At a meeting on 12th November 2024 Suella Braverman had a Discussion with Frank Millard: this is a transcript.
FM =Frank Millard SB Suella Braverman.
FM: Thank you very much for your time Suella, it's our pleasure to be interviewing you.
SB: Thank you for having me and for hosting this. It's great to be with friends and thank you for all the work you do at The Bruges Group, it is vital work which is greatly appreciated.
FM: If civil servants are reluctant or fail to facilitate the will of the people as expressed according to the democratic process, can they truly be worthy of the name? How can the civil service be made to work as it should?
SB: I'm not going to sit here and blame the civil service for what ultimately a political failure. I do believe as we are the elected politicians we go in with a mandate and it's up to us to harness the value of the civil service to achieve our political aims.
Now, when I think back to my time at the home office, let me use that example first. The main objective we had was on immigration. Mainly to cut legal migration by raising the salary threshold, imposing restrictions on who comes to the country, and to stop the boats, i.e. illegal migration.
Now, on the first issue of legal migration, I've got to say that on the system, we had the levers very much at our disposal in government to lower legal migration. And the civil service, who had worked very hard on delivering this system, were very eager to actually use it, and it was a real benefit of Brexit that we no longer had to subscribe to the dictat from Brussels, we no longer were slaves to freedom movement.
We had the power within our own arsenal of tools and it was actually relatively simple in theory to lower the legal migration. We didn't have to pass primary legislation, we didn't have to worry about the courts, we didn't have to worry about the Strasbourg judges. We actually could do it largely by executive action. The civil servants on side, I was clear about my objective, the problem was I didn't have the political support out of the cabinet table, and that was the reason why both some the Civil Service and I were stymied in lowering the migration, for a large part of my tenure.
When it came to illegal migration, I'm afraid the same problems arose there. I was very willing for example on the European Convention on Human Rights, I was very keen to reduce the number of claims available to those who arrive here illegally, but unfortunately, I didn't have the political support.
So, the failure to deliver was not down the Civil Servants, it was down to the lack of political support from other cabinet members and the Prime Minister
A second example, I would like to point to, which is a little bit more nuanced, was when I was a BREXIT Minister during the Theresa May years and obviously Theresa May started off her a tenure of 'BREXIT means BREXIT' and she developed the Chequers proposals.
Now, in the Brexit department, they advised David Davis there was a very different perception of what was happening, and, there was a body work that was being built up by Department for Exiting the European Union, focused on the reducing alignment and, allowing us to employ the regulation freedoms presented by our departure from the EU, extricating ourselves with the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice and all sorts of things.
In parallel developed by the Civil Service was the Chequers Proposals and unbeknownst to those of us in the Department of Exiting the EU, and generally, my perception then was that the civil service was largely opposed to the project of leaving the EU. They were very much in favour of the status quo, they didn't want us leaving the European Court of justice. They were very negative, following the 2016 referendum result. And I think there was obstruction from the civil Service.
That was partly a symptom of a more profound problem, which was a lack of a clear vision provided by the Prime Minister at the time. There was a lot of ambiguity about exactly what was intended by Prime Minister May, there was conflict as a result within government. And so, and as it turned out, there were two parallel projects. Ollie Robins was spearheading, the Chequers agreement and Dave Davis was leading the other on. in parallel.
So, the civil service was to a degree obstructing, what I would class as a proper departure and realisation of our BREXIT benefits. I do think there have been instances where we do need to show strong political leadership, clear direction, and the civil service generally and largely speaking will fall into line.
My last observation about the civil service is that we have but allowed political allegiances to be displayed, clearly a breach of their civil service code and vow of impartiality. We saw that during the BLM riots where members of the civil service were sympathising with what is a political movement.
We have seen that with some of the political agendas, which have really been embraced by civil servants, sometimes at odds with what politicians have intended. You see that in the migrant refugee lobby to a degree and I think to a degree the civil service has been influenced very heavily by lobby groups and political causes to a degree. I do think there is a real need to overhaul some of the training that goes on within the civil service and a more robust approach to ensuring that they are strictly politically neutral.
FM: ECHR. Boris Johnson said yesterday that the ECHR may have had its day. How do you see this?
SB: It's been my long-held view that we need to leave the ECHR. I am unequivocal about that I'm not one to sit on the fence on this issue of critical importance.
Boris Johnson is right. It started with very noble intentions in the aftermath of World War II the UK was one of the first signatories to the ECHR and of the first members of the Council of Europe, but we don't live in, the 1950s.
We are now in a in a very different culture and time and text of the ECHR is nothing to which I would object. There is nothing in the content of the convention to which I would object. No one is going to disagree with the right to life, or the freedom against torture and the prohibition against torture.
But the problem has been the growing empire, I would say, of the European court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and we have seen that it's become more interventionist, politicised and operates in a way to underline British values.
The operation of the courts combined with the Human Rights Act, a legacy of the Tony Blair years and a very litigious culture in the United Kingdom. And by that, I mean very heavily funded charities who actively pursue claims based on the Human Rights Act and ECHR rights and a very expansive arena of judicial view, i.e. administrative law, which has exploded over the last 30 years or so.
The combination of those factors has meant that it's almost become impossible for the government to control its borders, to maintain robust policies on national security, on law and order and in whole swathes of policy the government is often constrained by jurisprudence from the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, expansive jurisprudence, case law that, has really intruded upon the arena of executive decision making. And we have seen most recently some egregious examples.
We were all glued to our television sets when we saw the planes on the tarmac heading Rwanda and at the 11th hour, pursuant to an opaque process, a decision made by an unknown judge in a hearing in which the UK government was not represented the planes were grounded. That was notwithstanding a series of English judges in English courts who had considered the question of whether the flights should take off to Rwanda and held that they should take off to Rwanda so not only was it a very I would say, uh, you Junius process, but it totally undermined not just the English courts but the UK government to stop boats and send people to Rwanda. That was a glaring example of overreach by the Strasbourg court.
Another example has been earlier this year in relation to Switzerland, where the European Court of Human Rights has totally upended, government policy on climate change and effectively mandated that zero policies at odds with a referendum that took place in Switzerland.
So, you know, those are two examples. Policy Exchange has just put out a paper, citing 25 examples where The Human Rights Act has been used against the interests of government or I would say the British people.
I believe the case is compelling when it comes to leaving the ECHR, it's very straightforward in terms of what we need to do by triggering Article 56, giving six months' notice to the Council of Europe of our departure, we need to scrap or repeal The Human Rights Act, we need to then legislate limit some of the other elements of international law, such as the refugee convention, and other customary international law. We redefine limits to judicial review, and we then need to design our own domestic framework, on liberties, human rights, and I would say also civic responsibilities, because I think there is a need for an appropriately drafted set of laws to match the need for the 21st century.
We need a strategy to replace, we cannot just scrap it and then think what do we do next? We need to have a comprehensive policy for how we do it and what goes next and there are questions that need to be answered. They are all eminently soluble these challenges so the Northern Ireland aspect and the Good Friday agreement, the Trade and Corporation Act and Agreement with the European Union. They all make reference to the ECHR, Human Rights Act, Devolution Acts. We'd need some legal fixes for some of those issues, but they are not insurmountable obstacles to our overall departure.
FM:lot of people were disappointed you were not an option in the leadership. What do you see as your role in the party and the sense of its direction?
SB: Well, I think we've had a very extensive leadership contest and conversation within our party, actually about which direction we want to go in and, we've got our new leader Kemi and she's put together a very good team. She's been very honest about diagnosing for the problems and things that went wrong with the previous conservative administration and I think that demonstrates a very valuable level of insight that we need we now need to get behind the new team, the new leader and make sure that the party addresses what I think is an existential crisis within the Conservative Party right now.
We have no inalienable right to exist and the big threat to us is posed by Reform and, the Reform party has caused us a huge amount of pain, let's face it. Over a hundred or so of our MPs who were defeated at the last generation, lost effectively because of Reform. We lost 4 million votes to Reform. So, we can't just assume that Labour's problems will mean an automatic reinstatement of the Conservative Party.
We need to fight to regain trust, we need to actually offer a compelling and inspiring vision of what a conservative Britain can look like, and we need to regain the trust of the four million. We abandoned in anger to Reform. There's not enough space in British politics for two conservative parties and unless until we tackle head on the challenge posed by Reform, we have no chance of getting into government.
FM: Is Reform a busted flush now that the Conservative Party has a new leader? Has Reform peaked? How does the Conservative Party rebuild?
SB: I don't think Reform are a busted flush. I think that that MPs that believe that are displaying a worrying level of complacency. Reform is on the up, they are increasing the number of their members, rapidly, it's establishing strongholds in Wales in particular. It has a lot of support in the Southwest as well, in the north.
And it's now actually adopted adapted its strategy to target Labour seats. I think in about 100 Labour seats, they came second. That should be an alarm be for the Conservative party, in mainly those kind of red wall seats.
The worst thing for us to do would be to underestimate reform and to become electable in our own right, we need to be conservative frankly, on both economics and social issues. We need to be the party of aspiration, we need to be the party, which says work will pay. We need to be the party for hard workers, for strivers, for those who get up early in the morning and go to work and come back late at night, to get people off welfare and into work. We have far too many people, for who it's too easy to claim welfare and not work, that's not something we should be supporting. We need to be the party that is unapologetically on the right side of sovereignty in the nation state, so we should stand up for our interests abroad.
For example, we should not be surrendering sovereign territory to other countries. I point to the Chagos Islands and the disgraceful decision being made by this Labor government. We need to project strength and we need to ensure we are the party of Brexit. I very much fear for Brexit under this government.
I believe that they will begin the undoing of BREXIT that they will start to forger a relationship of closer alignment with the EU that they will surrender on free movement of people in some form, they already talking about some kind of defence pact. We don't need a defence pact with the European Union. We've got NATO. That's the bulwark of peace inside and beyond Europe.
So the party of low taxation, enterprise, work. We need to be the party of the family and aspiration and we need to be, bold on our foreign policy and standing up British values and national pride.
If there's anything to learn from the American elections, it's that the realignment and a policy platform focused on strong borders, sound centre right economics, and national pride is a winning formula, and one that millions of people around the world are crying out for
FM: BREXIT was sort of done. How much do you expect it to survive under this Starmer administration?
SB: I'll be honest with you Frank, I'm worried about Brexit. I voted for Brexit and campaigned for it in 2016. I then resigned over the betrayal terms of the Theresa May deal in 2018 as a Brexit minister and voted against the deal three times, I'm one of the 28 Spartans and I'm very very worried that everything we all fought and for many of your supporters in the Bruges Group will be casually squandered by this Labour government in a way that will be undemocratic.
I think that there will be a drip drip erosion of the benefits of the Brexit. You're right, Frank, we did Brexit, but we didn't do all of it, so we got out of the European Union technically and constitutionally, but we still didn't tackle freedom of movement. We didn't really make the most of the regulatory benefits and opportunities for Brexit. We stuck a lot of trade deals, many of those roll over deals, so we haven't yet struck new territory trade deals, that's a mixed picture. We've obviously signed and the uh comprehensive transpacific partnership, but with major players like India or the US, those are still distant prospects at the moment.
So, there is a real need to defend what's been achieved so far, Brexit, but also keeping remaking the argument to go further. And that's, one of the big areas is obviously migration, but I don't hold that much confidence that the government is going to really make the most of lowering migration and those powers, the second area, which we remain to tangible difference to people, is when it comes to regulations. And we still have far too many too much retained EU law on our statute books.
We still have too much alignment with EU directives and laws and rules, and we haven't yet flexed our regulatory muscles in a way that has been afforded to us. And so I think it's incumbent on many of us to keep arguing and urging the government to make most of those breaks of people from a regulatory point of view that cut costs with businesses, that would increase their profits that will increase efficiency, that would lead to more productivity. That's the vision of Brexit and we must lose it.
FM: We have overhanging EU law plus all the legislation brought in by Blair and Brown. Is this the case of 'more law and less justice'?
SB: One of the failures of the last conservative administration is that we didn't get to the root causes of some of the problems that we were dealing with, and we weren't too content to tweak around the edges and trip around the bush rather than getting to the root and we never did anything to scrap the Human Rights Act which is a legacy of Tony Blair
We never did anything to remove the Equality Act, which again, it's a legacy of Tony Blair, the long tail of 'Blairism', as I call it, and we've never really got to the some of these root, profound systemic problems facing that the country. The Human Rights act has caused many, many difficulties with our constitutional settlement, with our balance of justice, and really obstructed government from making policy in the name of the British people, whether it's deporting foreign drug dealers and foreign rapists or foreign terrorists, whether it's protest laws and arresting people who are broke the law in the name of their protesting. The 'Colston Four' that was the case that you'll remember with about the Colston statue in Bristol, BLM riots again, and during the riot, four of the protesters pulled down a statue and in rage. To my mind, that was a clear case of criminal damage.
They were charged with criminal damage in the court, but they were acquitted, and they were acquitted because they invoked The Human Rights Act as a defence and their freedom to assembly and that they won, and they were acquitted. As attorney general I challenged the ruling and we got a clarification of the laws that results, but it shouldn't have been that way in the first place. There have been quite a few public order cases where The Human Rights Act has operated in a way that would, really astonish most fair-minded law abiding British people.
When it comes to the position of our veterans, part of the reason why we've not been able to finally draw a line under some of the litigation relating to 'the Troubles', heroic British soldiers who fought against the IRA in the 1970s, are still now being chased through the courts and that's because The Human Right Act doesn't allow for there to be closure. There's been inquiry after inquiry that has been litigation after litigation, and yet some of these brave soldiers are still being persecuted through the courts.
We tried to introduce legislation to bring an end to it and we were blocked because of human rights concerns and indeed the Republic of Ireland has come out now and said that the legislation that we did put forward would be a violation of Article 2 of the ECHR. So again we never really got on underneath some of the problems or really fixed a lot of elements of the state That's our responsibility and that is our fault and that's why we really need to be very mindful about going into the next general election, about how would fundamentally reform aspects of this state.
FM: Are you an optimist about the US elections?
SB: I'm delighted with the US election results. I was one of the first British politicians to come out publicly supporting Donald Trump, and I said, I think several months ago that if I were an American citizen, I would be voting for Donald Trump. I think that it's clear that on our policy assessment, Donald Trump's formula of secure borders, stabilizing the economy through tax cuts and investment, being patriotic and proud of the country, is a winning formula and this is one that I relate to.
I think on foreign policy, Trump is an Anglophile and is more much more open to a US-UK free trade agreement because of the benefits of Brexit that this government should work energetically towards. And I think, Trump will make the world a safer place, a strong America, which is what Trump represents will mean that the hostile states, the totalitarian states, who have been angling for years for destabilised geopolitics and I'm thinking there of Iran, Russia and China and North Korea. They will have to recede now in their objectives. Certainly, Iran will really have to rethink its strategy in light of the Trump presidency. We saw when last time Trump was President he took a very robust line on the JCPOA that's the international agreement regulating Iran's, nuclear bomb capability.
Trump laid the foundations for peace in the Middle East with Abraham Accords with previously hostile nations to Israel, such as Bahrain, UAE, Morocco, and they were on the verge of signing another one with Saudi Arabia, when October 7th happened. We've just seen the Qatari's come
out and say Hamas needs to leave Qatar. You know, that's interesting that they never chose to eject to Hamas members from their country while Biden was President. So in think in the Middle east we are already beginning to see a shift and that will be for the better.
And on other the other hostile stay I think Trump represents a peace through strength approach, which can only be a good thing for the world.
FM: You mentioned China, Russia, and Iran. They are all members of BRICS, do you think Trump's policy pull back the global south from their influence?
SB: Yes, I think defence and security, that's one strand of the Trump dynamic, but there's also economics, we have to assess what the increase in tariffs will mean and that's why the UK US free trade deal is absolutely, a great price that we could secure and there's also the dynamic between China and the US on tariffs. We don't want to enter a trade war, but if there is an increase in tariffs and then retaliatory measures by China, the UK needs to quickly understand where is stands and then the US-Sino relationship.
FM: On law and order, the increase in shoplifting, the increase is undermining law and order. What can be done?
SB: It's not rocket science in dealing with shoplifting. Shoplifting is a volume crime; it's happening a lot and it's sadly prevalent. It's a symptom of a 'Californication' of our society where things like shoplifting, anti-social behaviour, cannabis use, aggressive begging, vandalism, loitering, harassment, graffiti, all that kind of lower level crime, goes unenforced against, unpoliced, and they have a very corrosive effect on communities, people, no longer feel safe in where they live or work. They lose pride in their public realm, and it symbolizes a descent into a criminality
We're seeing the same happen in parts of our country particularly in London and you know the parallels with London and San Francisco. I'm afraid at the moment San Francisco is really descended into a basket case of a city, where drug users and drug dealers are out of control and the city that once was a beautiful and thriving bustling, clean and safe city has now become and a crime centre.
The solution is strong and visible neighbourhood put policing. That's visible and a regular patrols and responsive sanctions so the police arresting and using the many powers that they have to to provide a consequence for this criminal activity. The police simply don't largely want to deal with some of these crimes. They deem them to be unimportant, a waste of resource, and they don't necessarily see the value I tackling antisocial behaviour, for example.
When I was Home Secretary we set out an anti-social behaviour action plan with the Prime Minister and that boosted the amount of hotspot policing (another word for neighbourhood, policing) targeting, particular areas, and it accelerated the way in which penalties can be imposed on people involved in antisocial behaviour. It enabled much more monitoring o what's happening in an area I believe very much in the broken windows approach to crime fighting. If you deal with the lower-level crime, you actually shut off more serious crime from taking a hold in an area. The police chiefs really have not properly responded to those political objectives that have been set time and time again.
FM: One last question. What message would you like give to The Bruges Group on current events and the Conservative Party?
SB: Well, I as I said in the beginning, I want to thank you all for your passion and your support and your faith in the conservative party. Don't lose faith, the fightback starts now for the Conservative Party. We got a new leader and new team and we've got possibly the worst start to any government that we've seen in recent history. The first 100 days have been a catastrophe.
Not only has the Labour government released thousands of criminals or the streets early. They've also presided over a budget which represents high tax, high spend, high borrow, and will inevitably harm the interests of the British people. It's full of broken promises, for example, on employers national insurance, cutting the winter fuel allowance for pensioners, making changes to Agricultural Property Relief for farmers. All sorts of horrors are contained in this Labour government's budget.
And we've also seen an increase in the number of illegal arrivals since Kier Starmer became prime minister. So I don't hold up much hope that they're going to be stopping the boats any time soon. And we haven't even gotten into the freebie scandal and the cronyism problems and the fact that they've already had to have a reset by firing the chief staff and replacing her within the first few months.
So, this government has not got off to the best start. We are now finding our footing; I think there's a consensus growing within the party about what went wrong over the last years of the Conservative government. We need to be mindful of those errors and not make again and I think that it's all to play for. I do believe that we can win the next election if we do offer that bold and vivid, inspiring vision for the British people. One based on aspiration, based on personal responsibility, based on economic prosperity and national pride. People don't want to keep being accused of being fascists and racists and bigots. They don't want to keep hearing that their country is the worst country known to man. They don't want to keep hearing that their history and their culture are offensive.
We need to be the party that stands in time and time again to defend the British people and celebrate our history, be optimistic about our future and stand up for the greatness of our country.
I'm very optimistic that we can rise to that challenge. We'll have to do it all together. And so, I very much look forward to working with you again the future. thank you very much indeed.
