Update

The P45 was not the biggest joke in May’s speech

By Maya Foa, Director of Reprieve
4 October 2017

In her speech to the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester today, the Prime Minister, Theresa May, said she intended to ‘build an outwards looking Britain’, and act as a ‘moral lead in the world’.

Surely the most audacious comedy moment in Theresa May’s speech was not the P45 skit, but her claim to be a ‘moral lead in the world.

She was describing a Government that has trained Saudi secret police in techniques for hacking activists’ phones, paid for guards in Bahrain’s notorious torture prison, and given unconditional support to Donald Trump’s devastating drone campaign in Yemen.

After entering the Foreign Office in 2011 William Hague endorsed a more ‘open and transparent’ approach to aiding regimes which carry out abuses, but Mrs May has squandered this legacy and instead sought to prop up dodgy dictatorships in secret.

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