Suella Braverman fired: 5 most controversial comments from former UK Home Secretary

In October 2022, Braverman expressed her reservations about Britain’s trade deal with India, saying it could increase immigration to the UK. She added that Indian migrants made up the largest number of visa overstayers in Britain and the 2021 deal, signed by her predecessor Priti Patel, had “not necessarily worked very well”.

In April 2023, during an interview with Sky News, Braverman alleged that groups of men, almost all British Pakistanis, were involved in the sexual abuse of children and young women in the UK.

She said, “What's clear is that what we've seen is a practice whereby vulnerable White English girls, sometimes in care, sometimes in challenging circumstances, are being pursued and raped, drugged, and harmed by gangs of British-Pakistani men who work in child abuse rings or networks.”

Braverman once again grabbed headlines last year after she pushed for her policy of sending asylum seekers who arrived in the UK to Rwanda. She commented in response to an audience member on a television show and received criticism from political opponents, international courts, and human rights organisations. They were concerned about deporting people to a country with “a questionable human rights record and are angry that the plan will include modern slavery victims and children,” a report by The Independent said.

This comment by Braverman came after campaigners of Just Stop Oil — a British environmental activist group — organised large-scale protests in multiple cities of the UK in October last year. She called the protestors and the opposition “the coalition of chaos”. The minister also blamed Labour and Liberal Democrats for blocking a crime and policing bill in the House of Commons that would have helped the police “remove the protesters sooner”.

Earlier in November, Braverman in a post on X, wrote that people live on the streets “as a lifestyle choice”. She said Britain would support “those who are genuinely homeless”, otherwise “British cities will go the way of places in the US like San Francisco and Los Angeles, where weak policies have led to an explosion of crime, drug taking, and squalor.”