Farewell, Theresa May – your ‘hostile environment’ will be your legacy

It’s sad to hear that Theresa May is stepping down as an MP at the next election. Just like it’s sad to see Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab, Kwasi Kwarteng, Matt Hancock and nearly 60 other Tory MPs step back from frontline politics.

Why? Well, the polls show that the public has firmly turned against the Tories, so it’s a tragedy that the British people won’t get a chance to speak back to those responsible for the damage they’ve caused over the past 13 years – that they’re leaving without giving the public the chance to kick them out.

I’m not complaining that Theresa May is a Conservative. I’d love it if UK politics was a genuine debate between people who want us to be a prosperous united society, but simply have different ideas as to how to get there. The social contract of our great nation is that politicians should be trying to improve the country’s quality of life by giving the people what they ask for.

But May was the first major politician to publicly and unashamedly break that contract: she pushed for a version of Brexit she knew the public didn’t want, after spending months warning that Brexit would make us poorer.

May had campaigned against Brexit prior to the referendum, clearly stating that “remaining inside the European Union does make us more secure, […] more prosperous and […] more influential”.

She understood the “take back control” motivations behind the Brexit vote. She pointed out that avoiding the economic damage would involve making “concessions in order to access [the EU Single Market] and accepting EU regulations, over which we would have no say”.

And then May negotiated a Brexit deal with the EU that left the UK signed up to EU’s “common rulebook” and foreign trade policy, over which we would duly have no say.

And in early 2018, government documents showed that her Brexit deal – and, indeed, any Brexit deal they tried – would make the UK poorer. That led to major demonstrations against the government from both Remainers screaming about the damage of Brexit – and Leavers raging that this wasn’t what they voted for.

It’s not just that May refused to offer people a referendum to vote on her Brexit deal, despite it suffering the worst parliamentary defeat in UK history. It’s that May forced parliament to vote on her deal again – and chose to repeatedly delay the vote for months – to deliberately tire out the public, so we’d stop fighting.

Meanwhile, the animosity over Brexit only grew. Politicians were harassed and threatened. I myself was abused and assaulted at events.

As I see it, May helped tear apart the fabric of British society by making it “OK” for politicians to deliberately hurt the country against its will. Sure, David Cameron recklessly and selfishly unlocked the door, but May was the first to walk through it.

That’s after years of sowing the seeds of division in British society. Boris Johnson simply poured Miracle-Gro onto them.

In 2012, as home secretary, May launched the “hostile environment” policy of making life in the UK as difficult as possible for people without “leave to remain” in the UK. This involved forcing landlords, banks and even charities to refuse service to anyone who couldn’t prove they had the right to stay in the UK.

Meanwhile, her department raised the prices of residence applications, raking in a total of £800 million from processing fees in six years. This was discriminatory against people of migrant descent, including those with the right to stay, but who lacked the paperwork to prove it.

It fostered a culture of suspicion of anyone who looked foreign. And May even fuelled this by sending vans with “GO HOME” signs through neighbourhoods. She presided over the Windrush scandal, where 57,000 descendents of people who came from Caribbean countries to help rebuild the UK after the Second World War faced threats and harassment – and 83 were wrongly deported.

She led the charge against the Human Rights Act, calling for us to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, while attacking “activist left-wing human rights lawyers”. This is the exact playbook that Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman have been following.

So let’s not pretend that just because Johnson wanted a harder Brexit, May was a decent politician. Populist, xenophobic, authoritarian, economic vandalism stains all of their hands – and it goes right back to May. I really wish those responsible for the last 13 years would stick around to face the music.