This week she told us that she is deeply determined to ensure that mental health is top of her agenda in government. Something which David Cameron and Blair also said. The only difference is that both of them found a small amount of money to back up their claims to care about the issue. May hasn't even bothered to do that. She has just made a lot of noise and fuss without dedicating a single penny of new money to trying to solve the problem she has so correctly identified. Not my idea of sincere and lasting commitment.
Then there are the statements she made on the steps of Downing Street and again this week about helping those who are only just managing and making their lives easier. Bless. She has certainly got it right that this group is really struggling. But she is ideologically incapable of addressing the unfair arrangements that are putting this group under so much pressure.
So she has no intention of banning zero hours contracts. Despite the fact that this is the central economic pressure directly dominating the lives of 4 million workers. They don't have one drop of job security and can lose their income overnight without doing a single thing wrong. If they get ill their employer needn't bother with all that pesky stuff about sickness payments. They just don't offer any new work to the person who is sick or objects to bad practices and leave the state to try and help the person survive on what little they have put by. Worse still is the simple fact that the threat of being moved onto these contracts sits in the background and worries millions more workers. Millions of the just managing are suffering from a hugely unfair practice and their supposed champion has not the slightest intention of doing a single thing to help them. Instead she is busy attacking the few remaining trade unions that have the capability to protect anyone in the workforce.
Don't hold your breath either whilst you wait for her to try and stop loan sharks from advertising every night on television the advantages of getting yourself into heavy debt and preying on those who work from paycheque to paycheque. It would be the easiest thing out for her to establish a credit union making reasonably priced small loans to small business people or to those just coping and thus to drive all these predators out of business. Instead she has already presided over a sharp increase in unsecured debt in the UK economy and that never ends well.
When it comes to finding a home Theresa and her Chancellor have proved highly adept at making announcements about the creation of new schemes to tackle the shortage of affordable homes. Unfortunately none of these schemes achieve anything except the waste of taxpayers money, a bit of window dressing and an increase in the profits of building developers who donate heavily to the Conservative Party. She won't increase the length and the security of private tenancies to provide just managing families with more than six months stability. She won't let councils borrow money to build new council homes to start to ease pressures on the market. She won't force developers sitting on land to pay higher rates so that land that already has planning permission produces actual house building instead of paper profits from accumulating land values. She will waste money on silly schemes to "help first time buyers get affordable homes" thus increasing demand without changing the supply and achieving nothing but a rise in house prices at the tax payers' expense.
She also won't be putting an end to the programme of austerity. Despite announcing that she doesn't know when she can balance the budget she is still starving the NHS, the care system and local authorities and inner city schools of cash. Meanwhile she continues to allow the Bank of England to print money and pump it into the banking system without any guarantees about what constructive use those bankers will put the money to. Instead of investing in changing the UK economy to equip it for future technology she is letting the banks channel money back into property, speculation and obscure uncontrolled financial derivatives. Put simply she is letting the just managing carry the burden of austerity and letting those who wrecked the economy get back to collecting their very nice bonuses.
Finally, and most cynically of all, she is letting those very wealthy bankers get away with paying very low rates of taxation whilst those just managing families pay marginal rates of taxation which can exceed 80% (because of their loss of benefits as incomes rise). Anyone who really cared about helping those just coping would be thinking and planning about how to transfer a greater share of earnings to those people. Instead the first budget of her regime cut taxes for high earners and made a direct transfer from the poor to the rich.
As I say, you have to admire Theresa May. It is not often that you come across someone with such barefaced cheek. Unless it was when Margaret Thatcher told us that where there was discord she would bring harmony! Actually take all that back. You don't have to admire Theresa May. You simply have to judge her by what she does not what she says.