One of the most astounding things about 2016 is the way that millions of people have just uncritically rote learned the right-wing media trope that Theresa May is some kind of "safe pair of hands" and then set about mindlessly repeating it as if it's their own opinion, rather than something bizarrely counter-factual that they've been programmed to say.
Even the remotest familiarity with Theresa May's track record at the Home Office makes this "safe pair of hands" story look absolutely ridiculous. This is a woman who promised to cut net migration to below 100,000 but actually oversaw the biggest inward migration peaks in all of British history!
Not only does May have a track record of brazen incompetence, she's also a hard-right authoritarian with a penchant for totalitarian policies like secret courts, discriminatory immigration rules for British spouses, hopelessly flawed, evidence-free and unworkable drugs laws, unprecedented state snooping powers and the abolition of our human rights.
Even if we ignore her track record of appalling incompetence and savage authoritarianism, it should be easy to see what a horrifying person she is:
- In her inaugural speech as Prime Minister she cried crocodile tears about how white working class kids are so unlikely to make it to university, then immediately set about scrapping all of the grants and bursaries that allowed kids from low-income families to get a university education.
- She gave a disgustingly obnoxious right-wing Twitter troll a massive and unprecedented "shout out" by quoting him at Prime Minister's Questions and writing him into the permanent Hansard record as a consequence.
- She blatantly evades answering the questions she's asked and continually talks in mind-numbingly stupid platitudes like "Brexit means Brexit" and "living within our means" as if the public are just a gigantic collection of total halfwits who can be easily fobbed off with ridiculous economic fairy stories and tautological gibberish.
- She decided to completely screw over the UK taxpayer by continuing on with Cameron and Osborne's shambolic scheme to bribe the French and Chinese into building our nuclear power infrastructure for us by guaranteeing them double the market price for electricity for 35 years and then promising to load the astronomical nuclear waste storage costs onto the UK taxpayer too!
- She introduced the most extreme state surveillance laws in any developed nation that will allow the employees of all manner of non-terrorism related state agencies (the Food Standards Agency, the Gambling Commission, the Health and Safety Executive ...) to snoop on the private communications data of innocent people. Additionally the Snoopers' Charter will also allow the police and secret services to lie in court in order to secure convictions!
- She is determined to scrap the concept of parliamentary sovereignty so that she can make up the law as she goes along to suit herself and the rogues gallery of bankers, hedge fund managers, tax-dodgers, landed gentry, property speculators and private health corporations who bankroll the Tory party.
It's obvious that the Mainstream media have helped to create this misleadingly positive impression by completely failing to hold her to account for her blunders (imagine the absolute furore if Jeremy Corbyn had quoted a vile misogynistic Twitter troll in parliament) or her dictatorial Snoopers' Charter that would have made the East German Statsi turn green with envy.
It's astonishing that people allow themselves to be hoodwinked like this but it's undeniable that they have been. So what is it that people like about Theresa May?
Perhaps there's just something in the British psyche that makes an awful lot of people adore Theresa May's overly strict nanny persona? Perhaps millions of people share the same shameful and deeply buried perversion that wants some kind of dominatrix nanny figure to punish and abuse them with impunity? What other explanation is there?
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