The nation we were born into

 

Subject: The nation we were born into.



 


As the news breaks about the return of David Cameron as Home Secretary in place of Suella Braverman the camera panned down the Close which encloses the front entrance to  Downing Street and through the heavy gates at the bottom one could see the citizen passed in their cars or on the bus, totally devoid of any contact with the people arriving in Downing Street in their ministerial cars coming in the hope of a job in the government.
This other world made more so because of the security allocated to them was not in place 70 years ago when as a ten year old I stood outside the door of No 10 whilst my dad took a photo. In those days the general public had access to Downing Street, there were no cement blocks around the Palace of Westminster (the House of Lords and the House of Commons) protecting the building and its occupants against a car being driven with explosives to act as a bomb.
The term terrorist was reserved for countries overseas not our green and gentle land graced as it was with a Parliament which occasionally was prone to a sex scandal or two, events which today wouldn’t raise an eyebrow.
The texture of our country has changed out of all recognition, it’s economics, it’s ethnic make up, its assumption of power have altered such that a person like me are cast rummaging around for some sort of equivalence to the nation we were born into.
Today there is a hesitancy, one could even say an almost paranoid effort to reject any suspicion of the ethnicity of the terrorist, it’s as if their is a suspicion that terrorism had laid dormant, an old fashioned concept of British eccentricity and not an imported reference taken from overseas.
I recognise that I am on dangerous ground, hypothesising about race and its questionable effect on the make up of our country, especially in its effect on violence. Society has been cowed into silence about the infiltration of the foreign gang culture, Nigerian, Russian, Albanian, the Balkan countries and the evil influence that religious jihad has had. The powers that be have wished to avoid calling a spade a spade for fear of the social backlash they fear from the ever increasing foreign presence in our country, a presence who might feel unbridgeable and share some of the disquiet in public.
Suella Braverman of whom we have heard so much recently is accused of stirring the pot and rousing the country out of its complacency. The political establishment are terrified to disturb the benefits of political ignorance but she of Indian parenthood comes from a country, ruled by Hindu autocracy with little or no time for any non Hindu addenda. Braverman  like Priti Patel and Sajid Javid were all born to parents from the subcontinent and are well versed in the complexities of religious orthodoxy, they are far better versed than Labour MP Yvette Cooper who has spent a lifetime pursuing the altruism  of multiculturalism and instead have the background to recognise the potential danger of ultra orthodox communities.
So without her we lose the blunt siren warning that we are sleepwalking into chaos. After years of platitudinal cot rocking when the police were encouraged to go easy on everyone from shoplifting to Pakistani grooming gangs, where prisons have closed their doors for lack of space, where a certain cohort of our youth have turned feral and show no interest in the needs of the society around them, it took an Indian to warn us of the danger and therefore it became necessary to silence her.
Popularism the dark art of presenting complex things in a simplified way and therefore appealing to the majority to vote for them (Brexit was a perfect example) has the danger of assuming they, the establishment  know what’s best for you but Braverman carried a message that the silent majority have worried about for a decade or two. Seen from a two up two down with little job security the world seems a very different place. No one is talking for them or to them and for good or evil Bravermans message was certainly popularist.