Wednesday 11 April 2018

Theresa May - the "nanny state" social justice warrior in No. 10

I suspect many - perhaps most - right-wingers and conservatives (and quite a few centrists and left-wingers) are so horrified at the thought of the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse (Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Angela Rayner) taking charge of the country...

...that they've bent over backwards not to criticise the present government over some of the distinctly non-conservative and non-right-wing policies it's been inflicting on us. After all, if you're a passenger on the the Titanic who's just heard that the ship is making a beeline for a dirty great iceberg, would you choose that moment to seek out the captain to complain about the quoits tournament being postponed due to rough weather? No, you'd swallow your irritation, crack open another bottle of bubbly, and wait for the crisis to pass. But if the captain, instead of bothering to change course, took advantage of your forbearance to issue a plethora of petty directives seemingly designed to inconvenience and shortchange  passengers who'd paid a bloody fortune for their tickets, you might begin to feel that he was taking the piss, and that you might as well complain about the quoits tournament after all.

Well, that, almost exactly nine months since the disastrous and wholly unnecessary 2017 general election, is pretty much how I'm beginning to feel. I was prepared for Mrs May, weakened by self-inflicted wounds, not to order the Full English Breakfast of the sort of right-wing policies that any self-respecting Conservative prime minister would relish - but I wasn't expecting her to opt instead for the Continental Breakfast of gutless, incoherent, interfering, virtue-signalling, nanny-state Blairite, liberal-left policies that she's forced down our throats since she managed to limp back into office. If you don't want to risk eating unhealthy food, go to health-food restaurants or prepare your own food at home or explain to your waiter that you have a nut allergy/celiac disease/diabetes etc - why is it the restaurant's job to protect you from your own folly? It's hard to think of an initiative less likely to appeal to traditional Conservative voters - apart, of course, from this recent triumph of kneejerk nanny-state health fascism:
Ah, yes, that's why people voted Tory - so they could pay more for a Coke in order to stop other people's porky kids getting even fatter! Or maybe they voted Conservative because they're frantically worried about racial equality: 
And again:
Yup - whenever Tory voters gather (in secret, behind closed doors, having given the secret password) they rarely talk about anything other than the suffering of black people in this hideously racist country. Unless, of course, it's to weep tears of rage at the plight of Britain's vast transgender community:
Oh goody - the Conservatives are going to "ensure" that LGBT issues are "better taught in schools." I was just complaining to a conservative friend the other day that the real problem with the British state school system is undoubtedly that pupils simply aren't subjected to nearly enough cultural Marxist propaganda. Remember: normal is nasty - weird is wonderful! Can't you just imagine the outbursts of spontaneous cheering  at Conservative Party Association meetings up and down the land that greeted Mrs May's announcement? That'll certainly motivate the troops to get out there and spread the message on the doorstep. If that doesn't do the trick, there's nothing like attacking the Party to which they belong to energise them: 
But if they're not railing against the ghastly racism of white Britons, or against silly old fuddy-duddies who fail to grasp the self-evident fact that penises and vaginas have nothing whatsoever to do with gender, or shriving themselves because they failed to get het up about gay marriage when hardly anybody gave a damn about it, then Tories are wailing and gnashing their teeth about the gender pay-gap:
Let me just check that I've understood this: a Tory government has devised a way to get businesses - the engine of the economy and the source of all that lovely tax money that governments use to bribe voters - to waste valuable time collecting data which will then be used to shame them into over-promoting women (the Norwegians did this, and it was a financial disaster) in order to solve a non-existent problem because a bunch of BBC presenters earning well over £100,000 a year have had a collective hissy fit? But Mrs May's pandering to the sisterhood (at least, the one-percenters among them) didn't end there: 
What form did the warning take, I wonder? Oh, I see - right. I so agree! The fight will only have been truly won when a majority of Britain's main political parties - for instance, the Conservatives, the SNP, the DUP, the Greens and Sinn Fein - are led by women! But if there's something even dearer to Conservative hearts than gender equality, it's summed up in the traditional Tory rallying cry - What about the workers?:
It's as if Mrs May's spends all her time thinking up ways to unleash the dynamism and energy of Britain's business community by freeing it from the shackles of the sort of meaningless, enervating, petty-fogging rules and regulations that socialists are always seeking to impose. (Theresa, the workers' champion, had to drop that policy - but it's such a great idea, I'm sure she'll revive it when the time is right.)

Of course, Mrs May has demonstrated time and again that she's only too aware of the need to pander to her base by standing up for British industry against foreign competition and malicious foreign bureaucrats:
And, needless to say, as a former Home Secretary, she knows how to satisfy traditional Tory supporters' demand for law and order:
And what's not to love about this:
Or this:
Above all, though, what Mrs May has proved conclusively is that she intuitively understands - and shares - her party's utter contempt for politicians who are happier splurging taxpayers' money in a vain attempt to fix problems in foreign countries rather than spending it on pressing issues here at home:
I don't know about you - but it makes me want to cry. 

2 comments:

  1. That's quite a charge sheet, isn't it? The sobering thought is that it is by no means all she should be in the dock for.

    There was a school of thought prior to the last general election that a Momentum government would inevitably be short lived and would inoculate enough voters against socialism for sufficiently long to kill the bug for several generations.

    At the time, I thought it was a stupid idea. I'm not so sure now. Could things be a lot worse?

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    1. I might have agreed with you in the early '90s, when John Major narrowly losing to Neil Kinnock might have been no bad thing - short-term pain would probably have resulted in the return of an anti-EU, right-wing Conservative government within a couple of years, thus possibly avoiding the whole Blair/Brown/Cameron era. Now, I'm not so sure, mainly because a Corbyn government would coincide with the start of Brexit - we'd have a government which despises this country in charge at the exact point when it needs to be as upbeat, optimistic, patriotic and pro-business as possible. I'm not saying Theresa May is the right person to lead such a government (far from it), but I shudder to imagine what the like of McDonnell and Thornberry could do to the Brexit project.

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