London: British Home Secretary Suella Braverman faced heavy criticism on Tuesday for describing the arrival of asylum seekers as an invasion, with lawmakers across the political spectrum warning of the risk of using inflammatory language. His remarks came a day after a man used a firebomb to attack an immigration processing center in the port city of Dover. Braverman, who is fighting to save her job after breaching security rules, told parliament on Monday she was trying to prevent an “invasion of our south coast” in the context of migrants arriving in small boats across the English Channel. was working.
Robert Jenrick, an immigration minister in Braverman’s interior ministry, said his boss’s language reflected the scale of the challenge, with a record number of around 40,000 asylum seekers arriving in Britain by small boats so far this year.
But he added: “I think in my role you have to choose your terminology wisely and we don’t want to repeat events like what happened in Dover.”
Braverman was appointed interior minister last week by new prime minister Rishi Sunak, six days after he resigned from the same role for violating ministerial rules by sending a sensitive government document via his personal email.
He has also been accused of failing to listen to legal advice on the prolonged detention of migrants at another processing centre, and of failing to secure adequate accommodation, both claims he has denied.
Roger Gale, a legislator from Braverman’s governing Conservative Party, whose constituency includes that center, said his predecessors had found alternative accommodations such as hotels, but that had stopped when he took office.
“I do not accept or rely on this word from the Home Secretary,” he told Times Radio. “She’s really only interested in playing right wing.”
The site conditions at Manston in Kent were described last week by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration David Neill as “very dilapidated”. One report found that people were sleeping on the floor, some did not have telephone access and were not allowed to close the toilet doors completely.
Intended to house about 1,500 migrants for less than 24 hours at a time, the number has more than doubled, with an Afghan family saying they were there for 32 days.
“Let’s stop pretending they’re all refugees in trouble, the whole country knows that’s not true,” Braverman told parliament.
Opposition Labor Party home affairs spokeswoman Yvette Cooper said the rhetoric had deteriorated in line with the government’s performance.
“Any Home Secretary who was serious about public safety or national security would not use excessively inflammatory language following a dangerous petrol bomb attack on the Dover Preliminary Processing Center,” she said.