Theresa May’s arrival at 10 Downing Street may have been unusually painless for an incoming Prime Minister, though painful for those she replaced. Her outlook is becoming clearer. Compared with David Cameron and George Osborne, she is against seeing politics as simply the game of outwitting one’s opponents. Her approach, inspired by her new joint chief of staff Nick Timothy, is to ask the question he posed a few months ago: “What, in 2016, does the Conservative Party offer a working-class kid from Brixton, Birmingham, Bolton or Bradford?” It may indeed inconvenience the Labour Party, but that is not its object.
This is what “Mayism” is about. She is determined that social justice should not be the exclusive property of the Left. She will have noted, from the recent events that carried her to power, that such “working-class kids” in the Midlands and the North are from communities which substantially rejected the European Union in the referendum.
08 September 2016, The Tablet
Brexit means social justice
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