditching a bonfire of EU laws.
It comes after Johnson’s supporters spent the weekend at the Conservative Democratic Organisation’s conference in Bournemouth, where Priti Patel, the former home secretary, issued a thinly veiled swipe at Rishi Sunak, blaming the “centre of the party” for local election losses.
‘Stop building houses for immigrants’
Britain should reduce housebuilding by cutting immigration, a senior right-wing MP has said as he refused to endorse Rishi Sunak’s leadership (Chris Smyth writes).
Sir John Redwood united the two most divisive issues within the Conservative Party when he said that it should promise to reduce development by cutting immigration.
He said that Sunak needed to make “big changes” on immigration, Brexit and the economy. When asked if Sunak should lead the party into the next election, he said: “The focus is all on policy, not on people.”
Redwood told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Tory MPs were “desperate” for changes as he allied himself with Suella Braverman, the home secretary, who is pushing to reduce immigration numbers.
“How do you get higher productivity? You don’t get it by inviting in a lot of people to take very low-paid jobs,” he said. “We shouldn’t invite people in for low-paid jobs when we don’t have housing for them.”
He told businesses wanting to import more foreign labour: “They should invest in training, machinery and in computing”.
As well as a divide over immigration, the Conservatives are split between MPs in the south of England who want to water down housebuilding targets and others, often in the north and Midlands, who insist that the party must do more to offer young people places to live.
Redwood said the party should “be realistic and say we are not going to build houses for 700,000 extra people every year, given that we shouldn’t be inviting them all in.
“I want us to build enough decent houses for people who are here, but I don’t think it’s realistic to think that we can keep on inviting in 500,000, 600,000, 700,000 extra people each year, because you would need to build a couple of big cities each year just to house them.”
Britons will forget how to work, says Braverman
The government must reduce immigration before the next election because Britain has become too “dependent” on foreign labour, Suella Braverman will say in a warning shot to cabinet colleagues blocking proposals to reduce numbers (Matt Dathan writes).
The home secretary will be the headline speaker at the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon) in central London, which has been organised by a right-wing American think tank to discuss the future of the Tory party.
