Finance: Research, Policy and Anecdotes

As Theresa May announced her resignation, the airwaves and Twitter were full of praise for her sense of duty!  As German very conscient of Germany’s dark chapter in the 20th century I am always sceptical of people claiming to do their duty! Though her duty she did – bully and harass legal residents (remember Windrush generation) and foreign university students as Home Secretary – all to draw attention away from the social consequences of Tory austerity. It is telling and noteworthy that before her resignation, newspaper headlines in the UK were dominated by the disenfranchisement of EU citizen in the European Parliamentary Elections.  She claimed to have done her duty by trying to implement Brexit – maybe so, but was it her duty to go into the negotiations without any plan and without properly understanding how the EU works and what the constraints of Brexit are?  Was it her duty to draw red lines that cannot be respected at the same time (also known as Brexit trilemma)? Was it her duty to pander to the wet dreams of Brexiteers rather than searching for a national consensus? I will spare the reader an answer to these questions! Most telling in recent political obituaries is the statement that she did not realise the consequences of agreeing to the Northern Irish backstop in December 2017!  Really?!?!

Exit the Dancing Queen – enter the clown?  As Tories (and in a rare political consensus) most of UK’s and Europe’s political class breathe a sigh of relief that she will be gone soon, it is important to stress that nothing but nothing has changed in the Brexit constellation! Will 27 elected heads of EU governments and a recently democratically elected European Parliament get rid of the Northern Ireland backstop and endanger peace in Ireland just because another unelected British prime minister asks them to do so?  No need for an answer here!  Risk a “clean Brexit” and negotiate from outside with the EU?  Sure, the EU will negotiate, with a few preconditions, though, one of which starts with “back” and ends with “stop”. Will it be easier to negotiate for the UK government under the pressure of economic chaos after a Crash-Brexit?  I guess some hard questions that the next unelected Prime Minister of the UK should ask him/herself before taking decisions. 

In her resignation speech she cited Nicholas Winton who had saved the lives of hundreds of children from Hitler’s death camps.    Less than three years after she paraphrased Adolf Hitler in her Citizen of Nowhere speech, this is not just cynical, it is simply disgraceful!  In short: Good Riddance.

Overview