Much has been made in recent days of Theresa May’s reforming zeal, as one of Britain’s longest serving home secretaries, in taking on the police, scaling back the racially divisive use of stop and search and facing down the US government over the deportation of computer hacker Gary McKinnon.
But these undoubted liberal moments and the promise of future achievements as a “One Nation” reformer on the steps of Downing Street have obscured a much stronger underlying record as a tough Tory traditionalist home secretary. She was simply more Michael Howard than Roy Jenkins, albeit in a modern setting.
Her six years at the Home Office were marked by an instinctive secrecy, a talent for “going missing” or delegating when things went wrong, and a too careless approach to civil liberties.
Her capacity to make herself scarce at key moments of political danger peaked during the referendum campaign. Her minimal public contribution not only failed to defend her record on immigration but instead focused on her personal pledge to withdraw from the European convention on human rights to demonstrate that she was a wafer-thin remainer.
So what in May’s record as home secretary justifies this somewhat darker reading that she is not quite as nice as she looks, and do any of her previously frustrated plans hint at what she might do now she is prime minister?
Extremism and free speech
Just before the last general election, May set out her own personal “wish-list” to reform counter-extremism strategy. It was met by objections from no fewer than six other Tory cabinet ministers and agreement has yet to be reached on a long-delayed but promised counter-extremism bill.
May’s plan included “extremism disruption orders” designed to be used against non-violent “individual extremists who incite hatred”. The conditions promise to include banning such individuals from broadcasting and her speech promised to give Ofcom more powers to take action against extremist broadcasts.
Leaked cabinet correspondence showed that what she really wanted to do was have Ofcom vet British television programmes before they were broadcast. Her then culture secretary, Sajid Javid, told her it would amount to state censorship and an attack on freedom of expression. The most recent extremism strategy paper suggested that she had backed down on this and Ofcom rules will only required broadcasters to ensure extremists are challenged on air. However, May is committed to conducting a new “counter-ideology campaign at pace and scale” to combat Islamist extremism and the issue could be reopened again.
Surveillance
In May’s first 100 days as home secretary in 2010, she introduced legislation to scrap Labour’s £4.5bn national identity card scheme, saying it would be the “first step of many that this government is taking to reduce the control of the state over decent, law-abiding people”.
A Protection of Freedoms Act also followed, but Charles Farr – whose influence was rapidly growing – and his office for security and counter-terrorism were soon pushing for the introduction of what became the first version of the snooper’s charter – the draft communications bill. May embraced it fully but it was torpedoed by Nick Clegg.
When whistleblower Edward Snowden disclosed in the Guardian the scale of GCHQ bulk harvesting programmes of everyone’s confidential digital data, she responded by accusing him of damaging national security. Her legislative response, the investigatory powers bill, now going through parliament, does provide a new legal and oversight framework for those mass state surveillance programmes but it also extends them to track and store for 12 months, everyone’s web browsing histories.
Immigration and refugees
Her most recent Immigration Act was designed in her words “to create a hostile environment” for illegal migrants by a package of measures including requiring landlords to check on the immigration status of all prospective tenants. This culminated in the infamous Operation Vaken “Go Home” vans touring immigrant communities and as a result of which only 11 people actually left the country.
When the net migration figures came out – as they do every three months – May always sent out her immigration minister, James Brokenshire, to explain why they had failed yet again to deliver the promised deep cuts in net migration. In cabinet, she blamed the rest of the government for giving up on tackling rising immigration and turned down their pleas to remove overseas students from the target. But she pressed ahead with immigration policies that including splitting up an estimated 33,000 families in Britain because they don’t earn enough and refused to put any time limit on the detention of immigration detainees.
As far as refugees are concerned, Britain has already left the European Union. May refused to take part in any of the EU relocation or resettlement scheme and was a key player in last year’s decision to withdraw British support for proactive naval search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean on the grounds it would encourage other to make the dangerous journey. Instead she has focused on providing aid to refugees in countries neighbouring Syria. She hinted at an even tougher approach to asylum at the last Conservative party conference, saying she wanted to allow those recognised as refugees only a temporary stay in Britain.
Policing and crime
She dispelled any notion of a liberal approach to policing and crime when she “joked” about Ken Clarke’s approach as justice secretary: “I lock them up. He lets them out,” she said.
The political impact of a 20% cut in Whitehall funding for police budgets has been blunted by the continuing fall in the overall crime rate in England and Wales. Figures published for the first time this Thursday about the scale of online crime may tarnish that achievement. She pushed through important reforms in policing, especially on child abuse, rape and violence against women and girls and initiating inquiries into historical injustices including Hillsborough. But her flagship reform of elected police and crime commissioners has not captured the public imagination and even she has acknowledged that their impact has been mixed. Her last act as home secretary was to kick into the long grass a possible inquiry into the 1984 “battle of Orgreave”.
Human rights
May has made denouncing the Human Rights Act and demanding Britain’s withdrawal from the European convention on human rights a major theme of her Tory party conference speeches while she was home secretary. During her only press questioning after her only leadership campaign speech she appeared to drop this hardline stance but was in fact careful only to say that “no parliamentary majority exists for it”. That means she is likely to go into the next election pledged to Britain’s withdrawal from the European convention on human rights – which would leave Britain as the only European country in the same position as the pariah state of Belarus.
