Theresa May and the Coming Doom

Theresa May said the decision to call a snap election came to her while on a walking holiday. She needed, so the reasoning goes, to strengthen her mandate, and therefore her negotiating hand, for the Brexit talks with Brussells, and to prevent Brexit being resisted by opposition or backbench MPs. The first of these explanations is nonsense: all of the EU country leaders will have mandates to represent their countries' interests, so Theresa's mandate will be nothing special (unless, unreported, EU leaders have been sniggering at her for not actually having been elected herself, for having taken over the party relatively unopposed - the other leadership candidates stepped down before the vote was taken to the members). Yanis Varoufakis says his mistake when dealing with the EU was assuming a large mandate from the Greek people would give him a negotiating advantage: the Brussels bureaucracy neutralizes the democratic mandates of specific nations, so all nations, theoretically but not in practice, are supposed to be equal when deciding the future of the Union. The second is also nonsense: opposition MPs voted overwhelmingly in favour of triggering article 50.

Popular opinion on the left was that the election was called because the Conservative party was under investigation for electoral fraud, been fined the maximum amount, and cases against individual MPs had been passed on to police. If MPs were found guilty, triggering by-elections, public opinion of the party would drop and the Conservatives may have lost their majority. It was also a good time to call the election because the Conservatives were way ahead in the polls, and, so far, whenever the polls have been wrong it has been to Labour's detriment.

There is a more interesting and depressing explanation for the snap election occurring now. Since July 2016 May&Co have been preparing for the Brexit negotiations and coming up with little beyond vacuous soundbites ('Brexit means Brexit!' 'Red, White and Blue Brexit!'). Theresa campaigned for Remain, but has transformed into a hardcore Brexiteer, and perhaps over the past year has realized how complex and difficult Brexit will be.

The projected date for the end of the negotiations is 2019; the next election was supposed to be 2020.

Perhaps May accepted Brexit was going to be a disaster - or, at least, not as good for most of her supporters as they are expecting - and decided to call the election so the next one, five years away, will be in 2022, so the Conservatives have 2 more years of power and, they hope, an overwhelmingly majority so they push through whatever is necessary to deal with the fallout from Brexit being a disaster.

In August 2011, riots erupted across England. Buildings were burnt down. Shops looted. Police were deployed en masse to calm it down. I remember not being able to catch a train because Manchester city centre had been cordoned off. I also remember they were filming 'The Dark Knight Rises' at Wollaton Hall while this was going on, and I wondered when watching it whether the riots had influenced Nolan&Co.

Since 2010, the police budget has been cut each year - we now have fewer police officers per capita than we did in the 1970s. Crime rates are increasing, and the police, like the NHS and other public servies, are overstretched. Home Secretary Amber Rudd has refused to rule out further cuts to the police. I find it easy to imagine a terrible backlash against the government should Brexit be the disaster it is looking increasingly likely to be. I wonder whether the reduced police force would be able to cope.

Theresa May is one of the supervillain MPs whose opinions scare me a little (a lot). She's not a fan of human rights - while campaigning for Remain, she said she liked the EU but would like to get out of the European Convention on Human Rights (which is separate to the EU). The only European country not a member of the ECHR is Belarus, the last dictatorship in Europe. Even Russia is a member. Even Putin pretends to care about human rights. We have a Prime Minister who doesn't even pretend.

While Home Secretary she was in charge of reducing immigration to the tens of thousands, which she failed at: net immigration reached record highs. I can imagine she was told to appear tough on immigrants to win votes, hence there were 'Immigrants Go Home!' vans driving around the country - a showy scheme which was incredibly ineffective. The economy has grown rather slowly since 2010, and that is with record immigration increasing the number or workers and spenders - some economists say the Conservatives deliberately let immigration rise so high to cover up how their austerity policies were negatively impacting the economy.

The Conservative narrative for this election is that it is a contest between Theresa May & Her Team versus Jeremy Corbyn & the Coalition of Chaos. The party aspect is being heavily played down, it is like we are being encouraged to vote for a president not a party.

Now, campaigning, she is not meeting the public. She is not answering questions unless they have been pre-vetted, and will not even let journalists hold microphones at events (so it can be switched off if they move off script). She is not being challenged. She is not debating other party leaders. She is hiding from scrutiny and democratic accountability.

Tabloid headlines have been horrible: 'CRUSH THE SABOTEURS', 'ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE', being the most awful. The shameless pro-Tory bias from media outlets has been depressing. The Investigatory Powers Act gave our government the most sweeping surveillance powers in all of the Western world.

My imagination finds it too easy to extrapolate from our contemporary starting point to an even-more-dystopian near future, where the Conservatives have a super majority and can pass whatever they want, where they are not held to account, where opposition to the Dear Leader is almost unheard of, where Brexit is a disaster, where riots occur, where the Conservatives declare a state of emergency and... we become a one party state.

I'm hoping it's just my imagination getting carried away because I've read too much dystopian fiction. I'm not a massive Corbyn fan, though I do like him. I don't think he's going to be PM: Conservative majority is looking quite certain, but we can make sure there is still some opposition to hold them to account, however ineffectual it may be.

In 2004, Conservative Shadow Chancellor Oliver Letwin (who was in May's Cabinet) allegedly told a private meeting that the NHS would not exist within five years if the Conservatives won a majority. Look at the NHS crisis, 'a humanitarian crisis' according to the Red Cross. Look at the NHS cyber attack - the government decided not to continue paying for Windows XP support, leaving the system vulnerable. Look at the NHS recruitment crisis, fewer new doctors and nurses being trained. The NHS nurses bursary being scrapped. Junior doctors going on strike for the first time in 40 years. This summer, nurses are going on strike for the first time ever. The NHS is being destroyed.

This ended up a lot longer and more desultory than I expected. I need to go now but I would have written more - I need a haircut. Hope you enjoyed reading this; apologies for any spelling errors - I haven't had time to proofread because I really need to go get that haircut.