Craig Murray: Theresa May’s Britain

I have only ever been able to discern two underlying motivations in Theresa May’s career; a love of office and a hatred of immigrants. It is possible to love office without loving power; loving power means you want to do something with it, whereas loving office is just for prestige and personal economic opportunity. I do not imagine May’s hatred of immigrants is driven by actual racism, easy though it is to read that into her hostile environment, go home van, end free movement, career. It is rather that the incredibly successful Tory narrative remains the false attribution of working-class poverty to immigration, rather than its actual cause, massive inequality and an entire legal structure and system of government geared to promoting the interests of the super wealthy.

 

I do not understand the notion that we have a constitutional crisis. The solution seems self-evident. England and Wales voted to leave the EU, by a large margin if you take those two countries, which share a legal system, alone. Let them leave the EU. Scotland voted by a still larger majority to remain in the EU. Let it become Independent, remain in the EU, and not need to thwart the will of the English and Welsh to leave. And let Ireland forget its bigots and be a united country.

Constitutional crisis over. Indeed, that there is no other viable solution, and the UK is no longer a viable political unit, I can guarantee you will be universally recognised by the year 2030 as having been a self-evident truth. The actual dissolution of the UK will come ten years before that.

The BBC TV News was hyping the success of the British economy under Theresa May a couple of days ago on the basis of figures from the Office of National Statistics showing that the economic inactivity rate had fallen to 21%, the lowest since records began. But that needs to be considered alongside the fact that purchasing power of average wages is still below where it was ten years ago, and a huge swathe of the population is in insecure, part-time and low paid employment.

The decline of leisure is not something to be celebrated. The shrinking of the “economically inactive” figure to 21% means that many pensioners are forced to keep on working because they cannot make ends meet on the developed world’s most miserly pensions, that parents of young children are forced both to stay in jobs rather than provide all the love, protection and affection they may wish. Every time Theresa May is questioned on the heartless fiasco of universal credit, she states its aim is to “get people back into work”, by which she means – choose between starvation and vicious drudgery; with no rights, no prospects and low paid hours handed down as a favour.

Whether or not May stays as head of the Tory government, or is replaced by some other heartless Tory bastard, I really do not care. I have not been blogging much recently, in sheer exasperation at the enormity of societal injustice and the utter irrelevance of the available political system. But I guess we have to get back to chipping away at the marble facade of power with our tiny social media picks. One day it will fall.

 

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 

 

 

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