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Theresa May will become the country’s new prime minister on Wednesday, as incumbent Prime Minister David Cameron delivers on his promise to resign after the Brexit vote. The UK officially has a new leader — the second woman in the country’s history to take the top job.
May’s tenure will not be easy. She’ll be taking over at time of intense crisis: The Brexitreferendum has thrown the UK into what one expert calls "its worst political crisis since May 1940." It’s not an exaggeration to say that May’s tenure will shape the course of British and European history for the foreseeable future.
Understanding May — who she is, and what drives her — is critical to understanding the events that will unfold in the next months and years. So here’s a quick guide to the next occupant of 10 Downing Street — where she’s coming from politically, what she’s said about Brexit, and why she may be facing an impossible dilemma as the UK’s next leader.
[h=3]May is a fairly moderate conservative — except on immigration[/h]
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(Jack Taylor/Getty Images)Since May’s election to Parliament in 1997, she’s taken fairly liberal stances on a number of social issues. She made a name for herself in 2002, when she delivered a speechtelling her fellow Conservatives that they need to stop being the "nasty party" in UK politics.
She’s an avowed feminist: She led a fight to close the UK’s gender wage gap in 2008and frequently confronts sexist comments about her fondness for stylish shoes.
"To the extent that May’s political credo is evident, she is a liberal Conservative," theFinancial Times’s George Parker and Helen Warrell wrote in a 2014 profile. She’s "supportive of gender equality, champion of female representation at Westminster and a backer of gay marriage."
But her record doesn’t always fit the "liberal" description: For instance, she twice voted against legalizing adoption by gay couples in the early 2000s. This is especially true when it comes to immigration.
Since 2010, May has served as home secretary, the UK’s top social and domestic Cabinet post. During her time in office, she has repeatedly expressed vociferous opposition to the UK’s historically high immigration levels.
"When immigration is too high, when the pace of change is too fast, it’s impossible to build a cohesive society," she said in one 2015 speech. "It’s difficult for schools and hospitals and core infrastructure like housing and transport to cope. And we know that for people in low-paid jobs, wages are forced down even further while some people are forced out of work altogether."
None of this is true — the data shows that immigrants haven’t stressed the UK economy and in fact have contributed to its growth. But that hasn’t stopped May from taking some fairly draconian steps to lower immigration.
Most infamously, May used her power as home secretary to impose a rule that would block skilled immigrants from permanently settling in the UK if they made less than £37,000 a year (roughly $53,000 at pre-Brexit exchange rates). Anyone who made less than that would be deported. May’s own Home Office estimated that the rule could cost the British economy more than $200 million, but she went through with it anyway.
May’s tenure as Home Secretary was also particularly unpleasant for LGBTQ migrants.
"Aderonke Apata, an LGBT rights activist from Nigeria, was told by Home Office lawyers who rejected her asylum claim last March that she could not be a lesbian because she had children. May described Apata’s fight against deportation as a ‘publicity stunt,’" Dawn Foster writes at the London Review of Books. This was not an isolated incident, Foster explains:
An anti-migration vote begat an anti-migration prime minister.
May’s tenure will not be easy. She’ll be taking over at time of intense crisis: The Brexitreferendum has thrown the UK into what one expert calls "its worst political crisis since May 1940." It’s not an exaggeration to say that May’s tenure will shape the course of British and European history for the foreseeable future.
[h=3]May is a fairly moderate conservative — except on immigration[/h]
She’s an avowed feminist: She led a fight to close the UK’s gender wage gap in 2008and frequently confronts sexist comments about her fondness for stylish shoes.
"To the extent that May’s political credo is evident, she is a liberal Conservative," theFinancial Times’s George Parker and Helen Warrell wrote in a 2014 profile. She’s "supportive of gender equality, champion of female representation at Westminster and a backer of gay marriage."
But her record doesn’t always fit the "liberal" description: For instance, she twice voted against legalizing adoption by gay couples in the early 2000s. This is especially true when it comes to immigration.
"When immigration is too high, when the pace of change is too fast, it’s impossible to build a cohesive society," she said in one 2015 speech. "It’s difficult for schools and hospitals and core infrastructure like housing and transport to cope. And we know that for people in low-paid jobs, wages are forced down even further while some people are forced out of work altogether."
None of this is true — the data shows that immigrants haven’t stressed the UK economy and in fact have contributed to its growth. But that hasn’t stopped May from taking some fairly draconian steps to lower immigration.
Most infamously, May used her power as home secretary to impose a rule that would block skilled immigrants from permanently settling in the UK if they made less than £37,000 a year (roughly $53,000 at pre-Brexit exchange rates). Anyone who made less than that would be deported. May’s own Home Office estimated that the rule could cost the British economy more than $200 million, but she went through with it anyway.
May’s tenure as Home Secretary was also particularly unpleasant for LGBTQ migrants.
"Aderonke Apata, an LGBT rights activist from Nigeria, was told by Home Office lawyers who rejected her asylum claim last March that she could not be a lesbian because she had children. May described Apata’s fight against deportation as a ‘publicity stunt,’" Dawn Foster writes at the London Review of Books. This was not an isolated incident, Foster explains:
Time and again during May’s tenure at the Home Office, people fleeing countries where homosexuality is illegal were asked to explain why they didn’t ‘look lesbian’ or why they didn’t attend local Pride marches; others were subjected to extensive invasive questioning about their sex lives; some even felt compelled to provide documentary evidence of their sexuality.
In a certain sense, then, this makes May the right person for a post-Brexit Britain. The campaign for leaving the European Union was dominated by anti-immigrant rhetoric: EU rules required the UK to accept migrants from any other country inside the EU, which was unpopular with a huge number of Britons. Indeed, polling data suggests that anti-immigrant sentiment was the single most decisive factor in Britain voting to leave.
An anti-migration vote begat an anti-migration prime minister.
