The biggest myth about May? That she has a plan to steal working class Labour votes

Theresa May, it is claimed, has parked Tory tanks firmly on Labour’s lawn by sticking up for the working class, while Labour has apparently gone off to the extremes. Has the PM really made a pitch for our voters or is it an illusion, like the Pokemon ghosts that children love to discover on the screens of their devices?

Southern Rail is locked in dispute with its platform guards as it continues to pursue shareholder dividends. Even with strikes happening, however the passengers are on the side of the workers – yet Theresa has come down firmly on the side of the company and against the union.

Is that a Tory tank being parked on a Labour lawn? Is May’s claim to be on the side of the workers real, or just an illusion that we see only in the media? I’d say it’s a Pokemon. You can see it on a media screen, but it doesn’t exist in reality.

All the time that May was Home Secretary, I was a criminal defence lawyer, defending suspects in police stations. She didn’t do much, except toughen terrorist legislation, which I initially agreed with, until it became a strange policy called Prevent, whereby primary school teachers are threatened with jail if they don’t inform on ten-year-olds who might display terrorist tendencies.

Then May wanted to put time limits on police bail. This idea came from journalists who were accused of hacking. They were doing “no comment” interviews. They were blocking police investigations every step of the way but then they complained about how long it took for police to conduct their enquiries. It wouldn’t have taken so long if they had just co-operated. And that was just the writers. Imagine if they were gangsters. No one agreed with May’s policy and it was quietly dropped. That was not a tank on Labour’s lawn because we believe in law and order. That was just a politician making a fool out of herself in an effort to look like a reformer.

With all the talk of Brexit we have heard nothing about the ending of farming subsidies to the biggest landlords in all of Europe. It seems that us workers are going to be paying our money directly to those billionaires because they are Tories. Meanwhile, May has refused to support the wage council for farm workers, which wants to give the lowest paid people a fair deal. But the PM wants only British workers to do those jobs, without ensuring they are paid at a decent rate. Tank or Pokemon? You decide.

On housing, May says she wants to increase housing for all, as long as it is not council housing or charity housing associations. Housing must be owner occupied or rented privately. In fact, her housing minister Gavin Barwell claims that social housing creates inequality, and she has done nothing to dissuade him of this view. That is hardly a tank on Labour’s lawn.

She claims to be similar to Labour by being a great respecter of democracy. You can see that in her commitment to the result of the referendum. But hang on, didn’t she promise the Brexit MPs anything they want, in order to avoid the leadership election going to the Tory members? If it had gone wide, she would have faced scrutiny for her banal “Brexit means Brexit” position. This would have exposed the full details of promises made to the Leave MPs and her conning of the Remain MPs. That’s why she was so desperate to stop it going to the members. It seems that this is not a tank on our lawn either. It’s just another Pokemon.

In fact I’m finding it difficult to see any tanks on Labour’s lawn, just Pokemons everywhere I look. They look lovely on my media device, but are nothing more than coloured pixels in reality. That’s the truth about Theresa May’s “socialism”, just a bunch of pixels.