So farewell, Suella Braverman (let’s hope): this right-wing populist has sunk her Tory leader bid with an LGBT comment (allegedly).

Strangely enough, she has proven Mainly Macro author Professor Simon Wren-Lewis right in his description of right-wing populists.

In his latest article, Prof Wren-Lewis described right-wing populists thus:

What do I mean by ‘right wing’ and ‘populism’? The right wing populist gets votes by focusing on nationalism and immigration rather than privatisation and tax cuts.

Typically a populist will do two things with any division on social issues.

The first is to elevate concern about change into fear of change and concern about difference into fear of difference. In the case of minorities or outsiders, politicians that want to profit from fear need to suggest that these minorities or outsiders are not just different, but represent a threat to the national majority. The second thing a populist does is to pretend that rather than there being a range of views on social issues in any country, instead there is a ‘silent majority’ of social conservatives whose views have been suppressed or ignored by a ‘liberal elite’. The populist becomes the embodiment of this silent majority, and this enables the ‘will of the people’ to override elements of a pluralist democracy (the courts, the media etc) that get in the populist’s way. This, together with attacking the human rights of minorities and opponents, makes right wing populism to varying degrees authoritarian as well as being socially divisive. The fact that [a] populist’s claims are mostly untrue means that populists tend to lie much of the time.

In a speech to the National Conservatism summit in Washington (Nat C – the jokes ought to be writing themselves), Braverman said:

“Our problem is us. Our problem is that the liberal Conservatives who trashed the Tory party think it was everyone’s fault but their own,” she said.

“My party governed as liberals and we were defeated as liberals. But seemingly, as ever, it is Conservatives who are to blame.”

So a “liberal elite” governing the Conservative Party scuppered its chance of winning the election by ignoring a mythical, silent Conservative majority – according to Suella Braverman. You can see why she got dumped, can’t you?

Then there’s this:

She then attacked the flying of the Progress Pride flag on government buildings “as if they were occupied territory”, before adding: “The Progress flag says one monstrous thing to me: that I was a member of a government that presided over the mutilation of children in our hospitals.”

The Progress flag is a version of the Pride emblem that has been updated with black, brown, pink, pale blue and white stripes, to represent other marginalised groups in the LGBTQ+ community, including people of colour, the trans community, and those living with HIV/AIDS.

Putting aside concerns about the kind of surgery Braverman mentioned, we can tell that Braverman was peddling fear of difference and a suggestion of a threat to the rest of the nation.

And her fellow Tories – instead of agreeing with her – dumped her.

This, in turn, suggests that Prof Wren-Lewis was wrong to suggest that the big story of the election was how right-wing populism failed at the ballot box – although, realistically, it’s probably just that Braverman is so right-wing that she left the other right-wing populists in the Tory Party behind.

She’ll probably defect to Reform UK in a while.

Source: ‘It’s over for Suella’: Braverman’s leadership bid dead after LGBT comments

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