Theresa May

Brexit means Brexit.*

Theresa May 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 form 2016 - 2019. She's nicknamed "Submarine May" because as soon as things get tough she dives below the surface.

May is a Protestant Christian within the Church of England, and the daughter of a vicar. The good news is that, like Dave, May lacks the predisposition toward evangelicalism. 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 and Andrea "My Ovaries Work" Leadsom. 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), their mandate, and £100b of the public purse. What took David Cameron 11 years as leader to build up, it only took 11 months for May to destroy for their party.

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

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). May served six years as Home Secretary, in charge of law and order, borders, immigration, drug policy etc. She is already 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. She also holds the judiciary in total contempt.

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.

Not enough people mention the files on pedophiles in the UK that went "missing" while she was in charge of the Home Office.

Prime Minister
Whenever Gordon Brown chooses to call a general election, we will be ready for him. He has no democratic mandate.

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. She is also the UK's second female Prime Minister, the first having been Margaret Thatcher. Just give her time, and she'll make Thatcher look like a Communist.

However, if Scotland decides to leave the UK and rejoin the EU, she could well be the final British Prime Minister, which is not something you want on your CV.

Brexit
People talk about the sort of Brexit that there is going to be – is it hard or soft, is it grey or white. Actually we want a red, white and blue Brexit...

Never thought I would live to see a British Prime Minister spouting such utter twaddle

Brexit means Brexit!

To give May the benefit of the doubt, she's in a rather large and complicated mess that's not of her own making, and saying something like "Brexit means Brexit", while not exactly informative, is her trying to buy time so Parliament can wrap their heads around the situation and start figuring a way out. Hard to argue with success: She managed to leech a few votes from Labor and break UKIP, taking advantage of a lack of real opposition.


 * Hmm, it's almost as if she's worked out that there's a huge block of Brexiteers in the north who will vote Tory. (Actually, May is not a new convert. As home secretary, she'd been doing similar stuff to non-EU migrants since 2010. 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 sees her plan for a soft Brexit isn't working out and is going to trigger Article 50 without delay, thus giving up her bargaining position and access to the single market. It's a self-inflicted wound for London, who will lose prominence as a global financial center.
 * Brexit was supposed to be about taking sovereignty from the EU and giving it back to Parliament, but all May ever seems to do is undermine Parliament in favour of... not sure what.
 * Now she's promising to break up the banks, jail the tax dodgers, spend like there's no tomorrow, isolate the UK on a lonely island, risk destabilizing the entire union, and still get everything she wants from Europe, regardless of practicality, because that's what friends do(?).  Not even Corbyn wanted to go as far as May proposes, and he was castigated for being a Trot. This 180° turn from laissez-faire (under Dave) to a moralist, protectionist, command economy (under May) is making the Tories delirious.  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 Amber Rudd, is that it "prevents migrants from taking jobs British people can do." You know what they say: converts are the most zealous. Immediate backlash from businesses seems to have no real effect on policy, however.
 * Throughout her political career, May been extremely keen on getting out of the / May will now opt out of EU human rights laws, which coincidentally exempts British troops from having to obey human rights laws, and thus, would be legally immune from prosecution should they commit war crimes. She also wants to make it easier for journalists, reporters, and critics in general to be "investigated" for reporting on war crimes violations/allegations.  This is part of a broader policy to suspend the Human Rights Act.
 * 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".

Just About Managing
Cameron got a good three years out of "Compassionate Conservatism." May's JAMs read like a joke, she's brought nothing but pain to people who (shamefully) need benefits to live despite working 40+ hours a week. Iain Duncan Smith is a die-hard Thatcherite, this is a return to the glory days for him. And yet he's out there protesting May's benefit cuts.

Trade
This isn’t a country, it’s an American aircraft carrier.

May and her party are making large-scale transfers of public funds to favoured companies via "investment".

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 is she to the US? A partner in crime. Meanwhile, Trump can't even get her name right.

The funniest part is that he's giving priority to Germany, of Tax their cars, I'm not shaking your hand and You owe us 400 billion dollars for NATO here is the invoice fame. "Front of the queue", indeed.

Social issues and equality
Theresa May's views on gay marriage are something of a mixed bag: under the leadership of May voted against repealing Section 28 in 1998 and voted against adoption rights for same-sex couples, in accordance with the  when others such as Boris Johnson (whose own record on LGBT rights isn't exactly 100% clean ) and George Osborne rebelled as a matter of conscience (Yes, he does have one!). In her time at the Home Office, policies have been 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."

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

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. At least May can differentiate between honest citizens and Islamic extremists, which pleases the left a good deal, though the right is worried that she'll start banning criticism of Islam next. 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."

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

Drugs
As home secretary, she refuse to budge on any sort of discussion on drugs beyond the old prohibition line. 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.

Censorship
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".

0 dead from Pornhub, but porn is a public health concern. That was in 2014; two years later, her government is 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. The wording of the legislation ("non-conventional" sexual viewing) is similar to Russia's banning "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations". For a PM who has yet to apologise for Clause 28, this is a worrying precedent.

May is also threatening action against those who advance unpopular ideas or sympathize with terrorists, even if they don't themselves advocate violence or illegal action.

Internet encryption
As Home Secretary, she was in favour of increased surveillance especially of online activities. May's first steps as premier have been to go after internet users, particularly journalists. It's all under the guise of national security. Bonus: They won't be able to take it to the European court.

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

Climate change
Fracking ban: okay to overturn. Brexit: nope, we have to listen to the will of the people.

Cameron's Conservatives were environmentally-conscious. May clearly doesn't care at all. She has merged the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) into a new department called, well, "Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy". Which is an obvious conflict of interest and will likely reduce government action on climate change.

Hearing voices
May claimed in an interview with The Sunday Times that God has been 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.

"Coalition of Chaos"
When has a snap election ever worked out well for the people who called it? The Tories are governing with a very slim majority, forcing them to cut a deal with the DUP to maintain a grip on Northern Ireland. No doubt the papers will dedicate just as much time highlighting this as they did Corbyn's ties to the IRA.

It won't be Theresa at the helm, but Brexit will still proceed. But will it be a "hard" Brexit now? Likely not.

Everything is on fire

 * The Prime Minster's Brexit deal draft is going to be rejected in the commons. To her credit, May seems to realize this and won’t hold a vote on it.
 * Lots of cabinet members are resigning because the outlined deal isn't to their liking.
 * Jacob Rees-Mogg has kicked off letters of no confidence. We may have a Tory leadership contest happening soon, and likely a general election.

Basically a lot of hard-liner Tories are using the chaos of the Brexit negotiations to position themselves for a power grab. This has been going on for months, it's coming to a head now because the HoC will soon vote on the Brexit deal, and Theresa May has lost control of her cabinet.

Videos

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