I just sat down to watch the evening news and almost instantly flew into a boiling hot rage: the home secretary Braverman today gave a speech to a Right-wing Conservative group about bringing down migration rates while still ensuring the country has a healthy workforce. “There is ‘no good reason’ the UK cannot train its own lorry drivers and fruit pickers to bring immigration down, Suella Braverman has said.” She then went on to arrogantly insist that it isn’t racist or xenophobic to ‘want to control our borders’.

I’m sorry, but that really, really boils my blood. As the saying goes, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and swims like a duck, it’s a zarking duck! Braverman was obviously trying to placate the consciouses of those narrow-minded tory voters who resent people from Africa or Asia living nearby, and who think immigrants have somehow flooded the UK workforce; yet still see themselves – and want to be seen – as good, upstanding, outlooking people. Yet what such xenophobes, Braverman included, deliberately forget is that this country would have crumbled long ago without immigrants to this country. They are our backbone; they are part of what makes this country so rich. To want to reject such people, to refuse to welcome them, betrays a deep fear and loathing of those they perceive as ‘other’. They can insult are intelligences by denying it all they like, but Suella Braverman are xenophobes, and nothing more. I find the fact that she has the affront to deny something so manifestly obvious, in order to make her policies seem more worthy than they are, infuriatingly arrogant.