Theresa May's weak leadership is a danger to Britain

Over the weekend the new Tory Home Secretary Sajid Javid decided to tear up the longstanding British convention that our government opposes the death penalty in all circumstances. He apparently made this decision entirely on his own, without any cabinet discussion, legal advice, or permission from the Prime Minister.

Theresa May is such a weak and incompetent leader that she's absolutely failed to correct or discipline Javid for making up government policy on the hoof, and ended up eventually agreeing with him in order to minimise the scandal, which is a very dangerous green light to all of her other ministers to just completely make things up as they go along without fear of repercussions.

It's possible to imagine that May's lackadaisical attitude to Javid inventing policy on the hoof could stem from the extraordinarily weak political position she's in (very few remaining allies, razor thin majority in parliament, under constant threat of a "no confidence" vote triggered by Jacob Rees-Mogg and the ERG Brextremists) but this incompetence isn't actually new.

Back during the 2017 General Election campaign her (now resigned in disgrace) Defence Secretary Michael Fallon made the shocking announcement that Britain would consider using nuclear weapons as attack weapons, which amounted to a sudden declaration that the UK is abandoning the long-established "no first strike" policy, and endangering the "Mutually Assured Destruction" deterrence compromise that has existed between the nuclear powers since the 1950s (by giving other nuclear powers a clear incentive to get their strike in first before Theresa May does).

Amazingly Fallon made this seismic change to Britain's nuclear weapons policy without cabinet discussion, legal advice, or permission from the Prime Minister. But Theresa May decided not to discipline him or put the record straight on Britain's actual nuclear weapons policy for fear of making one of her ministers look like a fool during an election campaign.

Even more amazing was the way the media (and especially the BBC) completely ignored this extraordinary on the hoof abandonment of Britain's longstanding nuclear weapons strategy in favour of a certifiably insane "yes first strike" policy, and instead focused all of their nuclear weapons political questions on relentlessly attacking Jeremy Corbyn for sticking with the traditional "no first strike" policy!

If Theresa May allows her ministers to just make up new policies on issues as important as nuclear weapons and the death penalty with no discussion, legal advice or permission, her incompetence and weak leadership is clearly and obviously a danger to Britain, British standards, and the British way of life.

And the fact that she actually ends up agreeing with them in order to save face, even though they went behind her back to announce these new policies has set a dangerous precedent. It doesn't matter how dangerous, regressive, un-British, or downright insane the new policy, she'll probably end up green lighting it just to avoid the fuss of disciplining them and putting the record straight.

Even if you somehow agree with the Fallon's crackpot "yes first strike" strategy or Javid's efforts to undermine Britain's longstanding opposition to the death penalty, there's absolutely no way that you can agree that the correct way to introduce these wild new policies was to do it behind Theresa May's back, safe in the knowledge that she's such a weak and directionless leader that she'd simply agree to them after the fact to avoid a fuss.

And if the non-reaction of the bulk of the mainstream media to Theresa May letting her ministers go unpunished for repeatedly going behind her back to announce wild new policies this is anything to go by, then she's not going to be held to account for this dangerously weak and incompetent attitude either.

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In modern Britain incompetence is tolerated as the norm and strong leadership is met with howls of condemnation

If we set aside our views on Brexit for a moment and try to look at Jeremy Corbyn's decision to sack Owen Smith for publicly criticising Labour's six tests position from a reasonably objective stance, it's obvious that Smith had to go.

Love them or loathe them Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher were strong leaders, as were Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee in the mid 20th Century.

It's inconceivable that any of these strong leaders would ever have allowed a member of their cabinet to publicly defy the party policy to set out their own personal policy in a newspaper article. Any cabinet member who did that, would have been sacked, and rightly so.

The problem of course is that after eight years of shockingly weak leadership under the Tories, people have got used to the government behaving like a total rabble, where gross incompetence is the norm, and with ministers regularly making up policy on the hoof and getting away with it. So when they see a party leader actually imposing discipline it comes as a shock to them.

Things were bad enough under David Cameron, whose tolerance to the incompetence of his ministers was so extreme that George Osborne and Theresa May survived easily despite six years of endlessly missed targets and hopelessly botched legislation, and the even more incompetent Iain Duncan Smith remained unsacked until he chose to betray Cameron by walking out of the government at the most damaging moment possible.

But under Theresa May things have become utterly farcical. We had the former Defence Secretary Michael Fallon announce the off the hoof policy that Britain was abandoning the "Mutually Assured Destruction" stance to announce the policy of Britain being open to using nuclear weapons as attack weapons. Not only did Theresa May not sack Fallon on the spot for announcing such a reckless abandonment of Britain's longstanding nuclear weapons policy, she actually let this insane new policy stand.

Then Fallon's replacement as Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson embarrassed Britain by saying that "Russia should just go away, and shut up". Theresa May is such a weak leader that once again she didn't correct this nonsense with a firm reiteration of the government's actual position, or ask for Williamson's resignation.

Then worst of all there's the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who even set out his own bespoke "Manifesto for EU Withdrawal" in a 4,000 word essay for the Daily Telegraph. This wasn't just the usual foot in mouth blabbering we've all come to expect from Johnson, it was a deliberate and calculated effort to undermine his own government's Brexit negotiating position.

Does anyone imagine that strong leaders like Thatcher, Blair, Churchill, or Attlee would have just sat back and done absolutely nothing when their own Foreign Secretary publicly undermined the official party position?

Regardless of whether you agree with Boris Johnson's decision to publicly undermine the Tory government by calling for a much harder form of Brexit, or with Owen Smith's decision to break collective responsibility to call for a second EU referendum, it's obvious both needed to be sacked, otherwise we'd end up with rudderless political parties full of ministers who feel entitled to just make up policies as they go along.

The reality of the situation is that Teresa May is such a weak and incompetent leader that she allowed a senior cabinet minister to go completely unpunished for brazenly undermining the official party stance.

Meanwhile Jeremy Corbyn behaved in the way any competent political leader would when one of his shadow cabinet ministers publicly criticises the official stance of their party in a newspaper column, rather than raising his concerns within the shadow cabinet, or through the democratic apparatus of the Labour Party.

The remarkable thing is that Theresa May's display of weakness and incompetence towards Boris Johnson's absurd display of disloyalty barely elicited barely a whisper of criticism from mainstream media hacks.

Then just a few months later we've had to endure howls of outrage from the very same hacks who remained silent about Theresa May's weakness and incompetence after Jeremy Corbyn rightly sacked Owen Smith for timing his attack on the Labour Party position just before the local elections in a calculated effort to do as much damage as possible to Labour's election chances.

It's as if eight years of Tory incompetence has done so much damage to the fabric of the United Kingdom that weakness and poor leadership are now accepted as the standard, and any signs of competence and strong leadership are met with furious condemnation and howls of outrage!

Regardless of our views on the important issues of the day (Brexit, austerity dogma, wage repression, rising poverty, the productivity crisis, NHS and social care funding ...) surely nobody thinks it's right that modern Britain is a place where unmistakably weak leadership goes almost completely uncriticised, while displays of routine political competence are attacked and derided as being somehow shocking and unacceptable?

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OR

11 General Election 2017 issues that mustn't be allowed to drop

A lot of the post-election focus has (understandably) been on Theresa May's efforts to cling onto power by throwing members of her inner circle under the public opinion bus and sucking up to the most extreme political party in parliament, but we mustn't forget some major issues from the campaign.

All of these issues need to be addressed

1. Security
During the election extreme security lapses led to two avoidable terrorist atrocities.

One was committed by an Islamist fanatic known to be plotting a terror attack against the UK who was allowed to come back through the UK border and was left unwatched as he planned and executed his attack.

The ringleader of the next was such a well known extremist he'd even featured in a Channel 4 documentary called "The Jihadists next door".

During the election Theresa May refused to release the report into the funding of terrorist networks in the UK, presumably because it allegedly implicates Saudi Arabia.

The extreme security lapses can't just be allowed to pass because they happened during an election and everyone was focused on campaigning, and serious pressure needs to be applied to get the government to admit what they know about foreign funding of terrorist networks in the UK.

2. The Naylor Report
If it wasn't for a citizen journalist called Chris Holden few of us would ever have considered the contents of the Naylor Report that Theresa May was championing. 

It's basically a plot to use public money to bribe hospitals into selling their land off on the cheap to property speculators, and if they don't take the bribe they get their funding slashed.

It's nothing less than Tory asset stripping of the NHS.

There needs to be a concerted effort to oppose the implementation of the Naylor Report.

3. Dark ads
The Tories ran an unprecedented campaign of dark ads, spending millions on spewing their propaganda all over social media, front loading Youtube songs with political attack adverts, and hijacking political Google searches with paid ads.

There are several things to consider.

In my view the specific targeting of particular voters in particular constituencies with dark ads should surely be declared under local, rather than national campaign budgets.

There should be an absolute requirement that copies of every political advert are lodged with the electoral authorities.Many of these Tory adverts (including the one they used to hijack Google searches for the Labour manifesto) contained outright lies about opposition parties and politicians. The electoral authorities really need to explain to the public what they intend to do to stop the dissemination of outright political lies.

Additionally steps should be taken to ensure that no political party is allowed to hijack legitimate Google searches by paying for sponsored ads at the top of the search.

4. Lying politicians
Aside from the campaign of Tory dark ads, numerous Tory politicians were guilty of outright lying to the British public. Theresa May herself told a couple of absolute whoppers.

Theresa May outright lied about Diane Abbott's stance on the DNA database (she doesn't want it scrapped, she wants the DNA of innocent people, including victims of crime, removed from it).

May also lied that Labour proposes "uncontrolled immigration", when in reality their manifesto pledged clampdowns on all kinds of harmful migration and increased funding of services for areas that have had large immigration influxes (see here) and is actually far more sensible than the Tory approach of recycling their twice-broken promise to reduce immigration to an arbitrary number.

After Brexit and now this, something really needs to be done to prevent our politicians from deliberately lying to us.

5. Yes First Strike
One of the most bizarre aspects of the General Election debate was the way Jeremy Corbyn was repeatedly rounded on by the public and the mainstream media for his sensible No First Strike nuclear weapons policy, but Theresa May wasn't hauled over the coals at all about the announcement of a crackpot Tory Yes First Strike nuclear policy.

I oppose nuclear weapons, but I at least understand the nuclear deterrent argument people put forward in favour of them. Yes First Strike makes no such sense. It's total and utter madness that would, in times of global conflict, actually significantly increase the chances of a nuclear strike against London in order to eradicate the insane strike first leader before they themselves launch a nuclear attack.

The Tory government needs to be pressed a lot more on Theresa May's Yes First Strike nuclear policy because I'm pretty sure that public opinion would be strongly against Britain being the country to trigger Armageddon by using nukes as attack weapons.

6. Austerity
Tory austerity dogma resulted in the slowest recovery from a recession since the South Sea Bubble burst in the 18th Century, the lowest level of house building since the early 1920s, the worst wage collapse since records began, and the least affordable house prices in history.

Not only that, but we've been getting left behind on the world stage because the Tories have been investing far less in infrastructure development (the foundations of future economic prosperity) than any other developed nation because of the Tories' ideological fixation with their economically inept and self-defeating cost-cutting exercises.

For seven ruinous years the mainstream media has pitifully failed to hold the Tories to account over their ideological fixation with austerity dogma. But after more voters supported anti-austerity parties than pro-austerity parties in this election, surely now is the time for austerity dogma to be subjected to proper public scrutiny, especially at the supposedly impartial BBC?

7. Dementia Tax
The Tories' depraved policy of asset stripping people who need social care has not gone away. They've simply announced that there will be a limit on how much wealth they can extract from frail old people and other disabled people. They've not said how much that limit would be, nor whether it would be an overall cap (a weak incentive to suicide) or an annual limit that rolls over indefinitely (a strong incentive to suicide).

Questions need to be asked about the details that Theresa May failed to disclose, and also over the morality of the policy.  How is it remotely justifiable to asset strip frail old people whilst simultaneously giving tens of £billions in handouts to corporations and your mega-rich chums?

8. Tory self-interest
Theresa May could have maintained political power until 2020, but she clearly and undeniably put her own self-interest above the good of the nation by calling a snap election when her poll lead was at an all-time high.

Instead of conducting Brexit amicably (taking the views of opposition parties and devolved governments into consideration and forming some kind of UK-wide consensus) she wanted to crush all political opposition to be crowned the undisputed Brexit queen to dictate the whole process herself.

After the failure of David Cameron's EU referendum gamble (wagered in order to poach a few hundred thousand UKIP voters in 2015), Theresa May's vanity election is the second time in a single year that the Tories have thrown the nation into chaos by putting their own opportunistic self-interest first.

It's now abundantly clear that the Tory party simply can't be trusted to consider the good of the nation as a whole above the self-serving opportunism of their leaders.

9. Press corruption
One of Theresa May's most despicable manifesto pledges was to sling the Leveson investigation into press corruption into the bin as if Rupert Murdoch's minions had never hacked into the phone of a murdered teenage girl.

During the election the billionaire-owned propaganda rags went into absolute overdrive with an unprecedented smear-mongering campaign against Labour.

Thankfully the smear-mongering tactics didn't pay off and deliver Theresa May the super-majority she was expecting when she called her vanity election, but the malign influence of the billionaire press barons was still enough to help her avoid a resounding defeat, which means there's still the possibility that the Tories will try to bin the Leveson investigation as a favour to their faithful mainstream media attack dogs.

The astoundingly biased smear-mongering conducted by certain publications during the election is another important reason that the investigation into press corruption absolutely mustn't be dropped.

10. Internet freedom
Theresa May is obsessed with controlling the Internet. Even after the woeful security lapses that led to murderous acts of barbarism during the election campaign, her initial response was to piggyback her pre-existing authoritarian fixation onto the atrocities by harking on about censoring the Internet.

Theresa May doesn't like the freedom of the Internet because it allows people to think outside the constraints of the neoliberal consensus that she is the figurehead of.

All the talk about preventing terrorism is just a front for her extreme-surveillance agenda. If she actually gave a crap about terrorism then she wouldn't have ignored all the expert advice (community engagement is the very first defence against Islamist and extreme-right radicalisation) and ploughed on with her plan to devastate community policing by scrapping 20,000 police jobs.

11. Human rights
Theresa May didn't just opportunistically piggyback her hatred of Internet freedom onto the terrorist atrocities that happened under her watch, she also tried to infect the debate with her visceral hatred of our human rights.

She's so incapable of thinking things through that she doesn't even understand that the destruction of our western justice-based human rights would be seen as a massive ideological victory for the Islamist extremists.

These depraved fanatics absolutely hate our liberal values and our non-Sharia justice systems. If we scrapped our human rights after one suicide bombing and a couple of sick rampages through the streets of London, they'd obviously see it as a huge victory and wonder what more could be achieved with a more concerted and coordinated sequence of attacks.

What we can do

Write to your MP:

If you have an opposition MP you can ask them what their party intends to do to hold the Tories to account over these 11 issues (feel free to include a link if you want to raise all 11 issues, or copy and paste from this blog if you intend to raise one or just a few specific issues).

If you have a Tory MP you can write to them and ask them to provide explanations. I'd be interested to see what they come up with to defend all of this hideous stuff.

Write to your MP here (remember to include your name and postal address and then they have an obligation to reply to your message)

Contact mainstream media:

Get in touch with mainstream media publications to request more coverage on these issues. Submit contributions to their letters pages. Contact individual mainstream media journalists that you respect and ask them if they would consider working to shed more public light on any of these subjects.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

These are the people

If you watched the Question Time election debate on June 2nd you will have witnessed Jeremy Corbyn being berated by a succession of furious elderly men, with a few questions from other less vociferous demographics sprinkled in.

The two main themes these elderly men attacked Corbyn on were clearly rote-learned straight out of the pages of the right-wing press.

None of them even seemed remotely interested in Corbyn's actual answers to their questions, they just wanted to vent their fury, and the right-wing propaganda barons have trained them that Corbyn is the Emmanuel Goldstein figure to be attacked and despised, and that stuff like his involvement in the Irish peace process, and his No First Strike nuclear policy are the main attack points.

It's funny that the right-wing blowhards who were crying bitter tears of outrage just a few days ago about the Election debate audience being "rigged" because for some reason the audience weren't inclined to applaud Paul Nuttall's divisive hard-right posturing, suddenly had no complains at all about the extremely odd demographic balance of the Question Time audience.

If the people who were picked by the BBC to ask questions of Jeremy Corbyn are anything to go by, the UK population is obviously more than 50% comprised of angry, old, cognitively stunted, right-wing, white males. Meanwhile elderly females don't even exist at all (maybe they were all at home doing the housework while their husbands were busy venting incoherent fury on the tellybox?).

Anyway since these people represent the majority of those who were invited to speak  by the BBC, let's consider who they are:

These are the people who believe in snatching food out of children's mouths and slashing the education budget, because making sure our kids (that our future prospects as a nation will rely on) are well fed and well educated is obviously "leftie do-gooder nonsense" and "political correctness gone mad".

These are the people who prefer to listen to empty political flim flam that's easy to rote learn without even thinking about it, and hate actual policy talk because it requires a bit of cognitive effort.
These are the people who simultaneously believe that Britain is so poor that we can't afford to properly fund hospitals, schools, police, the border agency or the fire service, but somehow we are so rich that we can afford to lavish another £70 billion in tax breaks on corporations and the mega-rich!

These are the people who will shout down anyone who ever disagrees with the fanatical right-wing dogma the media press barons have programmed them to believe in, and will never change their minds because they're too angry to listen to anything that doesn't conform to what they already believe in.

These are the people who are furious with Jeremy Corbyn for talking to the Irish republican (and Ulster loyalist) politicians to try to get them to sit down and negotiate a peaceful settlement to the conflict, and they don't give a toss that Margaret Thatcher was negotiating secret deals with the actual terrorists all the way through the 1980s, whilst brazenly lying to the British public that "we don't negotiate with terrorists"!


These are the people who have been brainwashed into believing that the mild-mannered democratic socialist Jeremy Corbyn is a communist sympathiser, even though he wants to repatriate British infrastructure and services and Theresa May is the one who wants to keep huge chunks of our railways, water supplies and national grid under Chinese communist control!

These are the people who don't give a damn that house prices are at the most unaffordable level in history while the Tories oversee the lowest house building levels since the 1920s. They already own houses so why should they care. They're alright Jack!
These are the people who "wargasm" at Theresa May's policy of using nuclear weapons as first strike attack weapons (rather than as a nuclear deterrent), and consider Jeremy Corbyn a dangerous madman for saying he would never trigger nuclear Armageddon by launching a nuclear strike first!

These are the people who are absolutely craving for Theresa May to flounce away from the Brexit negotiations with nothing because they're not the ones who will have to pay the price when the economy goes into recession and hundreds of thousands of people lose their jobs.
These are the people who will troop to the polls in their millions on June 8th to allow Theresa May to continue asset stripping the UK and handing out the pieces to whoever wants a slice (including the Chinese communist government and the Islamist tyrants in Qatar).

These are the people who are invincible in their own minds. In their own minds they won't ever get ill and need a functioning NHS, and they won't ever suffer from age-related degenerative diseases. It'll always be other people who have their houses asset stripped off them to cover the cost of yet another round of Tory corporate tax handouts.

These are the people who will decide the future of our nation if YOU don't get out and vote.

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OR

Has Britain Completely lost the plot over nuclear weapons?

Do you remember a few weeks ago when the Tory Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said that a Tory government led by Theresa May would launch a first-strike nuclear attack, and this was largely accepted as if actually launching Mutually Assured Destruction is a perfectly sensible policy and not concerning at all.

Then in an BBC Question Time election special Jeremy Corbyn said he wouldn't cause nuclear Armageddon by launching a first-strike nuclear attack and he actually got rounded on by the audience!

The guy who asked the question about nuclear weapons even described Corbyn's carefully explained no first-strike policy as "deeply concerning"!

Surely in a sane country people would be tearing strips off Theresa May for saying she would actually trigger an unimaginably catastrophic nuclear winter with a yes first strike policy?

But no!

In Bonkers Brexit Britain Jeremy Corbyn gets rounded on for explaining his no first strike policy!

What kind of people are we?

As far as I'm concerned there are three types of people when it comes to nuclear weapons.

• Those who are opposed to nuclear weapons and wish to see them abolished (people like me).

• Those who don't much like nuclear weapons but see them as a necessity. A deterrent that stops other countries from launching nuclear attacks on us through the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction.

• Then there are those who are actual nuclear weapons enthusiasts. People who would genuinely like the UK to go down in (whatever remains of) history as the nation that triggered the nuclear war that killed millions/hundreds of millions of people directly, and billions more in the post apocalyptic radioactive wasteland. The kind of people who simply don't care about the potential death toll from their jingoistic uber-bravado yes first strike nuclear weapons posturing.

Rather naively I'd always imagined that the third type were a tiny fringe minority, with the huge majority of Brits belonging to group one or group two.

However the way the nuclear debate has been framed during the 2017 General Election (lots of scrutiny on Jeremy Corbyn for no first-strike, barely any scrutiny on Theresa May for yes first strike) makes me suddenly realise that group three must be very much larger than group one or two, because anyone in the first two groups would surely approve of Corbyn's reassuring no first strike policy, and strongly disapprove of Theresa May's reckless yes first strike policy?

Is it me or has the country completely lost the plot?

Please share this article on social media and leave some comments below to reassure me that I'm not alone in thinking that Theresa May's yes first strike policy is the extreme and alarming thing, and Jeremy Corbyn's no first strike policy is actually very sensible and reassuring.

Thanks guys,  

Tom (AAV)

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OR

How many plebs is Theresa May willing to kill?

If it wasn't already clear how genocidally insane Theresa May was being when she bragged about her willingness to incinerate 100,000 innocent men, women and children in a nuclear fireball last year, it's even clearer now.

It turns out that the Tory government knew that a Trident missile had flown off in the wrong direction just weeks before the vote, but they hastily covered it up in order to make sure the parliamentary debate to write a blank cheque for Trident renewal was won.

Seeing as it's now clear that the Tories knew that our nuclear missile delivery system is prone to flying off towards the people it's supposed to be defending, it seems that Theresa May was actually expressing her willingness to incinerate 100,000 British men, women and children in a catastrophic nuclear missile malfunction, just as long as the (mainly American) arms companies that run our "independent" nuclear deterrent get to gorge on the £205 billion+ it's going to cost us.

Even if you think it's a bit of a stretch to say that the extraordinary cover up of the malfunctioning missile indicates that Theresa May is willing to incinerate British people with nuclear weapons, it's still absolutely undeniable that she's willing to see an awful lot of British people die in order to cover the obscene cost of renewing our stockpile of Doomsday Machines.

People are dying in hospital corridors because of Tory cuts to the NHS, and yet they're still ruthlessly slashing NHS services while demand keeps going up. The Tory policy of deliberately under-funding the NHS and social care is undeniably costing lives.

Just a fraction of the obscene amounts Theresa May wants to squander on Trident would save thousands of lives if it was spent on the NHS and social care. But the lives of ordinary plebs just don't matter to Theresa May and her ilk. Whether it's the innocent foreign plebs she openly admitted that she would incinerate in a nuclear weapons crime against humanity, or the British plebs dying in hospital corridors to pay for her Weapons of Mass Destruction vanity project, she just doesn't give a damn. They're just the "lower orders" after all, meaning their lives are just as disposable as the cannon fodder who were marched to their deaths during the First World War.

As long as Theresa May gets to secure a vast windfall of public cash for her arms company mates then it doesn't matter how many plebs have to suffer and die to cover the cost of it.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

How would the press react if Jeremy Corbyn behaved anything like Theresa May?

The extreme levels of mainstream media bias against Jeremy Corbyn has been academically proven. Even if you're the kind of person who has "had enough of experts", consider these things.

Given that the mainstream media continually blamed Jeremy Corbyn for Brexit (123 media appearances), how is it possible to explain that Theresa May actually gets repeatedly praised for her lazy self-serving non-campaign during the EU referendum (just 29 media appearances despite holding one of the most important offices of state)?

If Jeremy Corbyn had openly bragged about his willingness to incinerate 100,000 innocent men, women and children in a nuclear fireball like Theresa May did in July 2016, would the mainstream press have painted him as a "strong leader", or would they have used it as evidence that he's some kind of genocidal left-wing tyrant?

If Jeremy Corbyn had actually quoted a bigoted and misogynistic Twitter troll in parliament like Theresa May did in September 2016, would the mainstream press have given him a total free-pass on it like they gave Theresa May?

If, like Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn had a proven track record of attacking the rights and liberties of the British people, undermining the justice system, introducing discriminatory laws and fantasising about scrapping our human rights and replacing them with a set of "allowances" drawn up by him and his mates, would the media continually portray him as a "safe pair of hands" or would they use such an appalling track record as evidence that he's an authoritarian tyrant?

If Jeremy Corbyn decided to sign off on a ludicrous rip-off deal to bribe communist China into building our energy infrastructure for us like Theresa May did, would the mainstream media have just let it pass, or would they have shrieked themselves into hysteria about his extreme-left tendencies?

The obvious answer to all of these questions is that the media would not have given Corbyn the same kind of ridiculously easy ride that they keep giving Theresa May.

The mainstream press prefer Theresa may because she's keen on tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich, which suits the billionaire sociopaths who own most of the newspapers that set the political agenda. They hate Corbyn because he's a genuine anti-establishment outsider who would shake up the political system by giving more power to ordinary people (meaning less for self-entitled politicians, billionaire press barons and lazy mainstream media hacks).

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Why do so many people adore Theresa May?

One of the most astounding things about the rise of Theresa May is the way that millions of people have just uncritically rote learned the right-wing media trope that she is some kind of "safe pair of hands" and then set about mindlessly repeating it as if it's their own opinion, rather than something bizarrely counter-factual that they've been programmed to say.

Even the remotest familiarity with Theresa May's track record at the Home Office makes this "safe pair of hands" story look absolutely ridiculous. This is a woman who promised to cut net migration to below 100,000 but actually oversaw the biggest inward migration peaks in all of British history!

Not only does May have a track record of brazen incompetence, she's also a hard-right authoritarian with a penchant for totalitarian policies like secret courts, discriminatory immigration rules for British spouses, hopelessly flawed, evidence-free and unworkable drugs laws, unprecedented state snooping powers and the abolition of our human rights.

Even if we ignore her track record of appalling incompetence and savage authoritarianism, it should be easy to see what a horrifying person she is: 

• In her inaugural speech as Prime Minister she cried crocodile tears about how white working class kids are so unlikely to make it to university, then immediately set about scrapping all of the grants and bursaries that allowed kids from low-income families to get a university education. 

• She bragged in parliament about her willingness to incinerate 100,000 innocent men, women and children in a nuclear fireball. 

• She gave a disgustingly obnoxious right-wing Twitter troll a massive and unprecedented "shout out" by quoting him at Prime Minister's Questions and writing him into the permanent Hansard record as a consequence. 

• She blatantly evades answering the questions she's asked and continually talks in mind-numbingly stupid platitudes like "Brexit means Brexit" and "living within our means" as if the public are just a gigantic collection of total halfwits who can be easily fobbed off with ridiculous economic fairy stories and tautological gibberish.

• She decided to completely screw over the UK taxpayer by continuing on with Cameron and Osborne's shambolic scheme to bribe the French and Chinese into building our nuclear power infrastructure for us by guaranteeing them double the market price for electricity for 35 years and then promising to load the astronomical nuclear waste storage costs onto the UK taxpayer too!

• She introduced the most extreme state surveillance laws in any developed nation that will allow the employees of all manner of non-terrorism related state agencies (the Food Standards Agency, the Gambling Commission, the Health and Safety Executive ...)  to snoop on the private communications data of innocent people. Additionally the Snoopers' Charter will also allow the police and secret services to lie in court in order to secure convictions!

• She is determined to scrap the concept of parliamentary sovereignty so that she can make up the law as she goes along to suit herself and the rogues gallery of bankers, hedge fund managers, tax-dodgers, landed gentry, property speculators and private health corporations who bankroll the Tory party.

Given the mountain of evidence that Theresa May is a nasty, dishonest and blatantly incompetent politician with alarming hard-right authoritarian tendencies, it's astonishing that so many people have rote learned the absurdly inaccurate "safe pair of hands" trope from the mainstream media that she's actually become Britain's favourite politician!

It's obvious that the Mainstream media have helped to create this misleadingly positive impression by completely failing to hold her to account for her blunders (imagine the absolute furore if Jeremy Corbyn had quoted a vile misogynistic Twitter troll in parliament) or her dictatorial Snoopers' Charter that would have made the East German Statsi turn green with envy.

It's astonishing that people allow themselves to be hoodwinked like this but it's undeniable that they have been. So what is it that people like about Theresa May?

Perhaps there's just something in the British psyche that makes an awful lot of people adore Theresa May's overly strict nanny persona? Perhaps millions of people share the same shameful and deeply buried perversion that wants some kind of dominatrix nanny figure to punish and abuse them with impunity? What other explanation is there?

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