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Comment by rwmj

10 years ago

I'm never sure if Theresa May is evil or incompetent. It may be she is just incapable of controlling her department, although perhaps I'm being too charitable.

5 comments

rwmj

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toyg  10 years ago

She's just the banality of evil. Her electorate clamours for ethnic purging and she modelled her political career on the "Iron Lady" image, so she wants to be seen as tough. If one of the most important cabinet posts were the Secretary for Milk, she'd insist that cows be milked 24/7, because that's what being "strong" means in that context.

Political elites the world over are the weakest in a century, so they react acting tough. They never actually have to deal with the fallout.

semanticist  10 years ago

I strongly suspect it's the latter - every MP who becomes home secretary basically turns into a fascist, almost overnight. I guess they show them a bunch of secret reports on events that "almost" happened to scare them into going along with whatever the Home Office civil service have always been wanting to do.

  • Silhouette  10 years ago

    I read somewhere recently that there are now so many requests for authorisation to do various things in connection with probably very nasty people that the Home Secretary can spend 5-6 hours on a typical day just reading them and granting the authorisations that require their personal approval.

    Assuming that's reasonably accurate, it is hard to imagine how spending half your day every day just reading about people who are probably the worst of the worst in many cases could not have a profound effect on how you view the world.

    Whether anyone so deeply immersed in such a biased view should be expected to serve in such a position for more than a short period of time, and whether they should be responsible for making judgements about much of anything else during that period, are entirely different questions.

mseebach  10 years ago

I recall having read that the Home Office has a uniquely corrupting effect on its ministers. Also, it's not like the border was a gentle stroll through pleasant parkland prior to 2010. In fact, it was pretty much the same.

In general, it's not really practical to vilify individuals over policies and the actions of the bureaucracy -- that's different from not holding them responsible for things they're responsible for, but it's too easy to forget that Snooper's Charter was voted out of committee 444 to 69 a few days ago. They're all rotten.