So here’s the thing: I think Braverman probably should be sacked, but not for the reasons everyone seems to be talking about. Obviously, it is not politically convenient to have the Home Secretary in a massive public sparring fest with the Met. But fundamentally, the Met has been exposed repeatedly in the last few weeks for having become awfully cuddly with Hamas sympathizers and/or boosters. Maybe someone else should have been the one to call a spade a spade, but Braverman wasn’t wrong to point out a serious problem with the Met. Where she was wrong, however, was in writing what she did in the same oped about… Northern Ireland. ….

In so doing, Braverman displays a complete ignorance of facts pertaining to Northern Ireland, different factions there, what they each do, and how they typically operate. The connections she has attempted to make are what, say, a sixteen year-old non-Brit might think based on rhetoric they have heard advanced and inaccurate, cartoonish characterizations they have seen drawn, by the “de-colonizers,” the “woke,” and others on the left who try to lump different categories of people they perceive as victims together despite very disparate histories, social trends and cultures. This oped is sort of like what a very young intern would produce if they took all of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s talking points at face value and then wrote a non-Socialist “rebuttal” to them.

[It’s an astoundingly stupid take by Braverman, although hardly unprecedented. During the Troubles, both sides adopted the iconography of the Middle East conflict, with the IRA aligning with the PLO and the unionists with Israel. There’s a history to this stupidity that long precedes Braverman. — Ed]