Neil Scott on Theresa May’s last speech in the Commons.
I’ve just watched as Theresa May made her last speech in Westminster (and Harriet Harman… and what a contrast… i’d urge you to find them on YouTube).
May’s narrative in her speech was one of hard work and of ambition- with barbed comments against those around her who had the cheek to have ambition. The failure of self recognition is and self deception is so plain to see.
She is right- our political and professional classes are now made up with selfish youtubing, twittering, GB News-ing, profile building, image selling dopes who are promoted far far beyond their skill set.
But so was she.
People buy why… make your why explicit… the what comes from that. May’s why- beyond her 12 year old veneration of her father in the pulpit and her wanting to exert such power in public life- was to punish the sinners; to punish the refugees, the prisoners, the vulnerable and the poor. Her “what” was to enact that during her dreadful time in the Home Office. The image of her Home Office Hate Vans causing fear around the country should haunt her through what comes next in the Lords, or whatever she decides is “hard working” and conservative” enough for her to mold a new image.
May clearly thinks of herself – has a self deceiving image- as someone with high public service ethos. *Relative to* a lot of those those on the benches that surround her, she may well have. But she has an ego and is pretending she hasn’t. She was plainly for all of us to see, ambitious, but pretends she wasn’t.
Her nonsense is that not being a Conservative is lazy- she doesn’t say that explicitly but she praises the aspects of her idea of conservatism as some sort of a hard working back bone of Britain. Quite clearly, greed, avarice and *ambition* (though she pretends to be annoyed at the latter) are her drivers. Public service is secondary- and her career showed that to be the case when her skills, honed in biting and gnashing and condemning her way to power, she was not up to the job of correcting the damage her benches had wrought upon us via Caneron and Johnson and Gove and Osborne (and Farage and Facebook and Cambridge Analytica et al), and in fact failed so badly, she gave them power.
Democracy is not this conservative citadel she thinks it is, thank the stars. Our democracy was shaped NOT by liberal-conservatism that had previously enslaved and starved and shot workers across these islands, and beyond in its Empire. The labour movement fought for progress… the working class, the vulnerable, the oppressed… created (not helped create) a MORE representative and better (but not perfect BY FAR) democracy. It created a welfare state and health service that was the envy of the world – a state she helped demolish and smash into the venal, nasty place it is sinking to.
She has no insight. Her “compassion” really did not extend to vulnerable people. Her time in the Home Office, trying to look like Norman Tebbit in stilettos (now THERE IS an image…) appealed to the worst aspects of the right wing thugs who have broken Britain. A “conservatism” that has created poverty and taken away safety nets AND HEALTH and help for those who, unlike her, have not got stable, supporting families; unlike her, are in fear of their lives escaping extreme poverty, famine and war in exploited parts of the world. And unlike her, have not got a stable and supporting welfare state that nurtures and rewards ambition and service.
She was a thug in power. She talked about a ‘big society’ that means swathes of children are undernourished and under fed and are in danger. The strange remaking she thinks the past few years have brought as she seethed at Boris, Truss and Sunak really do not wash her clean.
She caused harm.
Good riddance.
May’s public service ethos is the kind of self -servative, nasty state Scotland must escape from. And with tik-toking “entrepreneurial” image creating Newnew Labour about to run riot over rights and over the vulnerable, we cannot escape too soon.
