Suella Braverman has proven it again: racism is a fire that conservatives love to play with | Aditya Chakrabortty

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Last Friday, an 82-year-old woman wrapped up warmly and set off on a 200-mile round trip to a meeting she half suspected wouldn’t even let her in. As you read this, the footage of his speech that night has been viewed over five million times. Which is odd, because it’s not much to look at: a wobbly side view of a woman with white hair, intense close-ups of a gray cardigan. Bridgerton this is not the case.

But it’s the words that matter. Joan Salter has traveled to Hampshire for a public meeting with the Home Secretary, and now it’s her turn to ask a question. As a child survivor of the Holocaust, she hears Suella Braverman demeaning and dehumanizing refugees and it reminds her of how the Nazis justified the killing of Jews like her. So why do it?

Even as the words come out, Braverman’s face freezes. The evening so far has been a love affair between conservative activists, which Salter tells me later made her nervous about being the only dissenter. But then the Home Secretary responds, I will not apologize for the language I used and a disturbing truth is exposed about what Britain has become.

Suella Braverman calls those who seek refuge in Britain an invasion. Photograph: Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament/AFP/Getty Images

Braverman calls those who seek refuge in Britain an invasion. Exactly the word, invasion. He strips people of their humanity and pretends they are instead a hostile army, sent to maraud our borders. His deputy minister, Robert Jenrick, once pleaded with his colleagues not to demonize migrants; now he stars in videos almost licking his jowls on Albanians forced to board a flight to Tirana. Salter is right about such attitudes from top fuel and licensing extremists in the field. We saw it after the toxic Brexit campaign, when Polish-born schoolchildren in Huntingdon were branded vermin on cards left outside their school gates, as racial and religious hate crimes soared this summer.

Today, the air is toxic again. Far-right groups have visited accommodation for asylum seekers, trying to terrify those inside many of whom have fled terror to come here often before sharing their videos on social media. Anti-fascist campaigners Hope Not Hate recorded 182 such escapades last year alone, culminating in a petrol bomb thrown at an asylum center in Dover by a man with links to far-right groups who would publish on how all muslims are guilty of grooming they only rape non muslims.

Unlike those big men in their big boots who scare the innocent, Salter doesn’t seek influence from social media. The grandmother wants to warn us not to go back to the time that sent her, at the age of three, running with her parents across Europe in search of refuge. She makes a mistake by harnessing the Minister of the Interior to the term swarms. As far as I know, this figurehead of the new conservative extremism has yet to use that despicable word. But I can think of a Tory Prime Minister who used that word: David Cameron, the old Etonian who never hesitated to whistle, who gave a speech denouncing multiculturalism even as Tommy Robinson’s troops marched on Luton. And Margaret Thatcher spoke of how the British felt rather overwhelmed by immigrants. In these venerable names from the parties’ past lurks the big picture of the conservatives’ chronic reliance on racist politics.

Because racism is not what polite people do and yet conservatives keep doing it, commentators will often put it behind a behavioral cord. Those are some bad apples, you’ll be told, after an adviser puts on a black shirt or complains about the new Doctor Who. Or: they must repel Nigel Farage’s effect. Or even, as one Times commentator wrote in 2019, Boris Johnson says it but he barely believes a word of it. What clairvoyance! But that’s the power thing: other people trotting behind with a dustpan and brush to sweep up the mess you keep making.

David Cameron, the old Etonian who never hesitated to whistle, gave a speech denouncing multiculturalism even as Tommy Robinson’s troops marched on Luton. Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA

Yet there was no Ukip when Benjamin Disraeli said that the Irish hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion. This savage, reckless, indolent, uncertain, and superstitious race has no sympathy for the English character. It was not a bad apple but Winston Churchill, the idol of the Tories, who as Prime Minister said: I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their fault because they reproduced like rabbits. The Bengal famine of 1943 is generally estimated to have killed around 2 million people.

I’m taking these quotes from a new book, Racism and the Tory Party, by sociologist Mike Cole. Far from being a mere slip, racism, he argues, saturated the party from the beginning of the 19th century to the second decade of the 21st. From the rivers of blood of Enoch Powell to the hostile environment of Theresa May, he travels through the history of conservatives. And it’s not just words. In its Online Safety Bill, the government this week wants to make illegal any online video of people in small boats that shows such a Channel crossing in a positive light. Braverman is continuing with his plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, staying in hostels with 12 toilets and five showers for every 100 detainees.

For conservatives, racism is a fire they love to play with. The heat it gives off can be electorally useful. But it’s always someone else who gets burned. The targets change two centuries ago it was the Irish, today it’s the Albanians but the strategy is always the same: choose the group, make them inhuman, then fire them. The mystery is why a party with such a long and inglorious history can still be praised by the press for sprinkling a few non-white people along its front bench.

From her own life, this remarkable woman knows that fascism is not an isolated case and that racism is never a simple misstep. Joan Salter, centre, at Holocaust Memorial Day in London, January 2022. Photograph: Guy Bell/REX/Shutterstock

The woman who is now Joan Salter was in 1943 a three-year-old girl named Fanny Zimetbaum. As Jews of Polish descent, his family did not gain refuge in Britain from the Nazis entering their native France. Instead, her parents had to rush across Europe, while Joan was shipped across the Atlantic to an orphanage in America. It was only years later, after many quarrels, that the family was reunited in London. At that time, she remembers her parents being completely broken.

When she was 70 and studying for a master’s degree, Salter scoured the archives. She read a parliamentary debate from 1943, concerning 2,000 Jewish children in France who were refused British visas and who were then deported to Hitler’s Germany. She read Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden claiming she was unaware of the matter. Then she read the minutes and the notes which proved that he was lying: he was at the council of war where the question was discussed. Yet the children were abandoned, just as her family was left to fend for themselves.

From her own life, this remarkable woman knows that fascism is not an isolated case and that racism is never a simple misstep. These are forces of evil lurking within the political perimeter and threatening to wholesale consume our society. Joan Salter carries a warning. The rest of us should listen.

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