The UK "Porn Block": ineffective, counter-productive, intrusive…and a microcosm of Theresa May's psychology?

The author some time ago wrote about how Theresa May’s psychology seemed like a microcosm of Britain’s collective neuroses. As a person, her inner thinking is defined by her background. The manner of how she ruled the both the Home Office as Home Secretary and has run the country as Prime Minister can be explained by the self-evident moral rigidity of her upbringing: the only child of a priest, growing up in the whiter-than-white heart of traditional “Middle England”.

There is more than a whiff of poisonously-regressive, moralistic sanctimony to the manner of both May’s idea of society and the social agenda that her government has pursued. It is as though under her watch, she wants to actively encourage the authoritarian moralizing that typified the Victorian era, but implemented with 21st century technology.

Under May’s watch, Britain loses its identity as a progressive Western society, and slides into the authoritarian realm, where people’s private actions are policed, even when what they are doing is entirely legal. These are not even people suspected of being criminals or conspiring in criminal behavior; they are simply doing something that is entirely natural as human beings. This is done in the name of “protecting children”; as all authoritarian actions are done in someone else’s name.

In this way, she is taking the idea of “nudging”public behaviour that was introduced under Cameron’s administration, and applying her own deeply unsubtle, authoritarian methodology: from coaxing people’s inclinations to hammering them into their head.  

The “Porn Block” is merely the logical conclusion to May’s pursuit of a regressive moral agenda that both stigmatizes the private realities of modern life, and removes the right to privacy for those interested in most online sexual content. The consumption of pornography becomes an implicit “thoughtcrime”: while it is “legal”, those who consume it are made to feel stigmatized, with all their online private inclinations stored and recorded. How convenient. The infamous phrase that “people who have done nothing wrong have nothing to fear” is the exact opposite of the intention of this policy: they have everything to fear.

Of course, the real intention is as “red meat” to the Conservative Party’s geriatric grassroots. Of those people, few of them see the internet as anything else than a corrupting and dangerous influence. Of course, it can be this, but that is the same any form of media.

Then there are the practicalities behind it, which explain how the “Porn Block” is such an utterly stupid idea at various levels. Apart from all the security dangers it poses to users at recording vast quantities of personal data and sexual interests, it is easy to circumvent the age barriers using VPN software in any case, making it largely ineffective to any savvy (underage) internet user. And to those who can’t get around the age block, then the “dark web” will be another unregulated avenue for them to explore. In the same way that banning soft drugs simply means that it sends users to the same dealers of illegal harder drugs (and thus being a counter-productive government act), the “Porn Block” will simply entice more teenagers to the “dark web”, where the most extreme content possible can also be found. So how about that for protecting children from porn?

The fact that this policy is so ineffective, counter-productive and authoritarian and that is also has occurred under the watch of Theresa May cannot be mere coincidence. Apart from being a national leader who is so utterly useless at almost everything she deals with, she then has to distract her ineptitude with authoritarian policies that can only appeal to her party base. Even if the policy is disastrous on so many levels, the fact that her party base would probably love it supersedes all other concerns. This was true of the “hostile environment”, welfare reform, and “austerity”, and is also true of the “Porn Block”.

Another social consequence of the “Porn Block” is that is amplifies the moral gulf between the rulers and the ruled. 21^st century Britain is a "liberal" country, but this is a policy that does not belong in a liberal country. It is a policy that doesn’t even belong in the West at all. But Britain’s ruling elite are a class apart from those below them whose taxes pay for the moralizing of their rulers. The rulers don’t care about the “Porn Block” in practical terms, because they know how to circumvent it already. Many of them already do this in how they “manage” their tax affairs. In this way, the “Porn Block” is simply more evidence of the contempt that the rulers have for the private lives of the ruled. As far as the rulers are concerned, the ruled don’t deserve one; the “Porn Block” is simply confirmation of this.

 

No sex (education), please – we’re British

The “Porn Block”, as the government seems proud to point out, makes Britain a pioneer in online security. As mentioned already before, the “security” aspect is both dangerous and pathetically-easy to circumvent. So all this proves, in the same manner as Brexit, is how hopelessly how out-of-depth and painfully lacking in self-awareness Britain’s government looks to the rest of the world. If the “Porn Block” makes Britain’s government a pioneer, it is only a pioneer in embarrassing ineptitude, under the guise of moral authoritarianism. It makes Britain’s government look like a slapstick version of the “morality police”.

In any case, these actions only underline how abysmal Britain’s sexual education is compared to most other developed nations, and how the government’s first instinct is to prevent people from finding things out or (heaven forbid) enjoying themselves in a way that their rulers find somehow offensive or socially dangerous. British sex education is almost an oxymoron, as governments (especially Conservative ones) are so constrained by their own sexual insecurities they are horrified at the idea of people having an “education” in sex. They simply cannot countenance seriously talking about it.

The alternative to sex education is the situation Britain has had for decades: among the highest rates for teenage pregnancy in the Western world. Government policy that engenders sexual ignorance in society does not reduce the desire for sex; indeed, decades of evidence have shown it produces the exact opposite effect.

One glaringly obvious reason that teenagers watch porn is that – apart from entirely natural hormonal reasons – because they know so little about sex from their schooling or their parents, online pornography becomes the only “resource” they can access to discover more about it. Therefore the most obvious reason that teenagers have such questionable morality about sex is because, lacking any proper guidance from responsible adults, they get their “sex education” from porn. The end result of “porn” being their primary sexual resource, are (male) teenagers with highly questionable ideas of consent, among many other issues of sexual realism.

And now the government wants to prevent teenagers from having any practical knowledge of sex at all until they come of age, in a true moralizing throwback to Victorian prudishness. It is true that before the internet age, pornography was very much limited in its circulation to the general population. 

But is that really a regression that Britain should be making in the 21^st century – back to a time decades ago when pornography was a realm that only “perverts” inhabited? It is telling how pervasive that outdated thinking still seems to be in the socially-regressive mind of Theresa May.

In this way, Britain under Theresa May has become, in regards to sex, one step closer to the moral universe of puritanical absolutism with modern technology: a moral plane that is much closer to the contemporary Muslim regimes of the Middle East and Asia, for example; or to use a fictitious parallel, the logical conclusion of this path is the descent some kind of twisted British version of Gilead.

Not so much “Under His Eye”, but “Under Theresa’s Eye”.

Theresa May's personality: an "anti-social" Prime Minister?

The motivations of Theresa May can be distilled down to her relationship to the Conservative Party, which has been with her from a young age. In this way, her role as leader of the country is really about her masking her inner inclinations towards the protecting the interest of her party. She is a product of her conservative background, and a dutiful servant of the Conservative Party.

These deep-set motivations explain her reasons for embracing the meaning of Brexit after the EU referendum. This allowed her to discard the "mask" she wore as part of Cameron's more centrist liberalism, and also explained her evident glee in sending George Osborne into parliamentary exile. She was able to express her reactionary, parochial instincts more freely under the cover of respecting the Brexit vote.

More tellingly, once she became Prime Minister, the more neurotic "quirks" of her personality became public knowledge.
As Home Secretary, she was known to protect her privacy fiercely, but as someone to work with, she was known to be secretive and rely on only a few loyalists (Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill in particular). One of the traits she had that became so useful to David Cameron was her reliability to master a "brief" i.e. to loyally repeat the "agreed" line. This was one of main things that accounted for her longevity at the Home Office.
Indeed, it could even be argued that the Home Office is continuing her work even after she has left it, leaving the official Home Secretary's role to often act as little more than a spokesperson for May's own strategy. In other words, Theresa May still seems in effective charge of Home Office strategy, leaving the Home Secretary to have little control over what the department's officials decide; the officials seem to be simply following the same strategy that May had when she was at the Home Office, regardless of what her successors might think. With Theresa May, Home Office strategy seems to be run almost directly by the Prime Minister.
To be fair, this isn't a new phenomenon, though: when Gordon Brown took over as Prime Minister after being head of the Treasury for so long, it was well-known that his successor at 11 Downing Street had similar issues as Chancellor. But the fact the Home Office's persistence with policies that have even been criticized by the Home Secretary himself, suggests that May's psychological impact has been to turn the Home Office's staff into her personal "minions" (or "flying monkeys", if you prefer). The Home Secretary doesn't even control what goes on in his own ministry.


Interactions with the social environment

As Prime Minister, her ability to "master" a brief has since become a point of satire: turning her into the "Maybot", incapable of answering a question in any other way than the one she has learned, and equally unable to coherently answer a question that she hasn't been given advance warning about. When these things do happen, the result is as cringe-worthy as it is ridiculous.
At the other extreme, this has frequently led her to answer questions in a way that resembles crazy-making semantic nonsense. While politicians are famous for "dissemination", May's method to "not answer a question" is almost unparalleled, forming sentences and entire speeches often entirely absent of meaning. Speeches that she has given at times resemble "Vogon poetry" recitals, making them almost physically-painful to endure. You wonder if this is actually intentional; by discouraging media appearances by making them so awful to listen to, she succeeds in reducing the need to speak in public to a bare minimum.
In this way, her naturally-insular instincts allow her to rule from the bunker, unseen like an enigmatic arm-chair general. This has provided yet more satirical material, of course, but in the real world where real answers to problems are needed, her semantic nonsense has driven those that need to make actual strategic decisions to the point of madness.

That being said, while her instincts have seemed to be to reduce her public speaking engagements as much as possible, in recent months, the ever-more-chaotic turn of events (caused from her own strategic inaction) have forced her to make ever more frequent appearances in parliament: to "answer" questions to the house.
But again, she seems to have lately developed an almost masochistic pleasure in this experience: mechanically responding to questions with crazy-making semantic nonsense. Literally hours and hours of parliament's time has been eaten up in this way, as she eats up time by wasting parliamentarians'. It's hard not to get the impression that the more time she spends formulating different ways of saying nothing, she is privately enjoying the practice it allows her to hone her semantic-nonsense-making skills. To borrow the "Maybot" analogy, it's as though each three-hour-long session of speaking to parliament without saying anything allows her semantic-nonsense-making software to be upgraded yet further. Parliament can never win, because her "semantic software" is always one step ahead of them. The fact that such parliamentary sessions thus resemble a form of psychological torture is something that May seems to have little concern about.
This "semantic software" has also been shown off to Brussels, as well, as has been reported, in cabinet itself.

Apart from May's idiosyncratic "speaking skills", there are also more overtly-displayed traits of social dysfunction.
 Her lack of even basic social skills is now well-documented. She famously doesn't "do" small talk. It's as though she simply has no idea what to say to people beyond some basic phrases she may have learned through experience. This indicates a kind of personality that struggles to understand some of the basics of human interaction.
More generally too, this feeds through to her inability to make people feel comfortable in her company; in fact, it appears she has no instinct to want to make people feel comfortable. There are anecdotes of her having meetings with colleagues where almost nothing is said on her part - either in words or in meaning. It is this that also makes spending time with her socially feel like a form of torture. Her stilted mannerisms and frosty demeanor give the impression of someone who simply doesn't like social situations or human interaction at all. This seems more than just "introversion"; it seems like something bordering on pathological. It's as though, at a fundamental level, she doesn't understand people.


Cognitive understanding

When it comes to decision-making and issues of cognition, there are also indications that Theresa May's judgement and sense of perspective is lacking at some critical level.
As said before, there have been plenty of occasions where it appears she has an inability to relate to others; both in terms of social interaction, but also in terms of cognitive understanding. In other words, it's as though she lacks the ability to relate to another's perspective. Either she seems unable to see when others are bored to death by her inability to answer a question, or she can see it but doesn't care. Either one of these would indicate some kind of deeper issue of lacking empathy. More seriously, when real-life situations (such as the Grenfell Tower fire) intrude, her inability to relate to others' feelings has been painfully-clear to see.
One can speculate where this comes from; whether it is just the way she is as a person, or was something that happened as a result of personal experience (and her life has been touched by family tragedy). Regardless, it poses serious questions about how she makes decisions that affect the whole country. And the way she has handled Brexit is a clear example of that: she has been determined to stick to her own interpretation of the vote regardless of what effect it has on others.

Theresa May's (robotic) ability to learn a "brief" as Home Secretary leads on to her bloody-minded obsession with immigration; both in sticking to the target of reducing immigration numbers even after it was clearly impractical, and also in counting international students as "immigrants". Her obsession with immigration demonstrates her blinkered (and neurotic) tendencies, which are a further sign of a perspective on others that appears "anti-social" in its origin. Her inability to see things from another's point of view - a key attribute of empathy - seems missing when it comes to immigration. This is true of her stance on social issues in general, but her rigidity on immigration is the most glaring example.
It is her self-evident obsession with immigration that led to her "red lines" in the Brexit negotiations with the EU. It was "immigration" that led to her interpreting Brexit as the necessity to leave the single market and customs union, which is what led to the infamous "back-stop" (a British idea, it should be remembered). Thus many of the chaotic shenanigans over the British negotiating position have been due to May's own inability to see Brexit as anything other than a vote against immigration.

As has been seen, as reality has shown many of May's political "stratagems" to be ever more absurd, her inability to change political tack and semantic rigidity have made her look like an increasingly-surrealist figure. But on the point of being able to think how others' would see her, she is either cognitively-incapable of this, or absent of any shame.
Either one of these explanations would point to an "anti-social" aspect to her personality. The truth may be a little of both, as we have already seen that she seems to lack empathy; while her apparent shamelessness at simply disseminating, or repeating the same plan as before even after its flaws have been exposed, indicates a bloody-mindedness that is pathological. She will continue with the same approach until it succeeds, regardless of the wider effect.
In this sense, she doesn't care what others think. This attribute was inferred even when she was campaigning for the leadership: that she wasn't interested in (and actually reviled) the superficial "popularity contest" aspect of modern politics. This was demonstrated by her decision to interpret the Brexit result as being an anti-immigration vote, regardless of any wider contributing issues. Her tendency to operate in a "bunker mentality" also supports the view that she would make decisions regardless of outside voices' advice.
While this approach can have its advantages at times, the fact that it is May's "default setting" tells us that she is someone who wants to close-off the outside world, making decisions that affect millions behind closed doors, deep in her "bunker" with a small circle of trusted advisers. This is the mentality of the "anti-social" autocrat; of a ruler safely separated from the ruled.

So Britain has come to be led by someone whose tendencies are anti-social in their nature; who seems to have a problem understanding people, and whose approach to politics seems to lack empathy.

Theresa May's "personality void": her inner psychology and the effect of Brexit

There are two common comments that have been made about Theresa May's personality, by both outside observers and those that have had direct interaction with her: one is her apparent lack of an easily-identifiable personality, and the other is her social awkwardness.

To be fair, there are those - her supporters, for instance - who would dispute these two characterizations, but that's hardly surprising. This simply supports the notion that May is only comfortable around people who she knows like her, or are like her: in other words, when she is in her "comfort zone". To have a fair understanding of someone's personality you need a sense of objectivity to have a have a proper sense of perspective. The vast majority of observations by those outside her loyalist circle have highlighted either one, or both, of the above characteristics.

Dealing with the first of these issues in this article - May's apparent "lack of personality" - is easiest when we look at what we know of her interests and what motivates her.


A personality void

Her motivations seem to stem (unsurprisingly) from how she was brought up. Being raised in the traditional values of "Middle England" of the 1950s as the single child of a vicar (with her mother working as Conservative Party activist), it is not hard to see where she gets her conservative values from. In these highly-specific circumstances of time, place and parentage, it would he hard to be raised in these surroundings and not have conservative values subconsciously instilled in you.
In her interviews, one of the main words May uses to describe her morality is the sense of "service". She has talked in the past of how various people in her family and in past generations have worked in roles that have involved a service element to them, either morally or functionally. In this way, her family background is typical of the ambitions that still embody a traditional English deference to social hierarchy. Due to her family background and history, she has thus been instilled with an innate sense of modesty and self-sacrifice, as well as a sense of duty.

An added element to this which is crucial is how she got involved with the Conservative Party from a young age due to her mother's local connections. This emotional attachment to the party from a young age proves critical to understanding her motivations and well as her interests, because both become fused together in her relationship to the Conservative Party.
Her relationship to the party evolved as she spent time at Oxford University, where she met her husband (again, through their respective connections to the party). Thus it's not hard to an emotional connection to the Conservative Party become even more intertwined from her own mother's initial connections as well as her husband's. In this sense, she might emotionally connect both her parents and her husband with her own ties to the party.
Then, within a few years of her graduating both her parents died in differing circumstances, and by now she worked with the Bank Of England, joining her husband's pursuit in the financial sector. Her steady rise up the Tory ranks followed. Her psychology of "duty" and "service" therefore can be understood in the context of how, after her parents died, the Conservative Party was perhaps the one tangible thing that still kept her emotionally connected to her past. Her motivation was for the service of her party; both as a continuation of the morality of "service" that had been instilled in her from childhood, as well as out of a genuine emotional attachment she may have had for its values. It could be argued then that - in some psychological manner - her interest in the party compensated for the loss of her parents.

In this way, the accusation that Theresa May has no identifiable personality stems from the sense that her devotion to the party is there instead of any identifiable personality. To outsiders, she might seem like a personality void - an empty vessel - because her motivations and interests primarily revolve around her emotional connection to the Conservative Party. This point becomes key to understanding the way she had handled (and politically exploited) Brexit, which we'll look at a little later.

What are her interests, at a personal level? To outside eyes, Theresa May seems insufferably "boring". Her leisure pursuits seem mundane in the extreme: cooking at home and walking in the mountains seem to be the only obvious ones: the kind of things that associated with highly-traditional cultural values. It's hard to think what she and her husband talk about to pass the time, except for issues of politics and values. They appear like a cut-out "Mr and Mrs Middle England"; banal, wholesome, unimaginative and utterly two dimensional. Their personas seem designed to bore you into submission.
It is this lack of depth to both their personalities that feeds the sensation that their personas are masks; psychological "shells" that hide some deeper persona. Can they really, truly be that boring?

From what can be gleaned, the only interest that has been consistent over the years has been Theresa May's consistent interest in the Conservative Party. The "boring" aspect to Theresa May's psychology can be explained by both her stiflingly-orthodox background, and if we see her necessity to emotionally identify with the Conservative Party is because of deeper insecurities.
In this sense, May seems to live and breathe the traditional values of her party; her ideas in that sense may not be seen as her own, but those of her party that she identifies with emotionally for her own reasons. Her party acts as both a kind of emotional "comfort blanket" and as a kind of intellectual "inner voice". Her rhetoric to the party conference is thus her refracting back to the delegates what they want to hear, because what they want to hear is what she wants them to hear, and what she wants to hear herself. Her rhetoric in these "closed spaces" is thus an act of intellectual co-resonance: both her and her party's delegates in a mutual feedback loop. She is to be seen as "one of them" and "they" as part of her.

The understanding that May's core values come from her identification with the Conservative Party is what allowed her to become so popular within the party. Apart from the "Nasty Party" speech early on in her life as a parliamentarian, she has appeared as a living distillation of her party's moral values. The fact that she kept her life private and her thoughts to herself while she was a politician added to an air of mystery, allowing others to distill into her persona the positive attributes that they were looking for in a potential leader.


"The Will Of The People"

Theresa May's evident lack of personality was therefore an advantage when it came to the party leadership election after David Cameron's resignation. Having long instilled a sense that she was, as far as the party members went, "one of them", it was relatively easy to gain the backing of other members of the parliamentary party when the time came.
One of the innate problems of her "personality void" is that she has no natural charisma. Boris Johnson, the other main contender (and favorite) for the leadership, had it in spades; but what he had a surfeit of in charisma he lacked for when it came to willpower and tact. While May lacked charisma, she was able to exude an air of calm competence: she was able to offer the reassuring "comfort blanket" of a Thatcher of the 21st century, seeing in Brexit an act of moral duty to implement the "will of the people". For her, it was not about charisma, but simply one of service to the nation.

In implementing Brexit, Theresa May thus morphed her persona from being simply a servant of her party to being a servant of the country. For a time after her rise to power, her leadership of the country was portrayed as being almost above party politics. Exploiting the personal popularity she had with the electorate (under the same spell her party had been, it seems) her government was now "Theresa May's team". For a time, it didn't matter that she wasn't naturally charismatic or rarely made public appearances; this was excused by the public as she had "more important things to do", and represented a more workmanlike approach to politics that May encouraged. The politics of charisma was over; the politics of duty was back in fashion.
This was how May came to become a kind of Brexit "avatar": in her ideological and moral embrace of the meaning of Brexit, she sought to identify with the motivations and values of those who had supported it. She portrayed her role not really as a "typical" politician, but as someone whose duty was to be the servant of Brexit; through her role as Prime Minister, Brexit's meaning would be done. This explained the seemingly-meaningless semantics of "Brexit means Brexit"; to her, it wasn't meaningless, but perhaps beyond meaning. Brexit's meaning to May was self-evident, and her years of service to the same morality that Brexit represented gave May the self-belief that it gave her some special insight.
While we can only guess at her innermost thinking, it's not hard to imagine that her background made her think she was uniquely-able to meet the challenges of the task, as though Brexit were the task that she had been specially-suited for in life, and that her career had been leading to this moment in time: that a strange kind of fate was at work. At a more human level, even her husband is said to have told her that when it came to the premiership, her years of service to the party demonstrated that she "deserved it". In this sense, her role as leader of Brexit was both an ultimate act of service and the ultimate prize. This contrasting dichotomy of simultaneous great sacrifice with great reward can be seen as a morality whose heart is in the founding ethics of her upbringing.

Prior to the referendum, her support for the EU had been functional if anything; her instincts were in truth as parochial and as culturally-insular as those in Middle England that supported Brexit. Thus, it would have took little effort for her to emotionally identify with the cause, and to want to ensure that she embodied their values. For in reality, Brexit's values were also her own.
The rhetoric she used at the the first party conference as leader demonstrated this, and her determination that Brexit had to be done in a way that was loyal to the vote demonstrated her own psychological desire to continue the same morality that had been with her from a young age: for Theresa May, it wasn't about what she wanted, it was about being loyal to the people; the same morality that is repeated in her loyalty to her party. The referendum could not be ignored; it was her duty to carry out "the will of the people"; she had been chosen as the person with this responsibility; she knew what the people wanted as she was "one of them". These four tenets of belief seem to be the things that are understood like articles of faith by May. Anyone who challenged them would be seen as undermining people's faith in democracy, and by extension, May's own internal belief system. 
That belief system appears to be what is driving her on in the absence of personality.


"I feel sorry for her"

The "personality void" that has been talked about seems to now have been filled by Brexit.

Brexit has become May's raison d'etre. Although when she became leader she talked of her social program, there are few reasons to think that was serious talk; given her record as Home Secretary, more likely this future action was just humanistic "window dressing" to make her seem moderate - part of the "mask" - to hide the empty shell of her persona beneath.
Brexit has consumed May's personality like some kind of esoteric "force of nature". While it acts as a symbolic "talisman" that gives her strange powers of political fortitude and persuasion, its greater chaotic energy is ripping the social fabric of the country apart. Brexit's deeper power is only to corrupt and destroy.

What's more, while Brexit has given Theresa May a kind of political invincibility, it has warped her sense of perspective. Allowing the meaning of Brexit to consume her, all other decisions have to be taken in respect to Brexit. In this way, the government has become the political undead - kept alive by Brexit, but incapable of doing anything else. All the other problems of the country are allowed to deteriorate, leaving the impression of a country slowly falling to pieces, disintegrating socially, as the government is only interested in Brexit.
And even on Brexit itself, because its ultimate meaning is destructive in its nature, it seems to have a strange ability to promote discord among Britain's political masters. As no-one can decide what Brexit means beyond unreal abstractions, the onset of time pushes the country towards the most destructive path of all.
This is the path that could, if continuing discord allows it to happen, ultimately lead to Britain's self-destruction, socially and economically. The horrid irony here is that Theresa May, whose inner psychology is about duty, loyalty and service, will be indirectly responsible for it. It is her personality, and her neurotic loyalty to her party and to Brexit, that is to blame.

Those that see Theresa May on the television have witnessed her physical deterioration over the last two and a half years because of Brexit. It almost seems to sapping the human energy out of her as it yet protects her from her political enemies.

"I feel sorry for her" some have said.
But that sentiment is only a symptom of the wider problem: by choosing to allow the destructive energy of Brexit to guide her, she has abdicated responsibility; she has allowed Brexit to unleash both her inner demons, and the demons that lie within all those seduced by its power.

Westminster, Theresa May and Brexit: rationalism has left the building

There have been a clutch of recent articles that have explained very plainly just how low and how rapidly Britain's moral standing and status has descended in the eyes of the outside world, thanks to Brexit.

An article by Richard Godwin made a sobering historical comparison between how Britain's masters have become consumed with irrationality, and events in Japan after the Great Depression. An equally sobering (and relevant) historic comparison could be made with the seizure of power by the "Young Turks" in Ottoman Turkey in the years prior to the First World War; another example of where a small number of ideologues took control of the levers of state for their own self-destructive ends.

Seen in a more detached light, events in Westminster after the referendum could even be seen as a kind of "quiet coup" by hard-right fanatics in the Conservative Party, where Theresa May's actions have all been about appeasing the wishes of the right-wing, Euro-sceptic ideologues, who really run events behind the scenes. At the very least, all May's key decisions have coincided with their wishes, which can hardly be a coincidence.
At every key decision-point, May has sided with the hard-right in her party, leaving Britain now on the cusp of leaving the EU without a deal, exactly as many of them wished from the very start. What else could explain May's "red lines", and her determination to stick to them, even at the risk of leaving the EU with "no deal"?
It is telling that such a small group of people have been able to control the narrative, given the nature of the political system; it demonstrates the innate weakness in what was thought to be a unbreakable parliamentary system - that a small group of ideological extremists can easily infect the larger parliamentary body once they are on the "inside", sowing chaos and surreptitiously seizing control of events.

In a similar vein to Godwin above, Matthew d'Ancona castigates the Conservative Party for turning in on itself over Brexit, and regressing to ugly nativist rhetoric, barely-repressed racism and prejudice. In this manner, the Conservative Party has effectively become the "Imperialist Party": ruling the country like a fiefdom, and seeing itself as innately superior. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

More generally, Britain since Brexit has turned the mindset of some of its inhabitants into one close to sociopathy, happy to let the rest of society suffer just to make them feel better. Some are so blindly determined to get rid of immigrants that they are happy for the rest of Britain to be poorer as a result. To use a "Marvel Universe" reference, this is an almost "Thanos"-like level of mercilessness.

Turning back to Westminster, meanwhile, we see that the Conservative Party in parliament have simply descended into a second childhood: only being held together by shared self-delusion over a fantasy, as though there is literally no other life outside the Westminster "bubble".
It seems that Conservative MPs have now gone truly mad from "Cabin Fever", utterly detached from reality, seeming to believe that Brussels' pronouncements are nothing but figments of their imagination; that, or that their power as MPs is similar to that of "Thanos", in being able to manipulate space and time at will, and pretend that a signed legal document (the "Withdrawal Agreement") can become unsigned. There is no rational explanation for their actions.


Godwin's article mentioned at the top talked of how Japan after the Great Depression became taken over by irrational fanatics.
This author has talked before about this, and how UKIP was able to exploit the situation in Britain after 2010. There is also an argument that David Cameron, in an effort to distract from the government's "austerity" agenda, played to the lowest denominator by promising to lower immigration to the "tens of thousands". This cynical and dishonest political move simply pandered to fears of immigration, and this prejudice was further fueled by other policies such as the "Go Home" vans. There was also the agenda of the dominant right-wing press, which Cameron was ever-eager to play to, as a distraction from policies that were less popular.

These were the "populist" seeds that were allowed to grow, with little thought to the consequences.

In this way, Britain under Cameron pandered to the right-wing "fanatics" (both in his party and in the press), leaving the country open to manipulation. By the time he promised the EU referendum, the damage had long been done. After berating the EU for years in a craven act of political opportunism, it was hard to then argue that the EU was suddenly worth being involved in.
The result of the referendum was not certain either way, and it needed further clever manipulation to convince enough people to vote to leave. But the same strategy that Cameron had used before - playing on prejudice while making fantastical promises - was used by the "leavers" on him. It was a case of "head" versus "heart", and the heart won.

The referendum result was the first clear sign to the outside world that Britain - and England in particular - was no longer a rational country.
Since then, with Theresa May taking over the helm after Cameron, we have seen prejudice and irrationality become ever more widespread, within Westminster in particular.

David Cameron was guilty of pandering to prejudice; Theresa May at times seems to embody it. As a "dyed-in-the-wool" Conservative, like her husband, she embodies much of the petty prejudices and narrow-minded thinking that typifies provincial England.
As a devout supporter of the Conservative Party from a young age, it has now become clear that she will always put party before country, regardless of any protestations to the contrary. Again, May's supreme loyalty to party must be very deep-seated in order to explain her actions.
Her party loyalty is so deep it is now, quite evidently, irrational. For her pursuit of trying to mollify the hard-liners in the party (i.e. the "Brexiteers") to keep them on-board has led to her going back on the deal she had already signed with the EU.

The Withdrawal Agreement is a legal text, as the EU constantly reminds London. In other words, it has the same legal force as a treaty, if ratified. For this reason, its terms cannot be changed, in the same way that a contract cannot be changed after it has been agreed and signed. And Theresa May signed it. Therefore, it cannot be changed.
So, for Theresa May to say she now wants to change the agreement she had already signed simply tells the EU and everyone else in the outside world that Britain is an untrustworthy nation. In fact, it broadcasts this untrustworthy intent from the rooftops on loudspeakers. Theresa May is willing to damage her own reputation and the reputation of her country for the sake of her party. There can be little clearer sign that these are the actions of someone who has lost their sense of perspective, and their rationality.
That is not self-sacrifice, or "duty": it is irrationality.

There is then her blatant strategy of blaming the EU's "intransigence" if they refuse to change the already-agreed Withdrawal Agreement. Like the other irrational "Brexiteers" in her party, she sees it as the EU's duty to change the treaty to suit her; even though the treaty was already agreed to her terms: her "red lines"!
It's a wonder that the people in Brussels haven't already told her where to go, given that there is no reasoning with her, and there us nothing to keep her from repudiating the terms of the agreement again in the future, if enough in her party wish it. She now has form on this, so why would anyone choose to believe a word she says?
The signs are all there that the EU's patience with May's impossible demands has effectively come to an end. When you are talking to someone in hock to irrational thinking, there is nothing more to talk about.

This all explains how Britain has descended, its political class morally and intellectually bankrupt. All that is left is to await the consequences.














 

Brexit: a constitutional crisis, "Civil War" comparisons and Theresa May's narcissism

The purpose of any government and any parliament is to make decisions and implement policy.

It is clear now that Britain's executive and legislative are in a complete constitutional stalemate on Brexit, where the executive cannot agree with the legislature, and the legislature cannot agree with the executive.

The executive - the government - is headed by Theresa May, who has effectively taken unilateral control of all decisions on Brexit since coming to power.
Her party lost full control of parliament  - the legislature - eighteen months ago, but Theresa May seems never to have noticed, with her continuing to act as though having almost unlimited powers. In spite of the self-evident necessity to come to some kind of cross-party agreement when running a minority government, her approach has been divisive and autocratic from the start. She sees things only from the perspective of survival, through exploiting divisions in her enemies combined with the fear of the alternative: the classic approach of an autocrat.

The number of blows and setbacks she has received has become almost difficult to keep up with, but with parliament voting down her agreed deal with the EU by an unprecedented margin - yet her government still staying in power - the sense of constitutional crisis has become irrefutable.

By all historical precedents and conventions, any Prime Minister with a sense of decency and self-awareness would have stood down after such an enormous defeat, made possible only through masses of backbenchers on her own side turning against her. But Theresa May is someone whose character seems as immovable as granite when it comes to facing reality.

It is self-evident that the only way to resolve the impasse between the government and parliament is through a fresh election.
What is so cravenly-hypocritical about May's resistance to new elections now (which she saw as only "heightening divisions") is that only eighteen months ago she called for a new election when she already had a majority. Her justification then was that parliament was somehow "blocking" her government's strategy on Brexit (itself a disingenuous accusation), and that she needed a larger majority to ensure she got legislation through parliament. This was already the strategy of someone who clearly had little real sympathy for democratic principles, and only saw "democracy" as useful when it was useful to her.
Now though, when the chaos is worse than ever because parliament cannot decide and the government cannot pass legislation as a result, May claims that elections only "heighten divisions". So she has gone from wanting elections eighteen months ago because parliament was divided, to now claiming that elections only create divisions. She wanted elections eighteen months ago to make her more powerful; now she wants to prevent them (even though they are self-evidently needed more than ever) in order to cling on to power.
She bears all the hallmarks of a power-obsessed narcissist, who will twist logic into contortions in order to justify her own selfish actions.

May's evident obsession to cling to power appears to stem from a fundamental aspect of her character. She is deeply-traditional by temperament and, as a "dyed in the wool" conservative, sees her position as Prime Minister as one of "duty".
That sense of "duty" she appears to interpret into an almost sacrosanct sense of mission: that she was "chosen" to lead the country through Brexit, and in her role as Prime Minister she is uniquely endowed with the responsibility to decide on the right path of the country.

The problem, when one thinks about this mindset for more than a few seconds, is that same sense of "duty" is what any despot in history also has used to justify their actions.
"Duty" quickly can become corrupted into doing whatever one can to achieve your aims: it might start with dissemination, then using fear, dirty tricks and before long someone can become paranoid and will only listen to advice from those they trust. This is the slippery slope, and Theresa May has shown more than enough evidence of displaying these characteristics.


A "personal rule"?

There is a case to be made that this is the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War of the mid 17th century.
Charles I got into problems with parliament because he began to act as a despot. At the time, monarchs had a great deal more power to do as they pleased. Charles I, typical of monarchs of the time, saw his right to rule as "God-given". It was his "duty" to rule as much as it was his God-given right, and if parliament were preventing him from doing so, then he saw it as his role to put them right. This was the basic reason for his attempt to arrest troublesome parliamentarians, which quickly escalated into outright war between the two factions.
Charles I was a deeply-proud man, and even after losing the war and under house arrest, he still refused to make serious compromises; instead, he stalled and dragged out time by exploiting the weaknesses and divisions within his opponents, flattering one faction in at attempt to win favour and isolate another, meanwhile blaming his opponents as the ones causing all the problems. While this was going on, he was still trying to organize supporters into a military counter-strike. Eventually, parliament's patience (and their gullibility) was exhausted.

Now that May's deal was voted down in parliament, May has claimed she is ready to listen. Given that this approach would have evidently made more sense after she lost her majority in parliament eighteen months ago, scepticism of her sincerity is not unwarranted.
She had already delayed the vote by a month since December, for the blatantly cynical motive to move the timing closer to the Brexit "cliff" at the end of March, and thus intimidate parliament into backing her deal. Her justifications to parliament before the vote amounted to same thing: intimidation, and threatening that the choice was her deal or the chaos of "no deal".
As parliament didn't buy this line, May's new tactic is for parliament to show the necessity to compromise, but also by highlighting the evident differences between the different factions. In this way, while she claims that her "red lines" (that were the reason for the unacceptable "deal" with the EU in the first place) are inviolate, it is others that must give ground.
She sees her "red lines" as part of her "duty" to implement the "will of the people", conflating what she wants into what she thinks the country wants. In this twisted rationale, if parliament is against her, then it is, by extension, against the people as well.

The cause of this constitutional crisis is clear: Theresa May.

Now that she has technically opened negotiations with parliament, her motives are as transparently-cynical as ever. The negotiations are not there to allow for genuine compromise; only to provide May with the narrative that she "tried" to work with a divided parliament, but because parliament refused her deal and couldn't agree on a compromise, a "no deal" Brexit became inevitable. Her primary aim is that it is not Theresa May who gets blamed for any "no deal" scenario, but someone else. She will happily deflect the blame onto the stubbornness of the opposition in parliament, or even better, the EU. Due to aspects of her personality, she seems to have little genuine ability to compromise, and just stall for as long as necessary, when the blame can be transferred from her to a convenient scapegoat. This is the same tactic used time and again by the autocrat.

We are now in a situation in Britain where the parliament is divided between May's supporters and her opponents, whose own allegiances are hazy and sometimes cross party lines. The parliamentary system is broken, and the country is ran by someone who is only interested in her own survival - for what purpose, it is unclear.

With the military reserves now on stand-by in the result of a "no deal" Brexit, with companies being gagged by Theresa May's government through NDAs, and with the very real threat of shortages and transport chaos, all the signs are that Britain has reached an institutional "tipping point". There seems no way back from the current crisis.

The question is: what on earth comes next?

Brexit Britain: a moral and political crisis. How Brexit is destroying Britain from within

The sequence of events following the EU referendum has revealed the callous amorality that lurks at the dark heart of British politics.

Brexit has shown itself to be a ravenous beast of an idea.
Part of the destructive power of Brexit is its ability to be both an idea that is a chameleon (that it means different things to different people), and also has a seemingly-unique ability to bring out the innate divisions in British society, from top to bottom. It is a poison and a cancer on the body politic and society overall, its only ability to corrupt and destroy.
In this sense, Brexit is a political creature of chaos, as seductive and divisive as any ideology from the fork-tongued mouth of "the serpent".

Biblical hyperbole aside, the singular crisis that Britain finds itself in is a result of a series of decisions. It could be argued that some of these decisions were ones that could have been predicted long ago, if a solid analysis had been done of the nature of British politics. In other words, the singular crisis that the body politic finds itself in was entirely predictable before the referendum, once the terms of the referendum itself were decided.

One of the decisions that made a difference was the nature of the referendum question that was originally posed. The battle over the wording of the question itself was explained in great detail in one chapter of Tim Shipman's book "All Out War".
In the end, having the question about the issue with one option or another ("remain" or "leave") effectively gave the "leave" side a sort of  ideological"free pass". While Cameron thought the referendum would be simple to win from an establishment point of view, the very chameleon-like nature of the "leave" option was the problem that the "remain" side could never tackle.

With "leave" being an essentially emotive vote, it meant almost whatever the "leave" voter wanted it to mean. From a philosophical and even semantic point of view, the referendum question was meaningless in any practical sense.
The referendum question really was a choice of "stay as we are" or "do something else". But what "else" were the 17 million people voting for? In this sense, "leave" could only ever be a negative vote i.e. "not remain", because there were a plethora of reasons and paths that voters may have all voted "leave" for. For the referendum vote to "leave" to make any rational sense (and for the government to know what on earth its legitimate course of action should be), a follow-up vote to choose from the most likely "leave" options would have been the only rational and democratic path to take. It was not taken (because David Cameron never thought he would "lose"), and the result of that is the chaos Britain finds itself in.
It thus gave fertile ground for opportunistic ideologues to take advantage of the chaos.

With there being three different major campaigns for "leave", and all having their own distinct agendas, how was it even philosophically possible to explain that 17 million people voted for the exact same idea when they voted to "do something else"? How can anyone know what "else" they all wanted? It is impossible.
How many of those 17 million voted for a WTO  option, or an EFTA option, or any one of dozens of possible alternatives? No-one knows, and no-one can know. Because not one of those options were ever clearly shown as the "people's will", the end result was always going to be a semantic nonsense without a further democratic clarification.
This explains how, once "leave" won and the Article 50 process was triggered, the chaotic situation that parliament finds itself it was almost inevitable. With no one option having a majority in parliament, the resulting stalemate (arguing while Britain slides ever closer to the abyss) only means that Britain is doomed to leave without a deal.

This is how we got into a situation where Brexit became the ultimate death of British democracy in Westminster, and the beginning of a reign of Whitehall autocracy in Theresa May.

Theresa May's strategy has been to act as a virtual dictator on the terms of Brexit, somehow seeing herself as the extraordinary arbiter of the (still unclear) "people's will".
Brexit itself seems to have poisonous effects on anyone that wields its unusual power, giving Theresa May a hard-faced sense of mission, dismiss any advice that contradicts her own perception, while also confusing her enemies and sowing discord at the same time.
Meanwhile, Brexit seems to have taken a very obvious physical and mental toll on the Prime Minister, making her appear even more gaunt and preoccupied; a troubled soul that is immovable and yet feeble, her empathy seemingly leeched away by the poison of Brexit; sustaining her political survival but at the cost of her humanity and judgement.

Apart from May herself, Brexit's power seems only to create and exacerbate division. Her party are split down the middle, seemingly more united in their dislike of her "deal" than in their own vision of the alternative. It is a party that seems to be waiting for Brexit to finally tear it asunder when the time comes.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn seems to be using Brexit for its own self-centred reasons, some hoping secretly that a "no deal" Brexit might lead to a kind of new "socialist revolution".
The DUP see Brexit as an opportunity to have control of the government by their own form of political extortion.

As the chaos in parliament continues, the country hurtles headlong towards the cliff because no-one in charge can decide in which other direction to go. The house is burning down, but those in charge can't decide which exit to use.
If this isn't an absolute indictment of the rotten state of Britain's body politic, then what else is?

Theresa May: the survival instinct and the "talisman" of Brexit

If Theresa May has one overlying quality, it is an indomitable survival instinct.

While her personality flaws are legion (and have been commented on by this author), she seems to have a strange knack for outwitting her enemies. What is so odd about this is that she seems otherwise so incompetent, with an unnerving ability to antagonize her existing enemies and create yet new ones. And yet, when it comes to the crucial moment, she seems to possess an almost supernatural ability to survive politically.
She can be wounded, but as yet possesses an inability to accept her own demise. When necessary, she manages to find a way to expose the weaknesses of her opponents and at the same time muster enough loyalists around her to see them off.

It is that, or that she is just plain "lucky" in her choice of enemies.

In a sense David Cameron was "lucky" to have got as far as he did before he needed to resign. In his time as Prime Minister, he rolled the dice one too many times, thinking that his run of good fortune was almost endless; his over-confidence was eventually exposed.
With Theresa May, however, we are dealing with a different form of political animal; a political creature that, with an almost ghoulish quality to its character, seems almost indestructible to normal, mortal means.

To use a more symbolic analogy, she has sent her troops needlessly into a near-defeat in battle, but was not overthrown by them; has removed or forced out countless of her courtiers; has ruled over her land as an impenetrable, immovable and incompetent autocrat; and now has survived an attempt at her overthrow from within.
All this she has achieved by making repeated, insincere claims to heed her followers' advice at the critical moment, which mollify her critics, but then are seemingly "forgotten" by her a short time later.
It's hard to judge if she is knowingly, repeatedly deceitful or just completely lacking in self-awareness of her actions. But the fact that she repeats the same behaviour again and again suggests it can only be the former, which makes her followers either appallingly gullible or just held in hock to her rule from fear alone. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that it is "fear" (of the alternative) that is the key to May's unusual power (more on this is a moment).

Is is possible for a person so inept and yet wield such powers of fortitude and survival? Perhaps "Brexit" can explain a lot of it.


The "talisman" of Brexit

Many have spoke about how Brexit has utterly changed the political landscape of Britain.

Something else that it has also done is change the nature of political leadership. For whoever is Prime Minister during the "Brexit process" can also claim, through the extraordinary circumstances of the referendum, to be the sole arbiter of the nation's will.
In this way, parliament has become an irrelevance since the referendum, as the Prime Minister can claim (and has) that parliament would be subverting the vote of the referendum if it opposes her. This was the very claim she made when she called the snap election last year, and this claim has been repeated whenever it criticized whatever actions on Brexit she unilaterally decided. As far as Theresa May was concerned, she seemed to see her rule as a "higher duty" to the nation, regardless of what parliament, or even many in her own party, wanted.

So "Brexit" has become something almost esoteric or "supernatural" in its power: a simple word with a meaning that somehow bestows extraordinary power on its wielder. "Brexit" means whatever its wielder wants it to mean. This is why the meaningless phrase "Brexit means Brexit" is in fact as meaningful in its meaninglessness as Theresa May requires. It means nothing, or it means everything.

"Brexit" in itself is simply an instrument - or talisman, if you like - of power. To stretch the esoteric meaning even further, this is why Andy Serkis' take on "Brexit" was, for all its satirical meaning, still so unnervingly close to the bone.

As well as being a symbolic instrument of power, it is also a poison. Brexit has undeniably poisoned the social fabric of the country, perhaps for ever.

But in the meantime, it has given Theresa May an unusual power and a strange aura of political invincibility. The symbolic "talisman" of Brexit protects Theresa May from all enemies, confounding them at the crucial moment by creating an aura of fear.
She can be wounded by her opponents, but as the wielder of the Brexit "talisman", it also has the power of exposing the fear that others have of the alternative. Theresa May's plan might be awful, but she can still exploit the remainers' fear of "Hard Brexit" and the Brexiteers' fear of "No Brexit" without being overthrown by either (or both) in the process. In the middle of this are those on the government "payroll", whose combined loyalty and fear of any other leader than May are enough to see off her opponents. This is the symbolic power that "Brexit" has over those who oppose its wielder; it exploits their fear.

Equally, the counter-intuitive maxim that my enemies' strength is their weakness; my weakness is my strength rings true here. The Brexit "talisman" even serves May as her ultimate protection regardless of her apparent weakness, for as long as she wields the ultimate power over Brexit, she cannot be safely removed.
In this way, the "talisman" of Brexit defends May's position by playing up her apparent frailty, and exploiting fear in another way. May also uses her own frailty as an instrument of power, appealing to her enemies' sense of pity. In this way, Brexit can make its wielder even seem as a victim or a hostage to her enemies' mercy - portraying May as a creature of pity that allows her to continue with her power, tricking her enemies into granting her clemency for as long as the Brexit "talisman" requires.

May can only be removed from power once the "power" of Brexit itself has passed; in other words, she is politically immovable before "Brexit Day". But by that point of course, Brexit's potential for destructive power will have reached its peak, because if parliament do not agree to May's autocratic "deal", we are instantly into "no deal" and the nightmare scenario.
To continue the talisman analogy, a "no deal" Brexit will have destroyed not only its "wielder" (Theresa May), but the whole land as well. "Mordor" consumes "Middle-Earth". Perhaps the Brexit "talisman" wants to destroy Britain.

This was why David Cameron opened Pandora's Box when he allowed the issue of Europe to dictate his tenure. Brexit is a poison that cannot be satisfied; it is an "instrument of power" that is as seductive as is it dangerous.

Once it is wielded, its only purpose can be to destroy.

Narcissism and politics: Theresa May (Part 2)

A few months ago there was a dark rumour in political circles that some figures in the government were secretly orchestrating a "no deal" Brexit that would cause as much chaos as possible; both causing chaos within Britain and also across the EU.

The theory followed a hypothetical series of events where the government (i.e. Theresa May) would cynically lead the EU towards the impression of agreeing to a deal, only to sabotage it at the last minute, leaving the EU with as little time to prepare for the chaos as possible, and leaving Britain dependent on American logistical support until the period of "no deal" chaos passed. Such a scenario would turn Britain into a de facto American "client state" where what remained of government infrastructure and assets would be sold off in a "fire-sale", with the British economy as a kind of Libertarian dystopia. This would also leave the EU in a state of economic turmoil as an added "bonus".

The scenario that Britain currently finds itself in is due to the actions of its Prime Minister, Theresa May. Thanks to her actions:

• The British government spent nearly two years negotiating with itself - due to May's own perpetual stalling tactics. The government's position to start serious negotiations with the EU was then only agreed after Mrs May forced her own position on to her government (i.e."Chequers").
• Due to her "red lines", this position was then rejected by the EU. This resulted in May unilaterally deciding on her government's new position without consulting her own government or parliament. The consequent "deal" she unilaterally agreed with the EU was thus a result of May's "red lines", which forced the EU to demand terms that May must surely have known the British parliament would find unacceptable. 
• When May tried to convince parliament to ratify her "deal", she dealt with them in the same way as her own government: to cajole and disseminate to make them accept the unacceptable, or face "no deal". When it was clear that parliament would not agree to the deal, her tactic was to delay the vote to the last possible moment - and subvert democracy in the most cynical way - or allow the country to descend into chaos (see hypothetical scenario above).

Put in this light, May's actions resemble those of an unashamed autocrat working to blatantly undermine the democratic system. She has little moral regard for the idea of the democratic process, and ultimately sees herself as the sole arbiter of the land. 

Worse than that, she seems to have lost any rational sense of perspective, seeming not to care about the political damage she is doing to her party, her government and parliament, and seems to care little about the wider damage she is doing to the economy and to people's lives in general.

How to lose friends and alienate people

This author has written before about Theresa May's personality, and how there seems to something "off" about her behaviour and her judgement. All the evidence points to her being someone who seems to want to go out of her way to annoy friends and enemies alike, inadvertently or otherwise. 

This singular ability to alienate herself from those she engages with is truly exceptional in the annals of political leadership; even Nixon had better judgement and charisma. It seems the only ones she can retain the loyalty of are those that have entirely self-serving and amoral ambitions, or are too cowardly to want to give up their own ministerial status. The combined result of this is governmental positions that are filled by incompetents; the natural consequence of being ruled by a narcissist is some kind amoral personality cult where rationalism and intelligence are the main enemy.

In pursuing her "deal" outside of democratic consent or transparency, she has alienated both wings of her party against her by her own terrible judgement, as well as losing what little respect the grassroots of the party had left for her. As she never wanted to engage with the opposition, she lost any chance of gaining their support long ago, and has managed to also lose the confidence of the DUP, so she now is ruling a government with no functional majority, even on paper. 

And now that she no longer has the backing of parliament, she seeks "rule by extortion" instead: threatening the chaos of "no deal" if it doesn't support her deal - a deal that is only so awful to contemplate because May's stubbornness made it so.  

The events of the last few weeks have shown that Theresa May is someone who cannot be reasoned with. She does not listen, is incapable of admitting she is wrong, and cannot be trusted.

Her stubbornness is now legendary, but then this is compounded by the fact that even when she has changed her mind on something (such as calling for an early election), she makes it even worse by refusing to admit the obvious. Such "crazy-making" behaviour is an indication of pathological narcissism.

One of the other indicators of narcissism is a lack of "emotional intelligence": the ability to see things from another's point of view, and use human empathy and persuasion to explain your point of view.
It is clear that Theresa May lacks "emotional intelligence" in spades: she seems incapable of understanding how her government's policies might harm other people's lives, from her stance on EU migration to the "hostile environment" and the government's pursuit of austerity and welfare reform. Instead, she only focuses on the job she has tasked herself with doing, with no real regard to the effects of its wider, human impact. The countless stories of lives destroyed by her government's policies seem to have no effect on her. This is evident in her obsession with reducing migration, which she pursues relentlessly long after her colleagues have given up on it as a fool's errand. To have such a blinkered perspective is a sign a dysfunctional personality.

Then there is other evidence such as how she reacts spontaneously in the face of a human crisis (e.g. the Grenfell fire), where she demonstrated a chronic inability to do what any normal person would do (which Jeremy Corbyn then demonstrated) - to emotionally engage with the victims.
Equally, this lack of emotional intelligence is evident from the many anecdotes of those who have had to endure conversations with her. European politicians have been invited to a meeting with her, only to discover she had nothing to say; likewise, the many stories of her frosty (or sphinx-like) demeanor in meetings with her colleagues make the phrase "Ice Queen" that has been thrown around to describe her seem apt. And let's not forget her famous "death stare".

It is a common perception that politicians are wont to lie and disseminate rather than admit an uncomfortable truth, but May manages to do this is in such a cringe-worthy and blatantly dishonest way (e.g. demonstrated by facial contortions), that you wonder why she bothers. Politicians are wont to avoid answering uncomfortable questions, but May manages to do this in such a cringe-worthy and leaden way that it makes conversation with her almost physically-painful to endure.


A reign of fear

The natural result of this lack of "emotional intelligence" is that when narcissists are in a position of power, what they fall back on to maintain their hold is fear: fear of the alternative or fear of the unknown. In this manner, the atmosphere of rule under the narcissist is akin to a "reign of terror".
This was evident when Downing Street was ruled under the guidance of Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill.
Since the 2017 election, May has fell back on her other advisors and her her whips to hold the party together. "Fear" was used by May herself to justify calling the snap election; in that case it was "fear of Jeremy Corbyn" that was the main threat she used. It worked (just about), but the result was a ruling government that was held together not by shared respect for Theresa May but by fear she stoked of the alternative: a reign of fear created by May herself.

It is this "reign of fear" that then allows May to dictate and control events beyond any measure of accountability, as we have seen with her dictatorial management of Brexit.

The Gothic mood music and almost ghoulish quality to aspects of her character make it feel as if hers is a government of the undead. Ever since the election of eighteen months ago, her "zombie government" has been losing ministers at a rate of attrition unprecedented in British political history. As government presides over a state of institutional stasis, the country is slowly falling apart, society slowly disintegrating thanks to her government's amoral social policies, and the economy outside of London is barely functional.
It is a government that literally has no purpose but power for the sake of power, with Theresa showing every sign of narcissistic delusion about the necessity of her own position. As far as she is concerned, she seems to feel it is her moral obligation to rule. 

Theresa May's personality - and the innate strain of narcissism that seems to run through it - is the primary cause of the chaos that Britain faces. Two and half years ago, the future of Britain after the referendum was unclear; but it was not certain that it would be chaotic. It is only Theresa May's dysfunctional personality that has made it so.  

It is hard to imagine how the Brexit process, after the referendum, could have been handled any worse. 

May's most recent actions in delaying parliament's vote on her "deal" as long as possible only serve to extend the wider chaos in the country even further to the brink, as the value of the economy collapses further, businesses are unable to plan, and people are left in a state of paralyzing trauma. It is as though Theresa May has declared a kind of psychological warfare on her own population, regardless of her actual intentions. 

Seen in this objective light, Theresa May's behaviour can be seen as nothing more than selfish and self-defeating: the actions of an irrational narcissist. 

Theresa May, Salzburg and the "Brexit speech": a psychological portrait of narcissism

It has been a year since Theresa May's Florence Speech, where she set out what aims the British government had. A year on from that, almost to the day, we had the events of the informal EU heads' meeting in Salzburg.

Looking back over the events of the year that has transpired since May's Florence speech, we see a pattern of behaviour from Theresa May in her treatment of the negotiations with the EU. The "vision" that her Florence speech set out was never one that the EU could or would ever accept; it would break their own rules, for a start.
However, in the desire for the negotiations to move forward from "Phase 1", last December the EU agreed to a compromise - a "fudge" - on the intractable issue of Northern Ireland, where the UK agreed to a "backstop" if the UK failed to provide a solution to the problem of the NI border. Negotiations moved forward on the clear understanding that the UK would provide a solution to the EU in due course. However, the compromise was quickly backtracked on by the UK, who claimed a different "interpretation" to the wording of what was agreed with the EU. Meanwhile, the UK government have pushed back the submission of a "solution" to the NI border at every opportunity. Like an errant student, May has wangled extension after extension on the submission deadline of their homework to teacher. At some point, the teacher's patience is bound to snap.


Ending the indulgence

After nine months of this charade, it is not unreasonable for the EU to have felt duped. After doing what they could to move things forward for the benefit of Theresa May last December, they found out later on they had been "played". May's tactics seen in this way appear as those someone taking advantage of the others' charity, eking out negotiations with the EU by playing on their fears of May being replaced by a hardliner if they didn't compromise. On top of that, the British government's other strategy of getting the EU "on side" was to have their ministers going around the various EU capitals in a ham-fisted "divide and rule" approach that ignored the EU's hierarchy and institutions. Both these approaches seem to have convinced the EU that their indulgence of May's behaviour has only worked out against them, making May more brazen in her approach rather than more compromising. More on that in a moment.

May's "Chequers" plan was meant to have been a method of resolving the outstanding issues, including Northern Ireland, and also of providing the grounding for a future relationship. But given that the plan was only really there to hold together the opposing sides of her party, the EU's opinion seems to have been only an afterthought. Almost as soon as the plan's contents were public in July, the EU explained how they were impractical and broke the rules of the single market, as was obvious to anyone who understood how the EU functioned as an institution. The EU reiterated the possible alternatives; options that the EU had explained to the British government from the start of the negotiations.
So May went into the Salzburg meeting, with the EU having already rejected key aspects of the plan, as well as even a large part of her own party. When she talked to the other EU heads on Wednesday, the EU leaders were then stunned by the tone of her "pitch" to them: that her Chequers deal was the only one she could offer, she couldn't change it, and that the onus was on the EU to compromise. It was May's stubborn refusal to budge that had provoked the strong words from Donald Tusk and others on Thursday, and which led to May's bizarre and tetchy press conference that afternoon.

As the expectation was that some kind of "bridging" compromise was bound to be reached at Salzburg (i.e. one that could see a basis for further discussions in October), what had made the actual conclusion so abrupt had been May's inability to be flexible. One wonders if her personality is the culprit, as it has been for most of her failings as a national leader. As she appears to have a personality indicative of some pathological form of narcissism, this might explain how she could have arrived at the Salzburg meeting with such a delusional view of how events would transpire. While this can only be conjecture, circumstantial evidence of how she runs her government within a "bunker" of sycophantic advisors suggests that May doesn't know what the EU is really thinking because no-one around her is inclined to tell her. In this way, her brittle ego only listens to people she trusts, and those she trusts can only maintain that trust by telling her things that don't contradict her own world-view.
 Bringing in a comparable (and relevant) example from reality television, is "Amy's Baking Company". This is a company that featured on Gordon Ramsay's well-known programme, ran by a woman (the eponymous Amy) who is literally incapable of handling criticism.

Ramsay is incapable of getting even basic points across to Amy, who is defended from the rest of the world by her "enabling" husband. Any criticism is seen as an "attack". As a result, Ramsay decides he's wasting his time trying to change someone who cannot change.
Tusk and the other EU leaders seem to have reacted to May's stance on Wednesday in a similar way: for them, May's inability to compromise at this late stage seems to have been the last straw.

With May's position being so tenuous after the Chequers plan bombed with her own party, it's also possible that May felt she needed to talk "tough" at Salzburg in order to shore up her position for the party conference. But if that was true, then this was also the fault of her poor strategic thinking; something that is another of her unfortunate traits. Talking tough to the EU would make it all the harder to climb down in her party's eyes in time for a compromise in October. If she had compromised as the EU was expecting her to do, the party conference would have been tempestuous at best, putting at jeopardy the compromises needed for any positive outcome in October. She would have needed to tell the party a few unpleasant home truths at conference about what was realistic to achieve; but again, May is not temperamentally the type to make waves, and her stubborn streak also extends to her political durability.
When she returned to the UK, she then made an impromptu speech.


In the mouth of madness

After May's plan was rejected by the EU, the manner of that rejection (and Tusk's "instagram") seems to have affected May quite profoundly. Her surprise at the EU's inability to compromise seemed genuine, and thus the rejection of her plan she took as a personal affront. She had been publicly shamed, as far as she was concerned.
But with the way she approached the Salzburg meeting, she seems to have taken the attitude of the ever-indulged narcissist: as the EU had always compromised over her wishes, why wouldn't they do so again? Couldn't the EU see that Chequers wasn't already a "compromise" as far as May was concerned? Therefore, it was the EU's "turn" to do the same. This seems to have been her take on the situation, going to Salzburg.
But again, it seems clear that May simply doesn't "get it": there are some things the EU cannot compromise on, such as breaching their own rules. This had been clear from the very start. But May, like the typical narcissist, just doesn't listen. She only listens to people that confirm her own bias.

The rationale for the impromptu speech on Friday afternoon may well have been aimed at securing her position with her party, but the tone of the speech seems to have been driven by narcissistic rage. She singles out Donald Tusk for criticism, and uses untruth and psychological projection to accuse the EU of being disrespectful; quite a bold accusation, considering how much the British government had taking the EU for fools for the last nine months, as mentioned earlier. Making liberal use of her infamous "death stare", it is a speech that is designed for domestic audiences; but to the objective observer, it looks like the speech of someone on the verge of losing all self-control (and self-respect). She then reiterates her inability to compromise, demanding like she did in Salzburg that the EU must shift their position, or there would be no deal.

The effect of the speech on the talks, given what she said, is to increase the likelihood of "no deal" even higher. With now less than a month before the last real meeting, and with the party conference likely to be belligerent towards any kind of compromise with the EU, May's behaviour has brought the talks effectively to an end.
An inability to listen, an inability to change, and May's fragile ego seem to have brought Britain into the mouth of the abyss.

Psychopathy in politics: callous indifference versus deliberate harm (2)

It's difficult for most right-minded people to think that their government (outside of war) is capable to deliberately seeking to harm people. But when the evidence smacks you right in the face, it's hard not to notice.
In in article some months back, this author wrote about how government actions can be driven by a desire to achieve goals, regardless of the wider cost to society. As alluded to in that article, this kind of "callous indifference", in its most inhumane form, can take the form of a dictator (such as Stalin) wiping out his opponents through willful mass starvation - the brutal logical conclusion of "the ends justify the means".
At a different level of indifference, the government of Theresa May created the "hostile environment", which has destroyed the livelihoods and quality of life of many British people (such as those married to non-EU citizens) and naturalized British citizens (such as the "Windrush" generation, and others). At the same time, the continuation of the "austerity" agenda has destroyed the livelihoods and quality of life of many disabled people in Britain in particular, as well as creating an antagonistic atmosphere in society towards those claiming welfare in general. The antagonostic atmosphere of the "hostile environment" also creates a situation where landlords are implicitly given a free pass to fall back on their prejudices to deny tenancy rights to any foreigner they are suspicious of.
This could all be documented under a policy of institutional "callous indifference". However, the British government is also guilty of going deliberately out of its way to make life almost impossible for many asylum seekers.

This is the sharp end of the "hostile environment", where indifference to harm transforms into active facilitation of harm to people. The highlighted link above explains how the British government makes an active policy of appealing against court decisions to grant asylum, even when the vast majority of those appeals fail. In other words, the government has a policy of denying basic rights to asylum seekers that have already been legally granted by its own courts. What's all the more extraordinary about this is that the government is wasting public money pursuing hopeless appeals, whose only function is to deny rights (that have already been legally-granted) to asylum seekers, and to prolong their misery.
Put into context, not only is this abusing the rights of legal asylum seekers, it is also misusing public funds in order to do so. As the government-sanctioned appeals simply stretch out the amount of time that asylum seekers are unable to receive government support (or the right to any kind of humane existence), this is not about "callous indifference" to harm, but active pursuance of harm towards asylum seekers. This is the logical conclusion of creating a "hostile environment": implementing a policy that actively seeks to make people's lives miserable, even those who are legally-entitled to (and ought to expect) humanitarian support from the state.
The fact that the government are effectively misusing taxpayers money to achieve this travesty is all the more sickening: taxpayers are subsidizing the active mistreatment of asylum seekers in the UK. The policy of the government to pursue appeals against granting asylum when there is no real evidence to support them is, almost by definition, an act of irrational institutional sadism. It is wasting public funds to be cruel for the sake of being cruel.

The term "hostile environment", by its very meaning, has malevolent overtones. To be "hostile" to people is to be threatening and to wish them ill. The "hostile environment" that the British government has created towards asylum seekers is one where their existence in the UK seems to be deliberately made as unpleasant as humanly possible, short of actually building internment camps for them (the UK already has some notorious "detention centres", ran by private contractors who are given more-or-less free reign, with little effective government oversight. The public prisons are, not surprisingly, in a similarly anarchic state).
To play devil's advocate, I suppose an argument could be made to compare it to the treatment of the French authorities, which generally create an environment where asylum seekers are left in a kind of neglectful indifference (and any camps are eventually disbanded by the authorities). In that narrow sense, could Britain's "hostile environment" be argued to be more "humane" than just letting asylum seekers live in camps in the British countryside, until they dispersed of their own accord, as seems to happen in France? This is still doubtful logic, as the "hostile environment" in Britain functions in much the same way as it would in France: in France it is administrative bureaucracy that encourages asylum seekers to migrate to the UK; when in the UK is it the "hostile environment" that creates a kind of Kafkaesque nightmare for them instead. There are no disorganized camps like in France, but UK policy turns asylum seekers into housebound paupers (if they are lucky), and has numerous "detention centres". Then there are those that disappear into the black economy as a result of all this.


A "compliant environment"

The term "hostile environment" has been replaced by "compliant environment", though few would appear to be fooled. "Compliance" is another term bathed in banal, institutional syntax, but describe actions that make pursuing cruelty active government policy. The policy hasn't changed; only its presentation has.
The term "compliant" follows from the notion that those who comply with the rules have nothing to fear; except that all the evidence has now shown that the government actively seeks to persecute asylum seekers who have already been proven in law to require humanitarian protection by the British government. It is the government who are failing to comply with their own "compliant environment". And going back to the case of the "Windrush" generation, these include people whose own documents have been confiscated by the government, either through gross negligence or callous indifference; documents that proved their legal rights. Again, the government show how they cannot be trusted to follow their own rules. It is those that are most vulnerable in society in this case who are the most likely to suffer; their rights taken away from them for the sin of choosing to take officialdom at its word.

The sense of betrayal, at discovering that the high moral regard that the British government is based on is really an illusion, must be strong with those who have suffered as a result of this. It is like if you discovered that your father, who had raised you and you trusted implicitly for years, is actually a monster. With the government, it is a case of: do as I say, not as I do.
Presiding over all this is Theresa May. Those who support her say that, in close quarters, she is kind-hearted and warm. This may be true, but her supporters also seem blind to the more realistic view that May is kind-hearted and warm to people she likes and understands; there is far more evidence to suggest that, outside of her narrow social circle, she deals with issues in a far more mean-spirited and narrow-minded way.
This may well come from her parochial and socially-conservative upbringing, which means she struggles to humanly relate to those outside of her own background, and is temperamentally resistant to change. When turned into an "ideology" or government strategy, the result is the "hostile environment"; in a sense, an instrument of May's own inner psychology. Her officials are meant to apply the rules as set out by her. The "Cool Britannia" of twenty years ago has turned into "Cruel Britannia" under Theresa May.
The moral hypocrisy of Theresa May and her government is what really stands out in this "do as I say, not as I do" philosophy. As an ostensibly religious person, it's hard to fathom how she squares her Christian morality with her government's treatment of asylum seekers, the "Windrush" generation, and the most vulnerable in society in general. The "hostile environment" is an immoral policy, reeking in antipathy, and used in a way that deliberately harms people.
And yet Theresa May is still a church-going, seemingly moralistic person (or claims to be). Ignorance cannot be an excuse, as the real-world results of her government's policy have been known for a long time. It is much more likely about cynical political calculation, as that has been her strategy ever since she arrived at the Home Office (these kinds of stories go down well with the party grassroots, as they make her look resolute on immigration). Besides, who cares about the suffering of those who cannot vote and have no voice? It's already been made clear that she doesn't care about the fate of even her own citizens, if they have opinions and lifestyles that are different from her, so making some "third world" foreigners suffer just for the sake of it would be even easier to sanction.

While the treatment of the "Windrush" generation could be called a policy of "callous indifference", for the government to misuse public funds to actively make asylum seekers' lives intolerable is nothing less than sadistic.