By Gaggan Sabherwal
BBC South Asia Diaspora Reporter
8th September 2022
UK’s new Prime Minister Liz Truss has wasted no time and has appointed her new cabinet just hours after taking over from Boris Johnson.
Ms. Truss has appointed Indian origin barrister Suella Braverman as the country’s new Home Secretary, succeeding Priti Patel her fellow colleague of Indian descent.
Liz Truss’s close friend and ally Kwasi Kwarteng has been appointed as the Chancellor. He takes over from Nadim Zahawi who wasn’t in this post for long as he was appointed following the resignation of Indian origin MP Rishi Sunak in July. Mr. Kwarteng is the former business secretary who previously held a more junior role in the business department and was also junior minister at the former Department for Exiting the European Union and is now the man in charge of UK’s economy.
Mr. Kwarteng was born in the London Borough of Waltham Forest in 1975 and is the only child of Alfred K. Kwarteng and Charlotte Boaitey-Kwarteng, who had emigrated from Ghana to the UK as students in the 1960s. His mother is a barrister and his father an economist. Mr. Kwarteng attended the prestigious Eton college, famous for having given the UK 20 Prime Ministers, including David Cameron and Boris Johnson.
Besides this, Liz Truss has also appointed her long-term political ally Therese Coffey as the country’s new Health Secretary. She was the first person to be appointed by the new Prime Minister and will also hold the position of deputy Prime Minister. This makes her the first woman to serve as UK’s deputy Prime Minister.
Born in 1971, Therese Coffey grew up in Liverpool, and after graduating from University College London (UCL) with a PhD in Chemistry, joined the international company Mars. Having qualified as a chartered management accountant, Ms. Coffey covered various roles in Mars, eventually serving as Finance Director for Mars Drinks UK, and also worked as a Finance Manager at the BBC.
James Cleverly has been appointed as the Foreign Secretary and will be succeeding Ms. Truss herself in the role. Mr. Cleverly becomes foreign secretary after nearly two years as a junior minister in the department and a few weeks as education secretary. James Cleverly was born on 4 September 1969 in Lewisham in London, to a James Philip and Evelyn Suna Cleverly. His father is British and worked as a surveyor and his mother worked as a midwife and is from Sierra Leone.
With these appointments Liz Truss has created a very diverse cabinet and it is for the very first time in the history of British politics that none of the great offices of the state is held by a white man. The Great Offices of State are senior offices in the UK government, and they are the Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary, respectively. This is a stark contrast and a remarkable change to 2001, when 91% of the Tory MPs were male and every single one of them was white.
Indian origin Suella Braverman has taken on one of the great offices of state as Home Secretary. She also ran to be the leader herself earlier in the Tory leadership contest.
But who is Suella Braverman?
42 -year-old Suella Braverman was born Sue-Ellen Cassiana Braverman to Christie Fernandes, a Kenyan of Christian Goan origin, and Uma Fernandes, a Mauritian Hindu Tamil of Indian origin. Her mother migrated to the UK from Mauritius while her father migrated from Kenya in the 1960s.
Ms. Braverman was born in Harrow in London but grew up in Wembley in North-West London and is the couple’s only child who doted on her and were always hugely ambitious for their daughter.
Christie worked in a housing association for many years while Uma worked in the NHS as a nurse for 45 years. The couple joined the Conservative party in the 1980s and served their local community in Wembley. Uma was a local councillor for 16 years whereas Christie worked as a local campaigner.
During a recent ITV interview where Braverman participated in the Tory leadership contest she said, “I love this country, my parents came here with absolutely nothing and it was Britain that gave them hope, security and opportunity. This country has afforded me incredible opportunities in education and in my career. I owe a debt of gratitude to this country and to serve as PM would be the greatest honour’’.
Ms. Braverman attended a local state school but after winning a scholarship she went on to study at Heathfield School in London which is an independent school. After this she went on to study Law at Queens’ College, Cambridge and later gained a master’s degree in Law from the Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris. Following this she qualified as a New York attorney.
Suella Braverman specialised in public law and judicial review, and has defended the UK’s Home Office in immigration cases, the Parole Board in challenges by prisoners, and the Ministry of Defence in matters relating to injuries sustained in battle.
In February 2018, she married Rael Braverman, a manager at Mercedes. The couple got married at the House of Commons and went on to have their first child in 2019 and a second in 2021.
Suella Braverman was selected as the Conservative MP for Fareham in May 2015 and was given her first ministerial job by Theresa May, when she was appointed as a Brexit minister in January 2018. But she didn’t serve long in this post and resigned in November 2018 after the then Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, walked out in disagreement over May’s proposed divorce deal with the European Union.
But in February 2022 Boris Johnson brought her back into the fold, promoting her to a seat around the cabinet table as attorney general in 2020. She was made a Queen’s Counsel (QC) at the time of this appointment. To be awarded Queen’s Counsel (QC) status is a recognition of excellence and one of the highest honours a solicitor can attain.
Braverman was also the first cabinet minister to take maternity leave – after the law was changed so that cabinet ministers could receive paid maternity leave, having previously been expected to resign their ministerial positions.
What are Suella Braverman’s views?
Suella Braverman is a hard Brexiteer and recently said she has “significant reservations about our relationship with the European Court of Human Rights,” following the European court’s decision, which effectively grounded the first flight to send asylum seekers out of the UK.
Ms Braverman has previously said schools do not have to accommodate transgender pupils. She said schools did not have to use trans students’ chosen names or pronouns or let them wear a uniform that aligns with their gender identity. She also added that the schools should only affirm the gender preference of a child where it differs from their birth sex "upon the advice of an independent medical practitioner".
Ms Braverman has also criticised the civil service as being too "woke", reportedly lashing out earlier this year at the decision by the Government Legal Department to go on "divisive" diversity training at the taxpayers' expense.
The new Home Secretary was also heavily criticised earlier this year for saying she was considering whether to refer the case of four people cleared of tearing down a statue of slave trader Edward Colston to the Court of Appeal.
What challenges lay ahead for Suella Braverman?
The Home Office is regarded as the most daunting of any government department for a new secretary of state and Suella Braverman will walk into the Home Office knowing there are very significant political and structural problems to overcome.
Rwanda
On the political side, the record numbers of migrants arriving on the Kent coast is the most pressing challenge. Braverman’s predecessor Priti Patel’s policy solution – threatening them with being sent to Rwanda – is currently the subject of a judicial review in the High Court. It may prove not to be lawful and there are questions as to whether it really is the deterrent Priti Patel believed.
Asylum
The structural issues include an asylum system that is a mess. The cost of the UK’s asylum system has topped £2 billion a year, with the highest number of claims for two decades and record delays for people awaiting a decision. Besides this, tens of thousands of people seeking sanctuary in the UK stuck in government-funded hotels at a cost of more than £4m a day, of which around £1 million is being spent on Afghan refugees who fled the Taliban takeover while long-term accommodation is sought.
Crime
Police forces in England and Wales have recorded the highest number of crimes in 20 years, driven by a sharp rise in offences including fraud, rape and violent attacks.
The new Home Secretary will be under pressure to crack down particularly on gun and knife crime in light of a spate of violent attacks and shootings, as well as sex crimes, amid heightened concerns about the safety of women and girls especially. While crime is at historically low levels, there are concerns that the cost-of-living crisis may see a spike in acquisitive offences.
Policing
There is also the task of fulfilling the promise to hire 20,000 new police officers by March 2023. A report by MPs recently warned the Home Office faces “significant challenges” in reaching the target because the efforts could be hampered by an increasingly competitive employment market and a decline in public trust in policing. The total number of police officers hired so far stood at 13,790 at the end of June.
Passports
The continued delays in processing passport applications – with fears this may not improve before the end of the year – is another urgent task for Ms. Braverman to confront.
More than 550,000 passports were waiting to be dealt with at the end of June and it was still taking around 10 weeks to process 10% (around 55,000) of applications instead of the standard three weeks, according to passport office directors.
So, the next few days, weeks and months will be a pretty busy and challenging time for the country’s new Home Secretary.
BBC Hindi Link : https://www.bbc.com/hindi/international-62824858
Comments