This is the leading Tory who spent years in opposition decrying the party’s reputation as the “nasty party” and urging it to drop its attachment to the insurgent phase of Thatcherism. She was a modernizer, a liberal. This is not to claim that she lacked the authoritarian malice to also make her a convincing Tory. In a number of cases, she demonstrated that she would cheerfully crush a life in the interests of maintaining a right-wing base, and flip off those whom she has now contemptuously scorned as “activist, left-wing human rights lawyers.” [...]
In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, however, May has seen fit to anchor this language even further to the Right, denouncing the elites who find “your patriotism distasteful, your concerns about immigration parochial, your views about crime illiberal, your attachment to your job security inconvenient.” In cadences that would not be out of place at a UKIP rally, she made mincemeat of the cluelessness of metropolitan liberals, trying to reverse a democratic verdict. “If you’re well-off and comfortable,” she said, “Britain is a different country and these concerns are not your concerns.” [...]
The idea of a society that seems to have spun out of control, that has somehow been taken over by anti-social, anti-British elements — from migrants and criminals to international bankers — didn’t just emerge ex nihilo. It has been cultivated through overlapping strategies and vectors of political struggle, which really converged into an explosive mixture during the 2011 riots.
Those riots saw the shoots of an authentic, violent Poujadism, planted and cultivated long before, grow in English soil. When the riots broke out, British politics had been in a panicked stalemate since the credit crunch struck. Far from radicalizing, most people reached for the familiar and secure. They voted for the center, for safety. But the coordinates of the familiar were being scattered. [...]
Scotland is the main center of opposition to this kind of belligerent British restorationism, for obvious reasons. Notably, of all the major parties, only voters for the Scottish National Party do not approve of May’s new policies, such as forcing companies to publish statistics on how many “foreign” workers they employ. This is not because Scottish voters are more enlightened than others in the United Kingdom. It is because Scottish nationalism has deliberately harnessed itself to a progressive, center-left prospectus for post-British prosperity.
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