34m ago
16.22 BST
How Suella Braverman defines conservatism -
extracts from her speech
Most of the
Suella Braverman speech was about conservatism, and how she defines it. She
started with a long passage about how both her parents came to the UK as
immigrants (the sort of family, hard work success story that is de rigueur in a
speech to a US political convention), and she said they admired Britain’s
values, which she said were conservative values. Then she set out to explain
what conservatism (mostly she uses the small-c version) means to her.
This is why
it is hard not to read the speech as putting down a marker for a leadership
contest. Other than implying that immigration policy is too lax (see 12.54pm),
she was not disloyal to Rishi Sunak, and he would probably agree with most of
what she said about conservatism. But the very fact that she was courting the
party so assiduously (Tory members will love it) makes it a leadership play.
She defined
conservatism as being optimistic about the future, abhoring political
correctness and radical ideology, believing in and loving your country, understanding
the importance of borders and national identity, and being pro-family. Here are
some of the key quotes.
Braverman, the home secretary, said conservatives
should be sceptical of experts and elites. She said:
Conservatives prize experience, judgement, and
wisdom.
I think
William F Buckley Jr’s quip, that “I would rather be governed by the first
2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University Faculty”
captures the essence of it.
We are
sceptical of self-appointed gurus, experts, and elites who think they know best
what is in the public’s interest, even when that public is quite certain that
they need something different from what those experts are proposing.
She said focusing on conventional measures of
diversity was “myopic”, and likely to foster grievance. She said:
Measuring
diversity only on the basis of skin colour, sex, and sexuality is
mind-bogglingly myopic.
Identity
politics is the politics of grievance and division – it is illiberal and
incompatible with social cohesion.
It defines
people based on their external characteristics rather than on the content of
their character or their natural abilities.
It then
divides people into groups, and places those groups on a hierarchy of
grievance, explaining any disparity of outcome through the prism of structural
discrimination.
She claimed the left was obsessed with eradicating
inequality, at the expense of liberty.
She said:
I
understand that the goal of conservatism is to protect fundamental rights,
enhance the dignity and potential of human beings, and in so doing forge
healthy communities that make possible extraordinary collective achievements.
The left on
the other hand sees the purpose of politics as to eradicate the existence of
inequality, even if that comes at the expense of individual liberty and human
flourishing.
And she claimed that state intervention to ensure
“equality of outcomes” was dangerous.
She said:
We want to
expand opportunity, passionately so, but the idea that any true equality of
opportunity is structurally impossible, and so instead the state must intervene
to ensure equality of outcomes, is a dangerous one.
She said that, although many people on the left
loved their country, love of country was a “necessary, possibly the necessary
condition, of being a conservative”.
She went on:
The truth
is that large parts of the contemporary left are ashamed of our history and
embarrassed by the sentiments and desires expressed by the British public.
She claimed the left needed to make people
ashamed of Britain’s past.
She said:
I think the
left can only sell its vision for the future by making people feel terrible
about our past.
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.
The
defining feature of this country’s relationship with slavery is not that we
practised it, but that we led the way in abolishing it.
We should
be proud of who we are.
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