Linkage

Suella Braverman has been no stranger to controversy in her time as a minister, with the Home Secretary once again facing calls for her dismissal over comments about the police.

Opponents of Ms Braverman have consistently accused her of employing “far-right” rhetoric and lacking “compassion” in her comments about asylum seekers, immigrants and multiculturalism.

She was also effectively sacked by Liz Truss over security concerns, before being brought back into government a week later by Rishi Sunak.

Below, the PA news agency looks at some of the major controversies from Ms Braverman’s time in office.

In previous genocides, whether those accompanying the Great Wars or that of Rwanda in 1994, various justifications were offered to explain the lack of immediate action. In some cases, no Geneva Conventions existed, and, as in Rwanda, many pleaded ignorance.

But, in Gaza, no excuse is acceptable. Every international news company has correspondents or some presence in the Strip. Hundreds of journalists, reporters, bloggers, photographers and cameramen are documenting and counting every event, every massacre and every bomb dropped on civilian homes. It is important here to note that scores of journalists have already been killed in Israeli attacks.

Scientific approximations are telling us, for example, that nearly 25,000 tons of explosives have been dropped on Gaza by Israel in the first 27 days of war. It is equivalent to two atomic bombs, like those dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Boris Johnson said he would rather “let the bodies pile high” than impose another lockdown, the Covid Inquiry has heard.

The former prime minister has previously denied ever making the statement, both on television and to the House of Commons, after an anonymous source told the Daily Mail in 2021 that Johnson said: “No more fucking lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”

Boris Johnson told senior advisers that the Covid virus was “just nature’s way of dealing with old people” and he was “no longer buying” the fact the NHS was overwhelmed during the pandemic, the pandemic inquiry has heard.

In a WhatsApp message sent to his top aides in October 2020, the former prime minister said he had been “slightly rocked” by Covid infection rates and suggested he was, as a result, unconvinced that hospitals were on the brink despite public warnings from NHS chiefs and frontline staff.

The former chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, in his diaries described a “bonkers set of exchanges” in a meeting from that August. He noted that Johnson appeared “obsessed with older people accepting their fate” and letting younger people get on with their lives during the pandemic.

Draft of the Chapter published in Fascism and Theatre: The Politics and Aesthetics of Performance in the Era of Fascism, ed. Günter Berghaus, Berg, Oxford (1994), pp. 11-29.

After Joe Biden's apology for fond reminiscences of work with segregationist senators, uttered at a June 18 Manhattan fundraiser, the Bernie Sanders campaign is taking aim at another line by the former vice president that same night.

“We may not want to demonize anybody who has made money,” Biden said that evening, per a pool report. “Nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change. Because when we have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it brews and ferments political discord and basic revolution.”

In a Democratic primary season where "change" is the watchword for more than 20 Democrats seeking to challenge President Trump, Sanders’ presidential campaign has already weaponized Biden’s words. 

 Arrayed around a long mahogany table in the White House state dining room last week, the CEOs of the most powerful financial institutions in the world offered several explanations for paying high salaries to their employees — and, by extension, to themselves.

“These are complicated companies,” one CEO said. Offered another: “We’re competing for talent on an international market.”

But President Barack Obama wasn’t in a mood to hear them out. He stopped the conversation and offered a blunt reminder of the public’s reaction to such explanations. “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that.”

“My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” 

We looked for the origins of clippings from 14 articles that were published between 1894 and 2022, most of which we found in newspaper archives.

A meme shows clippings of 14 real articles that were printed between 1894 and 2022, all of which show people expressing variations of, "Nobody wants to work anymore."

The end product of today’s Western capitalism is a neo-rentier economy—precisely what
industrial capitalism and classical economists set out to replace during the Progressive Era
from the late 19th to early 20th century. A financial class has usurped the role that landlords
used to play—a class living off special privilege. Most economic rent is now paid out as
interest. This rake-off interrupts the circular flow between production and consumption,
causing economic shrinkage—a dynamic that is the opposite of industrial capitalism’s original
impulse. The “miracle of compound interest,” reinforced now by fiat credit creation, is
cannibalizing industrial capital as well as the returns to labor.

The political thrust of industrial capitalism was toward democratic parliamentary reform to
break the stranglehold of landlords on national tax systems. But today’s finance capital is
inherently oligarchic. It seeks to capture the government—first and foremost the treasury,
central bank, and courts—to enrich (indeed, to bail out) and untax the banking and financial
sector and its major clients: real estate and monopolies. This is why financial “technocrats”
(proxies and factotums for high finance) were imposed in Greece, and why Germany opposed a
public referendum on the European Central Bank’s austerity program.

It's remarkable how swiftly Moms for Liberty became such an albatross organization. As many Pennridge parents complained to Salon, much of the initial media coverage of the group was credulous, buying into the false narrative that it's a grassroots group of normal parents who are simply "concerned" about liberal "excesses." In reality, the group was founded in 2021 by the wife of the chair of the Florida Republican Party and was immediately so well-resourced and fully staffed that it could only be they were propped up by secretive, wealthy donors. 

The suspicious aura of money around the group was interesting to journalists, but what really damaged Moms for Liberty was that they underestimated the intelligence of the people in the communities they were targeting. The parents of Pennridge were not fooled by attempts to characterize literary fiction as "pornography." Local residents also feared that rewriting history classes to adhere to right-wing mythologies would ultimately harm the school's reputation, which could hurt both their property values and the ability of their kids to get into good colleges. Above all, multiple parents expressed a belief that schools should be preparing kids for the real world. They worried that right-wing whitewashing of history, social studies and other courses would leave kids without the basic skills necessary to thrive in a diverse, dynamic society.