Braverman knows no love of neighbour
The migration crisis offers gospel opportunity, writes George Pitcher, but not to this Home Secretary
Where is the gospel in Suella Braverman? I ask that question not in a rhetorical, more-Christian-than-thou sort of way, which itself would not be very gospel. I mean, specifically, does the UK Home Secretary speak good news for the poor?
The poor here, as in the gospel of Luke, are not just the economically deprived, but the oppressed, the marginalised and the vulnerable. The poor in spirit.
In her keynote speech this week to a right-wing think-tank in Washington DC, she warns that Europe is now at a “critical juncture” and failure to address illegal migration will “create the conditions for more extreme politics.”
This is an odd sort of warning, as she appears simultaneously to be putting down her marker for leading this more extreme politics. That much is evident in her declared desire to dismantle the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, with all its annoying commitments to protecting the world’s weakest peoples.
Extremist
Braverman is an extremist when she speaks like this – and she has form. She has already expressed the merits of taking Britain out of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights and now seems to have Number 10’s support for abandoning it.
The trouble is that her extremism is diffused by the widely acknowledged scale of the migration problem. Less frightening politicians agree with her on this challenge facing Europe.
As German chancellor, Angela Merkel said in 2010 that Europe’s multicultural experiment “had utterly failed” (and there was a clue to her cultural heritage in the name of her political party, the Christian Democratic Union). About the same time, French president Nicolas Sarkozy raised issues of national “identity”. Even David Cameron, one of the UK’s more lackadaisical prime ministers (in a strong field led by Boris Johnson) attacked “state multiculturism” and called for “muscular liberalism.”.
Contempt
What sets Braverman apart is her apparent contempt for human rights legislation, as revealed in her choice of words that it was her “dream” to see asylum seekers despatched on a plane to Rwanda. None has been, so she dreams on.
What is at the root of her hostility to human rights seems to be an almost sociopathic disregard for human dignity, which was at the core of the West’s post-war resolution at the end of the 1940s. Her attack on the Refugee Convention is an attack on the whole UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights that spawned it. And that places human dignity as its firm foundation and states, as its title affirms, that its quality is universal.
Dignity is not only at the heart of the declaration, it is at its head. Its preamble starts with the statement that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Its very first article states that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
Essential Christian ethos
The UN was not and is not a nominal Christian institution, but its Declaration is deeply congruent with an essential Christian ethos and its doctrine of imago dei, that all humans bear the image of God. It resonates, furthermore, with the gospel notion of neighbour and particularly with the answer to the question “who is my neighbour?”
Braverman displays no notion of the neighbour, the desperate person in need. Her only imperative is to stop them coming with “strong borders”, to turn them away. In attempting to answer the question in global terms, she passes by on the other side.
This is not to promote a migration free-for-all as an alternative. This is the position of which wantonly we’re accused when we point a condemnatory finger at Braverman. “Well what would you do?” they ask, as if migration offers only a binary choice between Braverman and entire freedom of movement.
Demanding
The question of who is our neighbour is much more demanding than that. It requires us to cross an emotional road to his and her aid. Perversely, Braverman quotes an American study showing that only after countries reach a per-capita income of $10,000 dollars does an appetite for emigration subside.
This she takes to be an absurd greed, the response to which can only be to stop them coming. But the alternative aspiration must be to develop economies to levels that the motivation for migration dissipates. If northern and western economies did so, they would not only be acting as good neighbours at a global level, but would also serve their own interests.
Gilded economic castles
We are called to serve our neighbours in the world in this way, rather than to lock ourselves in gilded economic castles. To answer that call won’t be easy. But it is way too easy to assume, as Braverman does, that the UK’s best interests are served only by isolating itself from challenges of migration.
Politicians are elected to serve the United Kingdom, but both the gospel - and by extension the UN it informs - recognise that our kingdom is not of this world. Unfortunately, like Pontius Pilate’s, Braverman’s entirely is so.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest
A version of this column first appeared on PremierChristianity