POLL – Was Rishi Sunak right to sack Suella Braverman, have your say
Suella Braverman has been sacked as Home Secretary following comments she made on policing of protests, sparking a Cabinet reshuffle.
A spokesman for the PM said: “Rishi Sunak has asked Suella Braverman to leave the Government and she has accepted.”
Ms Braverman wrote an op-ed ahead of Remembrance Day, on plans for thousands of Pro-Palestine protesters to descend on London.
She wrote in The Times: “Right-wing and nationalist protesters who engage in aggression are rightly met with a stern response yet pro-Palestinian mobs displaying almost identical behaviour are largely ignored, even when clearly breaking the law?
“I have spoken to serving and former police officers who have noted this double standard.
“Football fans are even more vocal about the tough way they are policed as compared to politically connected minority groups favoured by the left.
“It may be that senior officers are more concerned with how much flak they are likely to get than whether this perceived unfairness alienates the majority. The Government has a duty to take a broader view.”
The article was submitted to Downing Street, but required significant changes and so did not get signed off, it was understood. The piece was published nonetheless.
The comments made about the police sparked calls for Ms Braverman’s resignation, with Sir Keir Starmer accusing her of “sowing the seeds of hatred and distrust”.
On Saturday counter protests by far-right groups descended into chaos sparking 145 arrests and injuring 15 police officers.
The Met Police’s deputy assistant commissioner Laurence Taylor said the force faced a “really challenging day”.
He said the violence from 10am was “unprecedented”, and had the counter-protesters reached the pro-Palestinian crowd there could have been “serious disorder”.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan said if the PM didn’t sack Ms Braverman “he’s too weak or agrees with her”.
However, defence minister James Heappey said the former home secretary was not “entirely” to blame for the Armistice Day chaos.
He said: “I wouldn’t have used some of the words that the home secretary used in her article.
“But I also think that it would be incorrect to say that those protests, the counter-protests, were entirely a consequence of what she wrote.
“Tommy Robinson and his [English Defence League] thugs were planning their counter protest well before the home secretary published that article.”
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