Another British politics note: Suella Braverman, pro-Hamas protesters and Northern Ireland.

Rishi Sunak seems to have a masochistic streak a mile wide. How else to explain his willingness to do this job, in these times?

This weekend comes Armistice Day for the UK (today, Veterans Day is being observed in the US). And with it comes a fresh, blaring political row that is forcing me to take another contrarian position with regard to politics back in the UK. Probably no one reading this will agree with it. But hey, if there’s anything I’m known for, it’s having majoritarian positions on everything, right?

For those who haven’t followed, UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman— not exactly my favorite political figure in the Conservative Party— has sparked a major row by penning an oped trashing the Metropolitan Police (the “Met”) for their handling of pro-Hamas protesters (yes, I’m going to go ahead and call them that because of the rampant sloganeering in the “From the River to the Sea” genus that will undoubtedly be on display at the protest; no matter what people like Jeremy Corbyn stans may try to pretend, this is a slogan that is calling for the complete obliteration of the State of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants— literally Hamas’ goal).

Braverman’s issue is the Met signing off on this rally going ahead. The oped that was published was apparently not in line with what was approved by the UK Prime Minister’s office, and the PM appears pissed off (this is only the latest instance of Braverman causing him headaches he and his staff thought they had averted).

See this shot from Prime Minister’s Questions this week, which I think really says it all as far as how the Prime Minister-Home Secretary relationship is going (Sunak looks like he’s about to move into the MP to his right’s breast pocket to get away from her).

The Met, unsurprisingly, is deeply offended by the Home Secretary— in whose purview policing matters sit— dissing the Met so publicly.

In the ensuing furore, calls for Braverman to be sacked have proliferated. But the Tory base loves Braverman, mostly because she is a hardass on immigration who delights the right wing of the party. So, in addition to causing the PM problems by having pissed off the major policing force in the UK, Braverman is causing huge political headaches for him in terms of infighting between what we’ll call “the Base” and the “governing wing” of the Conservative Party. I continue to marvel at the fact that Rishi Sunak actually wants to be Prime Minister of the UK. It seems like a pretty shitty job most days. He has to deal with a very fractured party rife with infighting, a massive uptick in publicly visible anti-Semitism, a crappy economic situation (both in terms of inflation and growth), and a constant looming likelihood that he will be the last Tory Prime Minister for awhile as it looks really implausible that Labour will not take over after the next election. I think he must be a masochist. It’s hard to explain his persistence in doing the job otherwise.

So here’s the thing: I think Braverman probably should be sacked, but not for the reasons everyone seems to be talking about. Obviously, it is not politically convenient to have the Home Secretary in a massive public sparring fest with the Met. But fundamentally, the Met has been exposed repeatedly in the last few weeks for having become awfully cuddly with Hamas sympathizers and/or boosters. Maybe someone else should have been the one to call a spade a spade, but Braverman wasn’t wrong to point out a serious problem with the Met. Where she was wrong, however, was in writing what she did in the same oped about… Northern Ireland.

Here is what Braverman wrote:

I do not believe that these marches are merely a cry for help for Gaza. They are an assertion of primacy by certain groups - particularly Islamists – of the kind we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland.

[…]

Also disturbingly reminiscent of Ulster are the reports that some of Saturday’s march group organisers have links to terrorist groups, including Hamas.

This is some disturbingly ignorant, and politically toxic, stuff for one of the chief Ministers of State to be writing about Northern Ireland/Ulster when that remains a major political problem, particularly in the context of the post-Brexit United Kingdom.

Here’s the deal: The groups that mostly do marches in Northern Ireland are Unionists (aka Protestants). The Catholic/Nationalist/Republican side does not engage in this kind of activity nearly so much; the most well-remembered example of violence involving Catholic/Nationalist/Republican side and a protest was actually Bloody Sunday— which was so named because of action taken by the British military, not the Catholics/Nationalists/Republicans. Interestingly, there is a fairly robust history of the Catholic/Nationalist/Republican side of the Irish identity wars lining up with anti-Semites of different varieties (yes, that does include Hitler— this is covered in “Armed Struggle” by Richard English, which I have been reading recently). But as to the “marches,” “assertions of primacy,” “march group organizers” and their links, well, in Northern Ireland, that’s much more a Unionist/Protestant thing— and while there are indeed Unionist/Protestant terrorists, it seems pretty clear here that Braverman is trying to draw a connection between the Irish terrorists everyone knows of and naturally thinks of when you hear “Northern Ireland” (the Irish Republican Army and Catholic/Nationalist/Republican offshoots) and Hamas. But the IRA isn’t into marches or protests. They’re into killing relatives of the Royal Family and blowing up buildings— that kind of thing.

In so doing, Braverman displays a complete ignorance of facts pertaining to Northern Ireland, different factions there, what they each do, and how they typically operate. The connections she has attempted to make are what, say, a sixteen year-old non-Brit might think based on rhetoric they have heard advanced and inaccurate, cartoonish characterizations they have seen drawn, by the “de-colonizers,” the “woke,” and others on the left who try to lump different categories of people they perceive as victims together despite very disparate histories, social trends and cultures. This oped is sort of like what a very young intern would produce if they took all of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s talking points at face value and then wrote a non-Socialist “rebuttal” to them.

Is that the standard we should expect of one of the major Ministers of State? For my money, no. I think if you are Home Secretary, you have got to be able to distinguish between marchers whose marching does indeed piss off people who take very different political (and religious) views and people who are literally calling for genocide, some of whom may well ultimately be found in a court of law to be inciting it. I don’t know a single Jew who doesn’t feel personally, physically threatened (not intimidated or worried, but threatened) by what they’ve seen on the streets of London of late. I have encountered at least a few Catholics from Northern Ireland who don’t consider Unionist marches to be a direct threat to their existence as human beings (and I write this as a non-Irish Catholic who has, throughout her life, found quite a lot of major Unionist figures— ahem the late Ian Paisley— incredibly tiresome). These are just inherently different animals, and Braverman doesn’t seem to know it.

Here’s another thing Braverman’s oped suggests she’s completely oblivious to: Unionists ally politically with the Conservatives. So not only in making the comparison that Braverman did, did she just get a lot of core facts wrong. She also basically compared political allies to… Hamas-boosters. Given how difficult the Northern Ireland situation continues to be, politically, this is a way bigger problem than the Home Secretary pissing off the Met. I would argue it is a sufficiently big problem that, yes, she does need to be canned— but if Sunak does it, he needs to make very clear that he’s canning her for massively exacerbating problems with regard to Northern Ireland, not for bashing the Met as being soft on anti-Semites.

The reality is, the Met does seem to have gotten way too cuddly with people linked to Hamas who have indeed engaged in clearly anti-Semitic behavior. The Met has now cut ties with an adviser who led a “From the river to the sea” chant, which— contra boosters of people like Rep. Rashida Tlaib— is totally a slogan calling for genocide of Jews. The Met is also investigating a “leadership coordinator” who reportedly said support for Israel should be categorized as a “hate crime.” We also had an incident last week where police were exposed as stopping British veterans for marching with the Union Jack after having been apparently OK with the recent very large, very incendiary, very threatening (to Jews and those of us often mistaken for them by people outside of Scotland) protest in London. It may be inconvenient for the Home Secretary to be criticizing the Met over this, but in my view, they do deserve criticism.

The Northern Ireland allusions are a real problem, though. About the only thing that people in Northern Ireland seem to be able to agree on, no matter what faith or political affiliation they hold, or whether they consider themselves to be “Irish,” “British” or something in between, is that people on the British mainland really just don’t get them or their issues. Braverman proved that right at a time when the British government really needs to be doing more to “get” Northern Ireland, and help resolve problems there, not exacerbate them. Braverman isn’t doing that.

Braverman resigned from office under Boris Johnson for having used a personal email address for official business on what looked like a pretty one-off basis (she is not Hillary Clinton, thank God). It was largely considered an excuse to scram when Johnson was flailing and on his political last legs.

If that justified resigning, the Northern Ireland component of this— and the Northern Ireland component of it only— would seem to justify the same. I highly doubt Braverman will resign over this, though. So I think Sunak should fire her.

It’s getting awfully difficult attempting to engage in necessary housekeeping in this Conservative Party, and I wish the PM nothing but luck in this endeavor. As with really every part of his job these days, he seems to have his work cut out for him.