So, British Prime Minister Theresa May has finally agreed a departure date. She hasn’t, infuriatingly, agreed to a date when Britain leaves the European Union, but she has agreed that she will leave Number Ten Downing Street, on June 7th.
For month after month the British people have looked on in despair as Mrs May failed to deliver the Brexit that the majority of us voted for. The agreement that she and her senior negotiators made with the European Union, looked to many of us like an instrument of surrender. It tied Britain to the EU but without having even any minimal say in how this increasingly power-hungry empire acts. It would have turned Britain into a colony with less say over our own affairs than Canada did when it was under British Empire Dominion status in the late 19th century.
Theresa May really wanted the job of Prime Minister, if you have followed her career to any degree of detail at all, it has been one where she has worked to position herself to be considered as suitable to be in Number Ten. Unfortunately for Mrs May, when the chips were down and there was a crisis being caused by anti-democratic Remainers, she failed to deal properly with the crisis. She called an ill-advised General Election and lost whatever majority in Parliament she had inherited from former PM David Cameron. She then had the now much more difficult task of getting her awful EU agreement, negotiated in part by rabidly pro-EU government operatives, past a House of Commons where her party had a reduced political bite. It was also now a House where there was now a cabal of Remainers working to keep Britain locked into the EU.
Mrs May has also presided over a widening gap between government and the governed. The growing knowledge of the extent of the surrender in May’s EU agreement and the sight of Members of Parliament openly reneging on a democratic vote to leave the EU, has caused trust in politics to fall to a new low among the general public. Mrs May’s decisions regarding the management of the EU exit process and her limp-wristed response to the horrific Islamic terror attacks in 2017. After the Westminster Bridge attack, where a Muslim killed five people including a police officer in a vehicular and stabbing attack, Mrs May managed to make both a statement outside Number Ten and a statement to the House of Commons that pissed a lot of people off. In both statements Mrs May took the decision to not name the Islamic ideology that created this murderer. Mrs May has both failed to deal with Europe and failed to deal with Britain’s various Islamic problems.
Because of her failures, it’s now time to put her in perspective as to just how bad she was as PM. All PM’s have good and bad spots and sometimes it takes time for them to be properly and coldly identified after some historical distance has been put behind them. She didn’t take Britain into the EU and preside over industrial strife, a stagnating economy and power cuts as did Edward Heath. She didn’t openly despise the British working class or prop open the doors of the nation to excessive levels of and inappropriate types of immigration like Tony Blair. Some commentators have compared Mrs May to being below the Eighteenth century Prime Minister Lord North in terms of reputation.
This comparison is being made because Lord North lost Britain her American colonies but Theresa May nearly lost Britain its absolute sovereignty. I can see the point, Lord North just lost a few unruly colonies when there were other more vital battles to fight elsewhere, whereas Theresa May nearly lost Britain itself completely as an independent nation. At least Lord North resigned following a vote of no confidence, Mrs May on the other hand is having to be dragged kicking and screaming out of Number Ten. I don’t know what her final reputation will be when the history books are written about this time, but I would not be surprised to find some unflattering comparisons between Mrs May and Baroness Thatcher. Despite her rhetoric, Theresa May has been no Iron Lady.
The race is now on to find a new Conservative Party leader and by extension a new Prime Minister. How long we will have that Prime Minister for is anyone’s guess. The next General Election is not until 2022 so the new PM will have a very short time and a Parliament who may be against him or her, in order to undo the damage done to the EU exit process and to the reputation of British politics.
Whoever leads the Tory Party and the Government in my view should be a Brexiteer. It strikes me as wrong that the Government should not be led by someone who is fundamentally opposed to a decision made by the public after the decision making power was delegated to the public. So far out of those who have declared their candidacy, many of them just make me go ‘meh!’ Some of them I’d vote for, if I could trust them to deliver what I and 17million other Britons voted for, such as Boris Johnson or Andrea Leadsom. There are others, such as Michael Gove who I wouldn’t buy a used car from. I used to support him when he was at Education but as time has passed it is plain to see that he’s all mouth and trousers. This is because there is little effective that has been done in tackling the Left wing ‘blob’ in the education sector. This ‘blob’ of educationalists are still calling the shots, still undermining academic vigour and pushing leftist ideology onto children. His performance in Environment has been not much better or could even be worse, as he seems to have become a creature of the various Red-Green lobby groups. Gove I believe would capitulate to Brussels if he thought it was expedient to do so. Britain might be jumping out of the Remainiac frying pan and into the fire with Gove in charge.
We are stuck with May for another few weeks. Soon the leadership election will be held and it will be a bitter fight indeed. Personally out of the front runners, even though I don’t totally trust them, I think that Leadsom or Johnson would make the best of the poison chalice that the keys to Number Ten now represent. Leadsom is a skilful political operator who came out of her previous leadership bid with some degree of respect for her intact. Johnson is the sort of ruthless political thug when he needs to be of the sort that Britain should have facing the European Union at the moment.
Whoever from the Tory Party who leads the country onto 2022, provided it’s not a Remainer or a cynical empty vessel like Gove, then it must surely be a better leader than the one that is departing?Mrs May leaves behind a shattered Conservative Party that has grown remote from its roots and a divided nation where a major political realignment is in the early stages of taking place. I believe that few other post 1960’s Prime Ministers have ‘achieved’ that. Even the jump from Labour rule under James Callaghan to Margaret Thatcher was not as big as the realignment that is starting to grow. The political gap between the Labour government of Callaghan in 1979 and the incoming Thatcher government was not as wide as some of the divisions that I see in politics today. Mrs May has presided over a nation where the left think that political violence is a moral thing to do, violence that the mainstream media cheer on, along with an increasing number of ordinary people feel that they are despised by their rulers and whose concerns when voiced are criminalised. Not even Margaret Thatcher a woman who the left claim is our most divisive PM ever, managed to create this level of division. Neither did Edward Heath and his band of Euro enthusiasts manage to so completely destroy their own party to the degree of effectiveness that Theresa May has helped to emasculate the Conservatives as an electoral force.
The country, the Conservative Party and the political system in Britain is, over the next few months and years, in for some ‘interesting’ times. Let’s hope that whoever follows Mrs May carries out what we all voted for and lances the boil of political distrust that has been stoked in large part by the Remainer faction in Parliament and Mrs May’s inability to deal with this faction.
“Openly” or not, May despises the people and values of the country she so contemptibly claims to “love”.
Whether it was Blair who opened to door to a suicidal-level of immigration isn’t relevant – she continued to hold it open. What greater contempt can possibly be shown for her own country than that as Home Secretary and PM, she has allowed the industrial-scale rape of children ?
What greater contempt for the values of Western society can be shown by her – (and Western politicians everywhere) – than that they allow the savage torture and mutilation of muslim girls through FGM ? Or ban Christian bishops from visiting the UK ? Or allow violent muslims to dictate government policy and turn away desperate genuine refugees such as Asia Bibi ? Or joins the OIC in signing anti-Israel UN resolutions ?
That appalling cowardly untruthful woman belongs in Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet amongst her soul-mates.
Mrs May has as you say failed on so many levels. I picked just two, the failure to name the source of the terror problem we face and the mess she has made of Brexit. As you say there are many other failures that can be laid at Mrs May’s door, some whilst during her tenure as PM and others during her time at the Home Office.
In respect of May’s calling an early GE, it had least a few upsides.
TBF to May, her party obtained 2,406,618 votes more than Cameron’s 2015 result; but this was balanced by Labour’s votes increasing 3,530,625. Viewing the 2017 GE as a rerun of the 2016 referendum, it is notable that the parties promising to deliver the result (Conservatives, Labour and DUP) all saw their votes increase (21.4%, 37.8% & 58.6% respectively), while the most blatantly pro-EU parties (Lib Dems, Green, SNP & Plaid Cymru) saw theirs decrease (1.37%, 54.29%, 32.79% & 9.49%).
If nothing else, the GE saved us from 3 years of Salmond’s bellyaching in Westminster. In Scotland, the SNP was near destroyed (they bled votes out of everywhere and then some, losing almost half a million votes as well as 21 MPs; even the seats they held had them hanging on by their fingernails—one seat saw a majority of 4,344 reduced to 2!). In contrast, the Conservatives saw their best results since 1992 and are now the second party in Scotland in both votes and MPs. Maybe not in the rest of Britain but June 8 was a Tory night in Scotland; while in Ulster the DUP was transformed from bystanders into kingmakers and dealbreakers. Between Scotland and Ulster, as the DUP’s Arlene Foster remarked, it was a ‘good night for the Union’.
It’s about time that Unionist politics started coming to the forefront of the British political scene. The DUP seem the party most committed to both Brexit and our British Union—and they have some pretty good members deserving of wider renown; e.g. here is East Antrim MP Sammy Wilson speaking at a Leave Means Leave rally.
A (briefly) interesting moment was Nigel Farage’s visit last year to a DUP fundraiser, causing some fevered speculation. One can only wonder what success the UUP might have enjoyed if they had gone national with Enoch Powell at their head; but why shouldn’t the DUP go national now? Whenever I trot out this notion, it seems generally well received by Unionists and Brexiteers—and Remainers and separatists sperg out, which is itself a selling point.
Wrt her failure to ‘name the source of the terror problem’, that’s not just May but the entire political establishment. You could almost set your watch by Cameron’s trotting out an apology for Islam after the latest Islamic atrocity; e.g. here is Cam in 2012 informing the UN that ‘Islam is a great religion’ (so ‘great’ he had to say it twice).
But Islam is a symptom rather than the disease itself, as a comment originating from /pol/ describes:
This is well illustrated by the film Captain Phillips (2013, s. Tom Hanks)—good film, and true story with the events depicted being substantively accurate. Here we have a massive container ship, an engineering marvel and example of Western Civilisation’s ability to master nature—brought low, captured, by four—4!—Somali ‘pirates’ with their arses hanging out their trousers on board a small skiff. A couple of ‘good ol’ boys’ with hunting rifles could have resolved the issue—a single .50 cal would have sorted it with ease.
As Shakespeare wrote: ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves’ (Julius Cæsar 1.2.140). Western Civilisation—no country excepted—has become soft: it elevates weakness (the cult of victimhood) and debauchery over strength and virtue; and we lack the courage to take the necessary hard decisions. Islam (or other terrorism—as Gerry said, ‘They haven’t gone away, you know’) is not nearly the problem that our own various Left-inspired weaknesses are.
But remove the SJW, and the kebab will be removed in short order.
What is really the point of lambasting May? As if Cameron was any better; or Brown any better than him; or Blair any better than him; or Major any better in turn.
Mags? Better but overrated—neither as good as some of the Right claim nor as bad as the Left does. Amongst her mistakes was the Anglo–Irish Agreement, which (to her credit) she later acknowledged as error, and that Enoch’s ‘assessment [“treachery”?] was right’—but admitting error in 1998 does not stop the Anglo–Irish Agreement being signed in 1985.
And tbf to Mags, she’s one person. Wrt NI, one can only wonder about NI’s fate if Airey Neave had not been murdered by INLA—Shadow NI Secretary, he promised to be even better in office than the able Roy Mason, not only continuing but escalating the aggressive anti-IRA policies of his predecessor and integrating NI more closely into British life. He might also have stiffened Mags’ sinews in other areas. But he was killed, and here we are.
As I’ve noted before, other than Winston, who can you point to as a good PM out of the entire 20th Century? I might give you Attlee if you insist—the 1945 Labour Party wasn’t so bad, they had some good ideas (kicked off a number of high-technology projects) and genuinely cared about Britain as a nation and people (we can debate their means but not their intent). Who else?
There’s no magical alchemy will stop the gibs-voters voting for more gibs, and the gibs-promising MPs creating and importing as many gibs-voters as possible to keep them in office and on the taxpayer-funded gravy train.
So, if you’re not arguing for radical changes in our political system (in the sense of Cobbett’s ‘We want great alteration, but we want nothing new’), then the situation will not only continue but worsen, with diversity-hires promoting further diversity-hires, the corrupt promoting their fellow corrupt, and the incompetent blocking the competent.
When Jess Phillips or Diane Abbott or some other maleficent diversity-hire becomes PM, you’ll yearn for the simple ineptitude of Theresa May.