She instituted the wonderful ‘hostile environment’ which finally exposed the outrageous way Labour governments had been victimising members of the Windrush generation
She bravely supported the detention of David Miranda which I’m sure really helped cement the special relationship.
She successfully managed to ensure that the UK accepted only token numbers of refugees.
She got the Investigatory Powers Act in place.
She stood up to our unelected judiciary, even to the extent of being found in contempt of court over failing to comply with an agreement to release a prisoner.
She signed us up to a security pact with Saudi Arabia and agreed a very nice little deal for us to help run Saudi prisons (which Gove later cancelled).
All of the above is of course sarcasm apart from the facts.
Human rights. You mean rights that cannot simply be overridden by the Executive when they are inconvenient? What a quaint concept…
What I find terrifying, if I allow myself to think about it too much, is that Theresa May represents the relatively sane, moderate section of the Conservative Party and the vocal section of the grass-roots Tories appear to be significantly worse.
You seem to have a higher respect for her fundamental competence than I do. Of course, I don’t live under her management, so don’t have as direct a view as you do.
Whether she had any great part in achieving any of that I don’t know.
She was the figurehead for it and she managed to not only survive the Home Office (traditionally a make or break office for any aspiring PM) but turn her tenure into a successful bid for PM.
She somehow managed to survive every cock-up and scandal and even managed to get her political rivals blamed for some of them.
I think it’s hard to argue that she is not extremely competent as a politician. She has ‘elbows’ in the Yes Minister sense.
I switch back and forth over whether she genuinely feels a ‘duty to the nation’ or whether there’s a combination of authoritarian desire for control and a stunning lack of self-awareness about the scale of what she was taking on as PM.
The leadership contest which ended with her becoming PM can I think best be described as a contest which no future contender for PM could afford not to enter but which none of the more astute players actually wanted to win.
“Tory” was a deliberately chosen insult, which was later taken as a sort of badge of honour, their real name is the Conservative and Unionist Party (and ‘tory’ was used as a name for a faction of the British government with similar politics before the Conservative party was ever started).
The Conservative Party is unique among western democracies in that repealing human rights is a major plank of its platform. The amazing thing is that actually gets them votes, which says little good about a sizable fraction of the English electorate.
There is very little to Ms. May’s credit, but one thing she did was call out the police on their total lack of accountability. Not usual fare for a right-wing politician:
It appears you can say anything you like about Corbyn without challenge. Stab him in the back, the front, call him a fucking racist anti-semite, terrorist sympathiser. Whatever.
That is true but I’d suggest that was more about her authoritarian need for control and of course union busting which is of course traditional Conservative policy.
The speech was to the Police Federation which is effectively the union for rank and file police officers (up to Chief Inspector level).
I think part of the issue with Theresa May is that she says lots of positive things but what actually gets done is generally repressive.
Take for example her speech right after becoming PM:
All sounds great except it’s perfectly obvious and was perfectly obvious then that nothing was going to be done about any of that because Brexit was going to take up the entire energy of government and the legislature.
Yup. Mind you I wouldn’t say they’re unique in that respect. Other countries tend to use different language but it amounts to the same thing. The US for example simply ignores the whole issue.
UK politicians tend not to run the argument on the lines that they want to ‘repeal human rights’.
What they say they want to do is to repeal the Human Rights Act which is a specific piece of legislation and some want to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights.
They tend to phrase the argument along the lines of a claim that Britain invented human rights, we are the home of human rights and we can decide for ourselves whether something is a breach of human rights and we don’t need or want a bunch of foreigners telling us what we can and can’t do.
Sounds very similar to arguments the US uses to justify not joining the ICC doesn’t it?
I don’t know how much of her authoritarianism comes from the job of Home Secretary. The position molds the holder, predecessors from the other side like David Blunkett were no better. She has certainly not shown any ability to impose her authority on her fractious party and ministers.
As for human rights (as opposed to barons’ rights as enshrined in the Magna Carta), everybody knows their rightful home is France, of course.
The US not joining the ICC is in the same general principle as turkeys not being in favor of Thanksgiving.
