What Suella Braverman should have said to Joan Salter

Last week the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, was confronted at a constituency meeting by a Holocaust survivor called Joan Salter. The 83-year-old courteously took Braverman to task for what she described as her inflammatory comments concerning the 45,000 people who arrived illegally in Britain last year, people Ms Salter called ‘refugees’. She said that words such as ‘invasion’, reminded her of the language ‘used to dehumanise and justify the murder of my family and millions of others.’ Salter, who was awarded an MBE for her work in educating people about the horrors of the Holocaust, arrived in Britain from Belgium, via the United States, in 1947.  

The incident with Braverman was recorded by a pressure group called Freedom from Torture, who as they explained in an op-ed in Monday’s Independent, accompanied Salter to Fareham and ‘filmed the encounter and placed a video of it on social media.’

They did so, said the op-ed, to draw attention to what they described as the Home Secretary’s ‘dehumanising language’ which has ‘shocked the conscience of Britain’.