Thursday 9 November 2017

Theresa May just promoted one of the worst Brexit liars to replace Priti Patel


After demonstrating her weakness by allowing Priti Patel to resign as International Development Secretary, rather than sacking her for her secrecy and lies, Theresa May demonstrated it once again by capitulating to Brexiteer demands that she had to replace Patel with one of their fellow Brexiteers.

The Brexit fanatic that Theresa May has decided to promote is Penny Mordaunt, who was one of the most egregious of the Brexit liars during the EU referendum campaign.

In the run up to the EU referendum Mordaunt decided to go onto national television and repeatedly lie that the UK had no veto to prevent Turkey from joining the EU. She was challenged several times on her claims by the host Andrew Marr, but just kept repeating the her lies by saying "we are not going to be able to have a say" and "we would be unable to stop Turkey joining".

Not only was Mordaunt guilty of outright lying to the British people about Britain's power of veto within the EU, she was obviously doing so in order to provoke anti-Islamic and anti-refugee sentiments, by making reference to the "migrant crisis" amongst her bombardment of lies.

It's beyond doubt that Theresa May knows about Mordaunt's lies and xenophobia-stoking rhetoric, because the furore over her lies about Britain being unable to stop Turkey joining the EU went all the way to the top of the Tory party, with David Cameron issuing a rebuke.

But as has become so painfully obvious since her vanity election backfired so dramatically, Theresa May is in a shockingly weak political position. So she's been forced to elevate one of the worst Brexit liars into her cabinet, not because she feels she's the best person for the job, but because she knows that a revolt by the hard-right Brexit fanatics in her own party would surely be the final straw that brings her shambolic tenure as Prime Minister crashing to the ground.

As much as it's entertaining to see Theresa May reduced from the terrifying right-wing authoritarian wannabe tyrant she wanted to be in April, to a hopeless wreck of a leader being pulled one way and the other six months later, it's also extremely worrying, because the people who seem to be exerting the most influence on her are not the more moderate centre-right Tories, nor the centrist elements of the press, it's the fanatical hard-right Tory "no deal" Brexiteers and the likes of Daily Mail hatemonger in chief Paul Dacre.

We know that the hard-right Brexiteers desperately crave a ruinous "no deal" Brexit because they envisage rich pickings for their disaster capitalist mates as they use the ensuing economic meltdown to buy up swathes of British infrastructure on the cheap like a pack of vultures stripping the flesh off a corpse.

And we can also see that Theresa May has neither the will, nor the authority to stand up to the dangerous "no deal" fanatics in her own party, because there's no other explanation for the elevation of Penny Mordaunt when there are literally dozens of more suitable candidates in her party who don't happen to be one of the most egregious of the Brexit liars.

This latest feeble capitulation to the whims of the hard-right Brexiteers is a evidence that the longer Theresa May keeps clinging to power, the more probable a socially and economically catastrophic "no deal" flounce out of the EU becomes, because she simply doesn't have the authority to stand up to the elements of her own party who are so desperate for it to happen.

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