Theresa May knows exactly what she's doing

A few months ago a despicably dishonest Independent article misrepresenting Jeremy Corbyn's  speech to the EFF (the British manufacturing lobby) went mega-viral on Twitter as tens of thousands of anti-Corbyn ranters gleefully spread it around because that pack of lies, distortions and ludicrously misrepresented selective quotations confirmed their biases.

Today Theresa May has given an utterly risible speech to the CBI (the British business lobby) in which she whitewashed the Tories' ruinous track record in government, casually ignored her own appalling track record at the Home Office, and spread dog-whistle anti-European xenophobia in the hope of appealing to the fickle extreme-right ultranationalist blue-kip demographic who are apparently deserting her party in droves.

Theresa May whitewashed the devastating impact of ideologically driven Tory austerity dogma for the last eight years, she championed the tax-dodging, job-destroying Corporate behemoths like Amazon who are wrecking high streets up and down the country by using their artificial tax advantage to undercut tax-paying businesses, she praised the gig economy, she misrepresented the Tories' despicable track record of imposing the longest sustained decline in workers wages since records began, and she openly bragged about cutting the deficit by 80% in 8 years when they had originally bragged that they'd have completely eliminated it in less than five years.

But the most despicable and duplicitous aspects of her speech came near the beginning where she whitewashed her disgraceful personal record at the Home Office, spread ludicrous fairy stories about the kind of immigration system the UK will supposedly have if her hard-right shambles of a Brixit deal somehow avoids failing at the first hurdle, and uttered a desperately cynical anti-European sound bite designed to whip up hatred against Europeans in general, and most specifically Europeans who have come to the UK under their European Freedom of Movement rights.

When Theresa May publicly accuses EU citizens who have come to live and work in the UK of "jumping the queue" she knows exactly what she's doing. She's deliberately appealing to the basest instincts of the extreme-right ultranationalist Blue-kip mob who were instrumental in allowing her and her horrible Tory mates to cling onto power by their fingertips in 2017.

Theresa May and her advisers know that the Blue-kippers are abandoning the Tory party in droves because Theresa May's hard-right job-destroying power grab of a Brexit deal is nowhere near bonkers or destructive enough for their tastes, so she's attempting to woo them back with crude hate-mongering caricatures of European migrants as a queue-jumping job-nicking threat (rather than people who are on average far more likely to be hard-working net contributors to the UK economy than the British-born)!

When she creates the narrative that "unskilled" EU citizens are unfairly queue-jumping ahead of skilled workers from elsewhere, she's completely ignoring the fact that £millions worth of crops have already been rotting in the fields because of the hostile environment she's created towards EU workers is driving them away before Brexit has even happened, and because neither British workers, nor skilled workers from outside the EU want to do that kind of back-breaking low paid seasonal work.

And by creating this crude 'job-nicking' caricature she's ignoring the fact that aside from agriculture, other hugely significant sectors of the UK economy like manufacturing, health care, and the leisure industry rely heavily on EU workers too, meaning her Brexit shambles would be a disaster for these sectors too.

By painting EU workers as 'queue-jumpers' who have cheated their way into Britain, she's once again distracting from her own appalling track record by inviting the blue-kip mob to focus their hate on the 3 million EU citizens living in Britain.

Additionally Theresa May has created a bizarre fantasy of what immigration would look like under her Brexit deal. She claims that "instead of a system based on where a person is from, we will have one that is built around the talents and skills a person has to offer".

But her track record in the Home Office paints a very different picture. Take the way Theresa May made it her personal mission to chase foreign students out of Britain when all the economic and academic experts tried to warn her that it was a damaging mistake. Take the way she fixated on cutting immigration to below 100,000 regardless of the skills and talents of the people in question. Take the way she introduced draconian and discriminatory new immigration thresholds to block entry of non-EU spouses of British citizens regardless of their skills, talents, or earning potential. And take the way she massively expanded "Golden Visa" schemes to allow mega-rich immigrants (Russian oligarchs, corrupt Chinese officials, the families of African dictators, Middle Eastern oil barons) to buy British residency regardless of where they sourced the £millions they've been buying their way in with.

The only way anyone could possibly believe that Theresa May is motivated by a desire to make the UK immigration system fairer is by ignoring her hate-mongering rhetoric, and mindlessly taking her at her word that she wants to make the system fairer rather than examining her proven track record of making the UK immigration system way more unfair, corrupt, and illogical than it ever was before!

So have the Twitterati reacted with fury to Theresa May's vainglorious, deceptive, and downright despicable speech in the way they reacted to the pack of lies and deceptions they gleefully spread about Jeremy Corbyn's industrial policy speech a few months ago?

Of course they haven't.

Many of them are too busy desperately trying to save Theresa May's skin by attacking Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party to give the slightest damn about Theresa May's dangerous hate-mongering rhetoric against the 3 million EU citizens in the UK, about her transparently ridiculous false promises of fairer immigration system, or about her brazen whitewashing of her own track record at the Home Office.

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