@benofbrown Youngsters! May did horrible things, but there's a long tradition of Tory Home Chancellors doing horrible things: consider her predecessor Michael Howard (HS under John Major) who doubled the prison population in five years and tried to abolish the right to silence, for example. The last reformist HS we had was Roy Jenkins in 1965-67 and 1974-76. (Abolished flogging and hanging, decriminalized gay sex.) It's the Home Office: it attracts shits because the ministry itself is evil.

@benofbrown I mean, the police are violent and corrupt and bigoted, but you can't reform them without first abolishing the Home Office, which oversees them (and the immigration service). Otherwise the HO will just create a new organization that replicates all the worst traits of its predecessor.

The Home Office is the unfettered id of the Tory press running riot with a truncheon. It's institutionally spiteful, xenophobic, and authoritarian, and it attracts leaders with those traits.