The home secretary, Suella Braverman, has described rough sleeping as a “lifestyle choice” while defending her decision to restrict the use of tents by homeless people on the streets of Britain.
According to Whitehall insiders, Braverman plans to crack down on tents that cause a nuisance in urban areas such as high streets – amid growing numbers of rough sleepers and what the government considers a rise in antisocial behaviour.
The home secretary has also proposed the introduction of a civil offence, which could lead to charities being fined if they provide homeless people with tents, the Financial Times reported.
Writing on X, formerly Twitter, Braverman defended her proposals, saying: “The British people are compassionate. We will always support those who are genuinely homeless. But we cannot allow our streets to be taken over by rows of tents occupied by people, many of them from abroad, living on the streets as a lifestyle choice.
“Unless we step in now to stop this, British cities will go the way of places in the US like San Francisco and Los Angeles, where weak policies have led to an explosion of crime, drug-taking, and squalor.
Yes. Literally the only truly evil senior British politician I have come across in my lifetime.
There are plenty of politicians in my lifetime who I have disagreed with quite severely on certain things - Thatcher, Blair, Corbyn, May, for example. But in each of their cases I honestly believe they were pursuing a course that they believed would improve the lot of the British people and bring about a better, fairer and more prosperous society - I might have disagreed with them (in some cases a lot!) about how to get there, but I never doubted their hearts were ultimately in the right place. Boris Johnson was the first who left me thinking he had no redeeming qualities - selfish and egotistical, heart very much in the wrong place. Boris was only in it for Boris.
But Suella is something else. Suella isn’t in it for the public good, but Suella isn’t in it for Suella either. Suella is in it to hurt people. That’s her overwhelming motivating goal in life and politics. She gets off on undisguised cruelty. She is genuinely evil.
My idea is that this kind of people are deliberately chosen by their superiors to act as “lightning rods” for all kinds of unpopular measures.
Then they often fade away into relative obscurity and reappear in a next election cycle, as needed.
After they leave politics, they inevitably end up running a board of directors or a committee or a think tank somewhere…
Historically yes, although I don’t think there’s been one as bad as Suella before, and certainly not one who is now among the betting market favourites to be the next Tory leader once they’re in opposition.
I see her more as a symptom of the nihilism that has overtaken British conservatism since the 2016 referendum. They’ve become obsessed with fighting meaningless symbols and vibes, and fixated on pulling down their opponents rather than building something up themselves. Nothing positive matters to them, it’s all about destruction.
In the 1980s, Thatcher’s Tories sold the British lower middle-class on a vision of home-owning, share-owning popular capitalist democracy, in which entrepreneurs and small-business owners would guide us all into a prosperous future. What positive vision like that do Tories have to offer to voters today? Single-sex toilets and criminalising the homeless? Suella literally has said that her ‘dream’ in politics is to deport refugees to Rwanda. They have nothing positive to offer and Suella’s rise is a symptom of that.