Theresa May: The Bankruptcy of British Politics

Everyone can see the signs. The British political class have failed to understand reality, and their Reign of Error will soon be over. New voices will emerge and replace the decrepit, bankrupt system that has dutifully served the British establishment for as long as anyone can remember.

Veteran political commentators openly confess they can no longer predict what will happen next, in which case they are irrelevant, inept, and useless. They ought to resign. Who needs dinosaurs to tell us about mammals?

Opinion polls are less and less reliable. They failed to predict the result of the 2015 general election, they failed to predict Brexit, they failed to reflect the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

In 2008, 99% of professional economists failed to predict the financial meltdown. If 99% of astronomers failed to predict an eclipse, their subject would be renamed astrology. Thomas Carlyle coined the phrase "dismal science" to describe economics. Carlyle was wrong. Economics is not a science at all. Economics has more in common with fairytales, and, indeed, astrology. During the Brexit campaign, the Brexiteers openly mocked "experts", dismissed every projection they made, and highlighted that the predictions made by all economic models never intersect with reality. Is there any such thing as an expert economist? Where is the unblemished predictive record of any economist, especially those with the big reputations and the Nobel Prizes?

No one in power has the vaguest clue what is going on. How can a leader lead if he doesn't understand the world? We might as well choose chimpanzees to rule us, or pick leaders at random if there is no requirement to have genuinely and demonstrably knowledgeable people in charge.

In The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen, two cunning weavers provided the emperor with the most magnificent new suit of clothes ever. Unfortunately, there was a catch. Their exquisite beauty was invisible to everyone unfit for their positions, i.e. all stupid, incompetent and tasteless people.

When the Emperor duly paraded before his subjects in his new finery, no one dared to admit that he was stark naked. After all, the fault lay with them and not with the wondrous work of the weavers. It took a child - someone who wasn't part of the foolish games of adults - to see through the charade, and shout out, "But he isn't wearing anything at all!" Only then did the laughter begin. In Britain, we are still stuck at the liminal moment before the boy shouted out. We are seeing things that aren't there. We still imagine that our leaders are fully clothed and know what they're doing. But any second now, that child's voice will ring out and change everything. Our vision will clear and we will all see stark reality.

To show how absurd today's politics has become, it's useful to conduct an exercise that ought to be performed every year: a line by line dissection of the prime minister's speech at her party conference where she justifies what she did in the last year, and gives a vision of what she will do in the coming year.

In a democracy, every citizen has the absolute right to quote and challenge every statement made by the prime minister of the country given that all of us are affected by the thoughts and beliefs of that person.

This is a deconstruction of Theresa May's monstrous speech at the Tory Party Conference in 2016 where she masqueraded as a meritocrat despite being the leader of the party that supports an anti-meritocratic monarch as the head of state, an anti-meritocratic private education system (where all that matters is the wealth of your parents), and anti-meritocratic, rentier capitalism where those who have the most assets run and own the country despite not doing a single stroke of meritorious work.

Let's see if May has a coherent plan, or if she just strings sentences together and hopes no one will notice that she is politically naked and clueless.