Theresa May

Theresa May, newly arrived by umbrella, in 2015.

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Theresa May (1956–) a.k.a. "The Vicar's daughter", "The Submarine", "The Maybot", and "Sharia May" to National-Conservative was the Prime Minister of the UK and leader of the Conservative Party from 2016–2019. She's nicknamed "Submarine May" because as soon as things get tough she dives below the surface.^[3]

May is a Protestant Christian within the Church of England, and the daughter of a vicar.^[4] The good news is that, like Dave, May lacks the predisposition toward evangelicalism.^[5] Still, her record paints the picture of a self-righteous, moralising nanny who is living in the past, completely out of touch with the majority on both sides of the spectrum (basically anyone who isn't a pensioner who thinks we're living in the last days of Rome). Most Britons agreed she is still preferable to the nutty, Leave-backing pretenders like Michael "How Real Men clap" Gove^[6] and Andrea "My Ovaries Work" Leadsom.^[7] It's a fairly depressing state of affairs, but true.

Between her and Cameron, the costs to the party have been staggering. They threw away their majority (one of the most powerful majorities in parliament in the UK ever),^[8] their mandate, and £100b of the public purse.^[9] What took David Cameron 11 years as leader to build up,^[10] it only took 11 months for May to destroy for their party.

Home Secretary[edit]

“”[Britain's Prime Minister is] not going to be Theresa May, there is no chance.

—Mystic Mensch strikes again![11]

She is bewilderingly lacking in any achievements from her time as a Member of Parliament, beyond deflecting blame (i.e. the Cameron Model of premiership).^[12] May served six years as Home Secretary, in charge of law and order, borders, immigration, drug policy etc. She is unpopular among those who work in the NHS, the police, Border Force or the fire service. May helped destroy those services more than any other Home Secretary in history.^[13][14][15] She also holds the judiciary in total contempt.^{[16][17][18][19]}

She launched the "hostile environment", a scheme to make life as unpleasant as possible for anybody who might be an illegal immigrant, or looks foreign, or speaks funny: the human rights organisation Liberty wrote "The hostile environment is by its very nature discriminatory, so it is no surprise that it encourages discriminatory – even racist – behaviour". An example of this is landlords refusing to let to black and ethnic minority tenants even if they are British citizens.^[20][21]

The hostile environment led directly to the Windrush Scandal ^[22] which saw people wrongly detained, denied their human rights and wrongly deported, a tragedy that ruined the lives of many from Windrush Generation.^[23] People lost their homes, their jobs, denied medical care, and were deported after the Home office destroyed the landing cards of Windrush Generation residents - the only documentation that proved their right to reside in the UK. By law the Windrush Generation were not required to retain any documentation themselves. The problem was known about as early as 2013, but deportations were happening as late as 2019. The UK government then proceeded to drag its feet in correcting its wrongs and tried to deny the victims their right to return after it was shown that they had been wrongly deported. People died before it could be made right. The Hostile Environment and May threw these people to wolves and is the one thing Theresa May should be remembered for, over anything she got up to before or after as Prime Minister.

Prime Minister[edit]

She was the last Tory standing after the post-Brexit circular firing squad. May had a high level of support amongst the public for her "strength", which turned out to be stubbornness detrimental to the country's well being.^[25] She is also the UK's second female Prime Minister, the first having been Margaret Thatcher.

Policies[edit]

Brexit[edit]

To give May the benefit of the doubt, she was in a rather large and complicated mess wasn't entirely of her own making,^[28] and saying something like "Brexit means Brexit", while not exactly informative, was her trying to buy time so Parliament could wrap their heads around the situation and start figuring a way out.^{[note 1]} Hard to argue with success:^[29] She managed to leech a few votes from Labour and break UKIP,^[30][31] taking advantage of a lack of real opposition.

• Hmm, it's almost as if she worked out that there was a huge block of Brexiteers in the north who would vote Tory.
  (Actually, May is not a new convert.^[32] As home secretary, she'd been doing similar stuff to non-EU migrants since 2010.^[33] Nobody cared back then.)
• The British public were sold a vision of a negotiated or "soft" Brexit wherein the UK retain access to free trade and the single market. Now the comedy begins: Theresa saw her plan for a soft Brexit wasn't working out and was going to trigger Article 50 without delay, thus giving up her bargaining position and access to the single market. It was a self-inflicted wound for London, who would lose prominence as a global financial center.^[34]
• Brexit was supposed to be about taking sovereignty from the EU and giving it back to Parliament, but all May ever seemed to do was undermine Parliament in favour of... not sure what.^[35]
• She's promised to break up the banks,^[36] jail the tax dodgers,^[37] spend like there's no tomorrow,^[38] isolate the UK on a lonely island,^[39][40] risk destabilizing the entire union, and still get everything she wanted from Europe, regardless of practicality, because that's what friends do(?).^[41][42]
  Not even Corbyn wanted to go as far as May proposed, and he was castigated for being a Trot. This 180° turn from laissez-faire (under Dave) to a moralist, protectionist, command economy (under May) made the Tories delirious.^[43][44] Somebody should write a book about this.
• In a speech, May proposed forcing British businesses to reveal and register their foreign workers. The idea, echoed by then-Home Secretary Amber Rudd, is that it "prevents migrants from taking jobs British people can do."^[45] You know what they say: converts are the most zealous.^[46] The immediate backlash from businesses appeared to have no real effect on policy, however.^[47]
• Throughout her political career,^[48] May has been extremely keen on getting out of the ECJ/ECHR. Following a process started by Cameron, May decided to opt out of EU human rights laws, which coincidentally exempted British troops from having to obey human rights laws, and thus, would make them legally immune from prosecution should they commit war crimes. She also wanted to make it easier for journalists, reporters, and critics in general to be "investigated" for reporting on war crimes violations/allegations.^[49][50] This was part of a broader policy to suspend the Human Rights Act.^[51]
• Most Tories start from a hard-arsed position to negotiate down to something reasonable. May does not exaggerate. When she suggested turning heavily-pregnant women away from hospitals if they could not produce a UK passport on the spot, she considered it not only a reasoned position, but "uncontroversial".^[52]

Trade[edit]

May and her party made large-scale transfers of public funds to favoured companies via "investment".^[53]

She could have been leader of the EU. By 2050, the United Kingdom will be more populated than Germany, and EU council votes are based on population. What was she to the US? A partner in crime.^[54][55] Meanwhile, Trump couldn't even get her name right.^[56][57]

Social issues and equality[edit]

Theresa May's views on gay marriage are something of a mixed bag: under the leadership of IDS, May voted against repealing Section 28 in 1998 and voted against adoption rights for same-sex couples, in accordance with the party whip, when others such as Boris Johnson (whose own record on LGBT rights isn't exactly 100% clean^[58]) and George Osborne rebelled as a matter of conscience (Yes, he does have one!).^[59] In her time at the Home Office, policies were put in place which forced LGBT asylum seekers to prove their sexuality, some allegedly through intimate photos and videos of same-sex sexual activity. One individual was even told that she couldn't have been a lesbian, simply because she had children, saying that "You can't be a heterosexual one day and a lesbian the next day. Just as you can't change your race."^[60]

Still, compared to her competitors, May was by no means the worst candidate with regards to LGBT equality. Under Michael Howard, May abstained from voting on the Gender Recognition Act (allowing transgender individuals to legally change their gender) but later supported same-sex marriage alongside then-leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron:^[59]

"I want us to be a country where it doesn't matter where you were born, who your parents are, where you went to school, what your accent sounds like, what God you worship, whether you are a man or a woman, gay or straight, black or white. All that should matter is the talent you have and how hard you're prepared to work."^[61]

Shortly after her appointment, she borrowed a page from Dubya's playbook: reading aloud from the Quran, a gesture of solidarity with Britain's Muslims and a warning shot at the far-right. Fair play to her, she has always courted the Muslim vote.^[62] At least May can differentiate between honest citizens and Islamic extremists, which pleases the left a good deal, though the right was worried that she'd start banning criticism of Islam next.^[63] Case in point, back in her Home Sec days, she was instrumental in banning Aerosmith frontman Steve Tyler Pamela Geller from the UK, calling it "a measure against unfettered free speech."^[64]

She once ran a campaign where buses drove around telling illegal immigrants to 'go home or face arrest'^[65]

Drugs[edit]

As home secretary, she refused to budge on any sort of discussion on drugs beyond the old prohibition line.^[66] Her psychoactive substances bill attracted widespread criticism for its lack of grounding in reality: She banned literally everything that is psychoactive, which means you could theoretically be arrested for having virtually any substance in existence.^[67]

Censorship[edit]

In 2015, she banned an American rap artist, Tyler the Creator, from the UK on the ground that his songs "seek to provoke others to terrorist acts".^[68]

Zero dead from Pornhub, but porn is a public health concern.^[69] That was in 2014; two years later, her government began rolling out a plan to police people's kinks. They're using BBFC guidelines, so if it can't be shown in a movie, then they won't allow it.^[70] The wording of the legislation ("non-conventional" sexual viewing) is similar to Russia's "anti-gay" law banning "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations".

May also threatened action against those who advance unpopular ideas or sympathize with terrorists, even if they don't themselves advocate violence or illegal action.^[71]

Internet encryption[edit]

As Home Secretary, she was in favour of increased surveillance especially of online activities.^[72] May's first steps as premier were to go after internet users, particularly journalists, under the guise of national security.^[73][74][75] Bonus: They won't be able to take it to the European court.

She wanted to put the internet under the control of regulation of the government - her government, which would have had the power to block all porn sites and ultimately every non-Murdoch news site that criticizes the ruling class.^[76]

Climate change[edit]

Fracking ban: okay to overturn. Brexit: nope, we have to listen to the will of the people.^[77]

Cameron's Conservatives were environmentally-conscious. May clearly didn't care at all.^[78] She merged the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) into a new department called, well, "Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy", which would imply a clear conflict of interest.^[79] (The department was dissolved and split in 2023, with one part becoming the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.)

Hearing voices[edit]

May claimed in an interview with The Sunday Times that God was guiding her through Brexit. That's the one thing which prevented her own cabinet from tearing her open to check that she wasn't a droid.

However, the fact that Theresa has campaigned both for and against the EU suggests that, at some point, she may have been talking to Satan.^[80][81]

"Coalition of Chaos and goodbye"[edit]

May called a snap election in 2017. It went badly, as it usually does. Although May won, just, the Tories were governing with a very slim majority, forcing them to cut a £1bn increased spending deal for Northern Island as a sop to the DUP. This was seen as a bribe in order to secure the DUP's support to prop up her government on a "confidence-and-supply" arrangement rather than a formal coalition.^[82]

Although never really popular with those on the right of the Tory party, even those of a more moderate disposition started to openly criticise her. She survived two votes of no confidence, in December 2018 and in January 2019. Then, after versions of her draft withdrawal agreement were rejected by Parliament three times, and following her party's dire performance in the 2019 European Parliament election (receiving just 8.8% of the votes), she confirmed that she would resign as Conservative Party leader in June 2019. Phew! We hear you say, but that's only until you find out who replaced her...

After announcing her intention to stand down as an MP in March 2024, she was nominated for a life peerage by Rishi Sunak, and created Baroness May in August of the same year.

Videos[edit]

• Cassetteboy vs The Snoopers' Charter
• Brexit Supreme Court ruling as seen by Taiwanese animators

See also[edit]

• 2017 United Kingdom general election
• Liz Truss

External links[edit]

• Remembering that time when Theresa blamed a cat for high immigration.
• According to the very scientific analysis of Gay-Or-Straight.com, Theresa May is 89% gay.

Notes[edit]

References[edit]