Photo: Conservatives, Flickr. Some rights reserved.I’m in the extremely uncomfortable and completely unprecedented situation of agreeing with Theresa May. In her much berated Tory Party Conference speech, she said this: “if you’re a boss who earns a fortune but doesn’t look after your staff… An international company that treats tax laws as an optional extra… I’m putting you on warning… I want to set out my plan for a Britain where everyone plays by the same rules and every person has the opportunity to be all they want to be… ” She continued: “Our democracy should work for everyone, but if you’ve been trying to say things need to change for years and your complaints fall on deaf ears, it doesn’t feel like it’s working for you.” This could be the leader of a party of the far left speaking, not the women who as Home Secretary oversaw increased tuition fees, the sharp rise in the use of food-banks, radical cuts to funding of domestic abuse services and curtailment of the right to protest.
May spoke not only of fairness and equality, but of the frustrations and pain of working people: “People with assets have got richer. People without them have suffered.” She even acknowledged that: “it wasn’t the wealthy who made the biggest sacrifices after the financial crash, but ordinary, working class families.” Strikingly, she seems to be referring to and speaking not to the ‘squeezed middle’ but to the ordinary workers.
Her rhetoric has been described (by herself and others) as a move to the centre. Is it? Isn’t it is a move to populism? She called to the ‘ordinary working class’ whom Labour traditionally represented and whom conservative government has repeatedly ignored, disempowered and forgotten about. She distinguished between ‘them’ and ‘you’: in her speech ‘they’ are the elites, the bosses, the big businesses. ‘They’ are those who “find your patriotism distasteful, your concerns about immigration parochial, your views about crime illiberal, your attachment to your job security inconvenient.” In making this distinction, she constructs and purportedly represents ‘the people’.
