Suella Braverman, the far-right star who aspires to lead the British Conservative Party

2023-11-09 23:50:42

One of Suella Braverman’s most repeated quotes is a copy of an advertisement from a conservative, anti-tax group in the United States from two decades ago. In a speech to the House of Commons last autumnthe British Home Secretary blamed the protests of the group Just Stop Oil – the same group that broke the glass of the Venus in the mirror by Velázquez in the National Gallery in London -, to Labor and Liberal Democrats and to part of the “readers of the Guardian, tofu consumers, progres anti-growth.” She used the word “avocado“, a mixture of the “woke” and the “illuminati” of the illustration.

The phrase is inspired by an advertisement by the conservative Republican group Club for Growth that in 2003 was campaigning against Howard Dean, then the Democratic favorite to face George W. Bush in the 2004 elections. The cartoon attacked “drinkers slatssushi eaters, Volvo drivers, newspaper readers New York Times”. There was no derogatory use of the word wokebut the description included the piercing and the love of Hollywood. Dean lost the primaries, but that phrase remained as a simplification of the “culture war” that the United Kingdom and other European countries have imported 20 years late. Braverman, in fact, was in those years in New York, when she was a lawyer in her twenties and she passed the exam to be able to practice law there as well.