The British home secretary, Suella Braverman, attempting to secure her place as the flag-bearer of the Conservative Party’s law-and-order wing, on Tuesday railed against unauthorized migrants, human rights laws, and “woke” critics of her hard-line policies.

In her keynote speech at Manchester to the governing party’s annual conference, Ms. Braverman called migration a “hurricane” that would bring “millions more immigrants to these shores, uncontrolled and unmanageable,” adding that it would make her parents’ generation look like a “gust of wind.”

According to the British Home Office, more than 25,000 people have been detected crossing the English Channel in small boats this year alone, and nearly 50,000 migrants crossed the channel in 2022. 

Ms. Braverman, who gave a prelude to today’s address last week when she blasted a 1951 UN convention as outdated, said that U.K. governments had been “far too squeamish about being smeared as racist to properly bring order to the chaos.” The Conservatives, she said, would give Britain “strong borders.”

She hailed the government’s moves to make it harder for migrants to seek asylum in Britain, including a law that requires anyone arriving in small boats across the English Channel to be detained and then deported permanently to their home nation or third countries. The latest government figures show a record 175,000 people in Britain are waiting for decisions on asylum claims — an increase of 44 percent since June 2022.

Despite being passed by Parliament earlier this year, the law hasn’t yet taken effect. The only third country that has agreed to take migrants from Britain is Rwanda, and no one has yet been sent there as that plan is being challenged in British courts.

Ms. Braverman’s speech to party activists contained little new policy and had the feel of an election rally. Prime Minister Sunak’s Conservatives are lagging behind Labour in opinion polls with an election due by the end of 2024. Many members attending the four-day conference are looking ahead to a leadership contest that would likely follow a defeat.

Ms. Braverman, a Cambridge-educated lawyer, is unofficially campaigning for the support of the party’s tighter curbs on migration and openly questioning a progressive social agenda that has taken hold in large sections of the British political space. She quipped that the Human Rights Act should be called the “Criminal Rights Act,” said trans women shouldn’t be allowed on single-sex female hospital wards, and vowed to remove “gender ideology, white privilege, anti-British history” from education and cultural institutions.

Ms. Braverman said her critics had “tried to make me into a hate figure, because I tell the truth — the blunt unvarnished truth about what is happening in our country.”  She added: “We stand with the many, the law-abiding, hard-working common-sense majority, against the few, the privileged woke minority with their luxury beliefs who wield influence out of proportion to their numbers,”

Delegates peppered  her speech with loud rounds of applause.  

It’s an open question whether Ms. Braverman’s tough views will work on the party, or the country. The head of political research at pollster Ipsos, Gideon Skinner, told a meeting on immigration at the conference that Britons are divided on immigration and on how to deal with migrants who try to reach U.K. shores on small boats — but that the issue ranks behind the economy, inflation, and the health system as a priority for voters.

The conference ends Wednesday with a speech by Mr. Sunak, who will try to shift gloomy polls and unite his fractious party by promising he’ll make tough decisions “to do what I believe is right for the country in the long term.”

“I think for too long politicians have just taken the easy way out focused on the short term. I want to do things differently,” Mr. Sunak told the BBC on Tuesday.

Judging by Ms. Braverman’s barnstormer at Manchester today, one of his top ministers just beat him to the punch.