How can anyone defend TM right now?

[Bearbehind]

And I ask that as a life long Tory voter

• She repeatedly, categorically ruled out having a GE now, then completely u-turned
• she is too spineless to participate in tv debates
• she won't deny triple lock pensions will be scrapped
• she won't deny the freeze on tax hikes will be scrapped
• her 'red line' is immigration, which if you ask most Leavers, wasn't their 'red line'
• she is hell bent on screwing the economy to prove a point
• her Brexit team cannot answer even the most basic questions
• she showed her petticoat to Trump and even he has said the EU will come first
• she is operating under some kind of delusion that EU agencies can remain in what will be a non EU country.

Really, who in their right mind would vote for her?

Life long labour voters who are considering now voting Tory blow my mind.

Seriously, what was ever so bad about the EU that makes it worth all this?

But she still says, and said again today, that she wants a country which works for everyone. e.g. in a speech today in Dudley:

She continued: “Brexit isn’t just a process, it’s an opportunity … to make sure this really is a country that works for everyone and not just the privileged few. But to do that we do need the certainty that this election will bring over the next five years.”

Five years? So it won't be done in two years. What exactly has she done for the non privileged few? Even those of us who are pensioners are often helping children and grandchildren out when we are managing ourselves, so scrapping the triple lock is likely to be a vote loser.

“We’ve already seen the other parties lining up to prop up Corbyn, we’ve seen it from the Liberal Democrats, we’ve seen it from Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP,” she said to a round of boos.

Boos - doesn't exactly seem like a ringing endorsement.

Do you have any more Tory friends you can turn Bearbehind? (BTW haven't others accused you of being a 'leftie'? We live in strange times.)

The only other Tory I've turned is DH so far

The thought of me being a leftie is actually hysterical!

The point, which most people are spectacularly failing to understand, is leaving the EU is more far reaching than your political persuasion.

We need to realise that despite what she would have us believe, this election is about much more than brexit.
Do we trust her with the nhs, with education, to help the old, disabled or low paid?
Dare we give the Tories 5 more years?
How far to the extreme right do we want this country to go?

I geniunely don't understand who would vote Tory now except the very well to do bigots.

Changing your life long beliefs in Labour policies just to leave the Eu makes no sense whatsoever to me as, for the life of me, I cannot see what was so wrong with the EU that makes it worthwhile.

Do we trust her with the nhs, with education, to help the old, disabled or low paid?
No. No. No, no and no.
Unfortunately I think people will see this election as being about a single issue when there is so much more at stake. The cost of Brexit will make funding all of these things more difficult and the probable associated job losses are going to make things even worse for the UK. Truly depressing.

Bear, can I ask what it was that appealed about the Tories up to this point?

brexshit, rightly or wrongly, DH and I are relatively high earners with no additional needs and Tory policies have always benefited us over the alternatives.

Right now, none of that matters because leaving the EU with no plan will screw us all over far more than me paying a bit more tax.

When the choice is May or Corbyn a lot of people I know will choose to vote for May, They think she will be the stronger negotiator. I think May is strategically weak but tactically strong, as well as sadly obsessed with pacifying the right wing of her party. However I don't blame her for her u-turn on an election. The media extract these promises to have a story, followed by a future story when circumstances change and so does the decision.

Pms have called elections tactically for years. They call them when they think they are well ahead and they don't gamble on debates. If I am wrong, tell me the last time a pm with a big lead agreed to debate (except under highly artificial conditions).

May wants a popular mandate. Given the amount of people on similar threads to these who called her 'unelected' and thus questioned her legitimacy to manage Brexit, who can blame her for seeking an explicit mandate from the people?

If you don't like her, vote against her. I would see this as a huge opportunity for the libdems to try to rerun the Brexit referendum and, if as many people regret voting leave as some here suggest, they should do very well.

All those points plus the rape clause, changes to CMS , which disproportionately affect DV survivors, and the 3M the CMS still owes single parents, shes an absolute disgrace, its not enough to be a woman in power ...shes needs to use her platform to help women as a social group not kick the vulnerable ones the hardest.

They call them when they think they are well ahead

I don't know if it's before your time, but as Ted Heath did, asking 'Who governs the country?' Not you chum, came the reply. May wasn't supposed to be a PM like that, she was supposed to be one who stuck to a task she was given. So she had three years to do something in. Tossed aside without a by your leave. It may yet come back to haunt her.

Now that a tradition of Leadership debates has been started it's difficult to turn the clock back. Nor can she put Social media back in a bottle - another area where she is not really in touch.

If there were a worthwhile labour leader I would vote Labour.

Sadly there's not and I'd rather poke my eyes out than vote for the pitiful excuse of a leader they currently have on account for the fact he doesn't even seem to realise what century we are in.

Can Sadiq Khan run for leader?

My vote will be a protest vote in that there is such a huge Tory margin, it's pointless voting for any other party but I'll be damned if I'm supporting TM now.

Thanks for answering, Bear.

My vote will be a protest vote in that there is such a huge Tory margin, it's pointless voting for any other party but I'll be damned if I'm supporting TM now.
It's the same where I live. Tories get between 55-60% of the vote, with the rest divvied up between 3-4 other parties, depending how many stand. My DC have only recently started voting and it's been quite hard drumming into them the necessity of voting while acknowledging that where we live the outcome is a foregone conclusion! Maybe, when things settle, we will get something positive out of all of this, because it seems pretty obvious that FPTP leads to a sense of disenfranchisement for many people.

Good for you Bearbehind for being prepared not to vote for May. This is after all the flak you have got from some of the Leavers on other threads! Funnily enough, they haven't come here.

It is hard to get the family to vote when it all seems to be a foregone conclusion, but if you can get them interested in Local elections, sometimes there you can effect a change, and then you begin to believe it's possible.

Or with a couple of my family I have suggested vote swapping. They find someone (Green in their case) who is in a constituency where Green have a chance, but that person would normally vote for say Labour, and if the constituency the family member lives in has a Labour candidate who needs help, then they vote Labour.

Philipe sands - a QC who specialises in trying cases of international genocide and human rights abuse - spoke yesterday of how Merkel told close advisers after meeting May that her big problem is that she has no understanding of Europe, or of modern European history, since nobody with that understanding would speak of 'citizens of nowhere'. He was frank and eloquent in his outright condemnation of her.

May has sadly shown that she has little understanding of history, which personally, I would think a prerequisite for any politician.

So many people have spoken out against her, but absolutely nothing seems to be stopping her.

Figment and Peregrina,

'Citizens of nowhere' quite clearly references a group of well paid bankers, consultants and strategists who feel equally at home in London, New York or Singapore (or anywhere who taxes them little and has an abundance of places they like to go).

I would love an eloquent explanation of why this phrase shows a lack of understanding of European history or Europe. I personally know many people who do not feel any particular allegiance to a country (mostly European bankers working in London). I am not sure this is even a bad thing but I do think only listening to these voices IS a bad thing.

OP "she is hell bent on screwing the economy to prove a point"
What did I miss?!

the 'rootless jew' is a citizen from nowhere. not sure if that is an eloquent enough explanation? I can expand with reference to european history if necessary?

'Citizens of nowhere' quite clearly references a group of well paid bankers, consultants and strategists who feel equally at home in London, New York or Singapore (or anywhere who taxes them little and has an abundance of places they like to go).

That might be what she and you want us to think, but that is not how it came across. Most people who have moved around took it to be an insult. BTW May wants to turn the UK into a tax haven like Singapore, so she wants to make it a country for citizens of nowhere?

Citizens of nowhere' quite clearly references a group of well paid bankers, consultants and strategists who feel equally at home in London, New York or Singapore (or anywhere who taxes them little and has an abundance of places they like to go).
That's an interesting interpretation.

'Citizens of nowhere' was a dogwhistle - with its linguistic status as a metaphor giving it just the right level of indeterminacy to allow 'deniability' for its implicit nastiness. It can be used by those inclined to idiocy to refer to whichever group floats their hate boat - and TM can wriggle away from any accusations that she is targeting any one group.

My feeling is that TM is a Conservative Party third-ranker. In a normal situation, she wouldn't have been allowed near serious power. She hasn't been groomed for it. She doesn't have the capacity for it. She's a bit shit, really.

She's where she is because the Brexit earthquake took out the top tier and she wasn't a complete incompetent. She's just fairly stupid and uninformed - not utterly stupid. She's over-reliant on 'a trusted inner-circle' - who just happen to be libertarian zealots.

We're in an incomparably complex situation and the Conservative leader is someone who doesn't have the complexity, depth, flexibility of reasoning, curiosity or political brilliance to think beyond getting into power for the next round. That shouls worry people.

The right-wing press is cloaking her short-comings as a leader: to the detriment of the UK.

All those of you who think Corbyn is incompetent should also be thinking about what May is really like, beneath all the shine and spin applied by the right-wing press. She has delivered failure after failure in terms of the management of the results of the referendum.

BrexitMeansBrexshit and PaintingByNumbers - I agree with you both.

Lots of sarccy comments about my previous post but little attempt to explain it any other way. There is a whole book out (forget the name but was serialised in the Sunday Times) about 'citizens of nowhere' vs 'citizens if somewhere' explaining the disparate set of values and the lack of meaningful dialogue between them.

Thecat,

Given that you are posting in an Internet forum and May is the PM of the 6th largest economy in the world, your condescending post about her lack of intellect and flexibility is rather silly (not to say anti feminist).

Ad hominem (ad feminism?) speak to having a lack of convincing arguments on the actual issue.

Ad feminam I meant..