#and in order to ensure you aspire to the shackle & the hobble

[marnz]

thinking about how wealth is relational, it cannot be understood or defined without understanding your relationship to others, and how this feeds perfectly into Marx’s three types of alienation, primarily the alienation of the worker from their fellow workers, as well as the concept of class consciousness.

if you ask someone if they are rich and they say “well it depends on what you mean by ‘rich.’ what is your criteria? how much do you make? what is the cost of living like? what kind of wealth are you measuring?” it sounds like they’re talking around the issue. They aren’t. You cannot even begin to comprehend your place in the world, your relationship to power—your class—without understanding the vast gulf between you and everyone around you and the billionaires of the world. everything else is a distraction designed to work in the billionaires’ favor.

[gyrlversion]

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: May has broken Brexit… now it has broken her

Too little, too late. If Theresa May had possessed a shred of decency, she should have resigned long ago. Her authority was shot to pieces after her disastrous, self-inflicted general election humiliation, which cost the Tories their majority and ensured that the enemies of Brexit would prevail.

She had a second chance to do the decent thing last July when it became apparent that her dismal, defeatist Chequers withdrawal agreement was a shoddy betrayal of her oft-parroted mantra: ‘Brexit means Brexit.’

Instead of respecting the views of those who spoke for the 17.4 million people who voted to leave the EU, she even threatened to confiscate the ministerial cars of Cabinet dissenters and make them walk home.

If Theresa May (pictured leaving the Houses of Parliament on Wednesday evening) had possessed a shred of decency, she should have resigned long ago, writes Richard Littlejohn

This wasn’t the action of a strong, confident Prime Minister. It was a petty, vindictive attempt at intimidation, worthy of Richmal Crompton’s spoilt brat, Violet Elizabeth Bott, from the Just William books.

If Theresa didn’t get her way, she was going to scream and scream and scream until she was sick.

This was the real Mrs May: aloof, stubborn, convinced of her own self-righteousness, and contemptuous of others who begged to differ.

The idea that here was a woman who could unite the warring Conservative factions was palpable nonsense. She has always had a reputation for ignoring her colleagues, for treating them with lofty disdain.

At the Home Office and No. 10, she preferred to defer to her civil servants rather than engage with fellow MPs.

When David Davis was Brexit Secretary, she undermined him by ordering her favourite permanent secretary, Olly Robbins, a fanatical Remainer, to draw up a much softer, alternative withdrawal strategy.

Theresa May speaks at the House of Commons ahead of votes on alternative Brexit options

When David Davis (pictured) was Brexit Secretary, she undermined him by ordering her favourite permanent secretary, Olly Robbins, a fanatical Remainer, to draw up a much softer, alternative withdrawal strategy

Her bovine intransigence and constant interference forced both Davis and his successor, Dominic Raab, to resign, along with Leave campaign figurehead Boris Johnson.

To lose one prominent Brexiteer may be considered unfortunate, to lose three in quick succession looked like deliberate policy.

Regular readers will need no reminding that I’ve never been a fan. Frankly, she’s a pretty hopeless politician, serially over-promoted and with an unwarranted sense of entitlement. Her reputation as a conciliator, a safe pair of hands, is laughable.

Don’t forget, when Tory chairman, she labelled her own party the ‘nasty party’, a toxic tag it took years to shed.

At the Home Office, she was responsible for the Windrush crisis, and scrapping the police’s stop-and-search policy, which brought us the epidemic of knife crime currently claiming teenage lives not just in London but across the country.

Remember, too, that she also sent lorries into areas of high immigration, bearing giant advertising hoardings advising foreigners living here illegally to go home. What were you saying about the ‘nasty party’, Theresa?

That particular policy also helps explain her approach to Brexit and her fatal misunderstanding of the motives of the millions of her fellow citizens who voted Leave.

She managed to convince herself that the main reason Leave won was because people had tired of unfettered immigration. She seems to have bought into the narrative of fellow Remainers, who hold, insultingly, that Brexit voters are thick racists who hate foreigners.

Prime Minister Theresa May leaves 10 Downing Street in central London for the weekly PMQ session in the House of Commons last week

So she made ending free movement one of her famous ‘red lines’, reckoning that if she could deliver a solemn promise to end immigration it would be enough to satisfy the vast majority of Leavers.

How little she understands the people she aspired to lead.

Immigration was certainly a factor, but overwhelmingly people wanted to be free of the shackles of a corrupt foreign bureaucracy, to stop paying Danegeld to Brussels, and to restore the sovereignty and independence of our proud nation.

It was this total lack of comprehension which informed her inept, Quisling-style approach to the withdrawal negotiations and allowed Jean-Claude Drunker and company to run rings round her.

Her ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and ‘No deal is better than a bad deal’ promises proved utterly worthless.

While shedding Brexiteers from her Cabinet, she tacked ever closer to those determined to overturn the democratically expressed will of the British people.

As we now know beyond argument, and as I have constantly maintained, the vast majority of the political class have worked cynically to derail our departure and to keep us in perpetuity as prisoners of a sclerotic European superstate. That process culminated in the coup against the people which has been mounted by MPs and was still being played out farcically in the Commons last night.

Perhaps all this could have been avoided if we’d had a stronger Prime Minister, one who was determined to keep her word to respect the referendum result, and not a Remainer whose heart was never in Brexit from Day One.

But at a crucial time in the negotiations, in a fit of hubris, she called a general election — ‘not another one’ — and proceeded to make it all about her. She soon discovered Britain wasn’t buying her ‘strong and stable’ routine and the Tory majority disintegrated.

The election catastrophe was followed by the Chequers sell-out. That was when she should have stood down and let someone else have a go at salvaging a dignified Brexit from the wreckage of her shameful betrayal.

Theresa May (pictured), to her eternal disgrace, has turned Britain, one of the world’s greatest economies and military powers, into an international laughing stock

But she clung on, insisting that her ‘deal’ was the only show in town and running down the clock to deny any further room for manoeuvre — at the same time emboldening and enabling hardline Remoaners in her Cabinet to defy collective responsibility in a blatant attempt to stop Brexit altogether.

You might not believe me, but this is a commentary I’d rather not have written. Honestly, I’d love to have been proven wrong about Mother Theresa.

If she’d kept her promises, if she hadn’t lied to the British people, if she’d stood up to the EU and the wreckers of Continuity Remain, if she’d delivered Brexit, I’d have cheered her to the rafters.

But she hasn’t. So what if the Brexiteers have finally admitted defeat and swallowed her risible ‘deal’? It was a futile gesture, since the DUP declined to follow suit.

Even if it does eventually hobble across the line, her deal isn’t what 17.4 million people voted for by any stretch of the imagination.

It’s a travesty. Whoever comes next — and it has to be someone who believes in Leave — will have the devil’s own job trying to pick up the pieces.

Mrs May’s legacy is to have presided over three wasted years of vacillation, obfuscation, cowardice, downright sabotage and the destruction of a once-proud democracy, where MPs used to feel honour-bound to represent the will of the people who paid their wages.

Even if many others share the blame for the dispiriting, depressing, debauched state of British politics, she was the Prime Minister and she must carry the can.

Theresa May, to her eternal disgrace, has turned Britain, one of the world’s greatest economies and military powers, into an international laughing stock.

She has broken Brexit. And now Brexit has broken her.

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