Friday 7th October

So Mrs. May has set out her stall.  And very attractive it looks too, full of glossy words and polished phrases and apple-pie sentiments, who could possibly disagree with her.  Well, Tony Blair couldn’t for a start; her vision could well have been written for any of his early Conference Speeches.  Ed Milliband came up with almost the same phrases in his Conference Adresses too.  Some of her ideas, no actually almost all of her ideas have been discussed and agreed at Labour Conferences for years.  Workers on Company Boards, protecting the weak, going after tax avoiders, intervening when the free market is not working for the good of all, even praising Atlee for the creation of the NHS.  And dare we mention it, governing for the weak and the working classes rather than the privileged few.  In fact her whole speech would have sat happily with almost any Labour leader since the War (except that Labour would have been accused of class warfare).  Theresa May is a Socialist after all, who would have guessed.

Well you have to sit beneath Nelson’s Column and read between the lines (between the lions) to really understand what she is doing.  She is no Socialist at all, but is using the language of Socialism to try to fool us all.  She is trying to create the impression that there has just been a general election and she has won; only she is presenting her glossy manifesto after the fact rather than before the vote.  In some ways it is not that different from the words Cameron used when he talked (seems a long time ago now) of Compassionate Conservatism; remember all that hug a husky nonsense.  And even George Osborne, the architect of the now abandoned Austerity talked about helping all those who worked hard, rewarding the strivers and so on.  She is telling the World, but also her party that a new management is in charge, and it is kind and inclusive and not nasty anymore.  Well, we will see.

I would love it if she and the Tories did actually improve the lot of the poor and the weak, and did rein back the power of Corporations and did stop the rich and powerful taking advantage of us all.  But, I really don’t believe it.  Why did she not object, why did she not argue for working people, why did she not stop Osborne rewarding the very privileged few she now has in her sights when she was in Cabinet for 6 and a half years? Why did she vote for Benefit cuts,  why did she support Hunt against Junior Doctors, why did she vote for the bedroom tax?  I think we all know the answer.  In a way she probably believes some of the new rhetoric herself, but she must   also know that the current policies pursued by her Government will never achieve any of it.   But she is clever, and for a while may fool many of the public, who are longing for a change of heart, for someone who understands them and who they can trust.  We will see.  In four years time things may well look different and then her claims to Govern for the many and not the few (remember how ‘we are all in it together’ unraveled) may be tested by reality.