And to leave on a happier note, they do also have Suella Braverman, who I advertised to you last fall when she was serving as Britain’s Home Secretary—which is to say Attorney General, near enough.
Mrs. Braverman is still Home Secretary, notwithstanding a one-week hiatus last October while the Brits changed Prime Ministers. She was on fighting form in the House on Monday.
I played the clip on Radio Derb yesterday; you can listen at 39:40 below, this is the transcript.
First, however, I’ll remind you that Mrs. Braverman is of Indian origin, in fact is a practicing Buddhist. I should also tell you that a second member, also a lady with a voice much like Mrs. Braverman’s, makes a brief contribution around the 1m20s mark. (The lady’s name is Dame Andrea Leadsom, if you want to know, and she is the Member for South Northamptonshire, my home county.) OK, here we go.
[Clip: Braverman. It is unfair on those who play by the rules and it is unfair on the British people, so we must change the law and we must stop the boats. For too long, those of us voicing concerns about the effects of uncontrolled, unprecedented and illegal migration have been accused of inflammatory rhetoric, but nothing is more likely to inflame tensions than ignoring the public’s reasonable concerns about the current situation. The public are neither stupid nor bigoted. They can see at first hand the impact on their communities and it is irresponsible to suggest otherwise.
Speaking of acting responsibly, I want to put something on the record. It is perfectly respectable for a child of immigrants like me to say that I am deeply grateful to live here and that immigration has been overwhelmingly good for the United Kingdom, but also to say that we have had too much of it in recent years [noise in the chamber] and that uncontrolled and illegal migration is simply bad.
Leadsom. Does my right hon. Friend agree that in the last couple of years, when we have seen exponential growth in this human trafficking across the channel, the money that people can ill afford to spend on these criminals has been used to make their trade even more effective, putting yet more lives in danger?
Braverman. My right hon. Friend puts it very well. We now have a sophisticated, well resourced, multibillion-pound trade of illegal people smuggling and human trafficking. It is pan-national and it needs to stop. [noise in the chamber]
But to say… [unintelligible interruption]… I am going to make progress. And yes, Mr Speaker, despite the reasonable concerns that we have raised on several occasions, I am, like my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham [i.e., Priti Patel, Mrs. Braverman’s predecessor as Home Secretary] before me, subject to the most grotesque slurs for saying such simple truths about the impact of unlimited and illegal migration. The worst among them, poisoned by the extreme ideology of identity politics, suggests that a person’s skin colour should dictate their political views.
Mr. Speaker, I will not be hectored by out-of-touch lefties, or anyone for that matter. [noise in the chamber] I will not be patronised on what are the appropriate views for someone of my background to hold. And I will not back down when faced with spurious accusations of bigotry…
”I will not be hectored by out-of-touch lefties.” I like that. Maybe this takeover of the Anglosphere by Indians that we’ve all been bitching about here at VDARE… maybe it’ll turn out to have some upsides.