London:
Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman won the newly-created Fareham and Waterlooville constituency in the 2024 UK general election. The Conservative Party leader defeated Labour’s Gemma Furnivall by a margin of over 6,000 votes.
Following her victory, the right-wing leader issued an apology to the public for the Conservative Party’s performance over the past 14 years. “I’m sorry that my party didn’t listen to you,” she said in a press conference. “The Conservative party has let you down.”
The Indian-origin MP acknowledged that the party had failed to keep its promises and acted entitled to the voters’ support without delivering on their commitments. “You, the great British people, voted for us for over 14 years, and we did not keep our promises, despite promising time after time that we would do those things,” she said.
Ms Braverman talked about the need for the party to learn from its mistakes. She stated, “Because if we don’t, bad, as tonight has been for my party, we’ll have many worse nights to come.”
The former Home Secretary won the Fareham and Waterlooville seat after a challenging re-election bid. She was fired by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in 2023 for publicly accusing the Metropolitan Police of bias in handling pro-Palestine protests. Ms Braverman, taking a stance against the Gaza rallies, called pro-Palestine demonstrations “hate marches” and suggested waving a Palestinian flag could be a criminal offence. She also accused police of favouritism and ignoring “pro-Palestinian mobs.”
After her dismissal from office, she criticised the government’s handling of migration. She argued that the pressure on public services is “unsustainable” and demanded stricter measures to reduce migration.
Ms Braverman had also spoken out against the record high migration figures, calling it a “slap in the face” to the British public who have consistently voted to reduce migration. “The pressure on housing, the NHS, schools, wages, and community cohesion, is unsustainable. When do we say: enough is enough?” she had said. She argued that Brexit provided the tools to control migration, and it was “time to use them.” She had also argued that some people were homeless as a “lifestyle choice.”