She’s afraid.

She has tried to spin her announcement to make it seem like a referendum on her management of Brexit (rather than the decision to leave the European Union itself), but we can all see that this is nonsense.

She called her election on the day the Crown Prosecution Service announced it was considering court action against 30 Conservatives, many of whom may be MPs, for expenses fraud during the 2015 general election.

If they are found guilty, those MPs would have had to stand down – destroying the Conservative Party’s wafer-thin majority in the House of Commons. A new election will give those people a chance to gain a new mandate, without the shadow of expenses fraud hanging over them.

(There is, of course, a fault in Mrs May’s thinking. Most of the constituencies held by MPs implicated in the expenses fraud scandal were formerly held by Liberal Democrats, and that party is enjoying a revival due to its continued opposition of Brexit. The most likely result is that Mrs May’s candidates will lose their seats and be disgraced in the courts.)

She called her election within days of two opinion polls saying the Conservative Party had a 21-point lead over Labour. Her decision is therefore a cynical attempt to capitalise on the perceived weakness of the main Opposition party.

But the result of another poll, released over the weekend, showed Labour was only nine points behind the Tories, and a nine-point lead can evaporate like water during an election period.

Let us not forget that the Labour Party has been announcing hugely popular policies over the past few days, as well – and Mrs May’s Conservative policies are horrifyingly harmful to the people of the UK, when placed under proper analysis. Look at her policy to starve the children of poor families.

Oh, and Hicham Yezza, whose tweet appears above, makes another hugely important point about Mrs May’s decision:

What do you think of that?

Labour’s Barry Gardiner certainly had an opinion:

Others make similar points:

Of course, Brexit does have a bearing on Mrs May’s reasons for calling an election – in several different ways, none being what she presented to the public on Tuesday (April 18).

Firstly, having an election now means people will be voting before consequences of leaving the European Union can take effect. If she left the next election until 2020 – a year after the UK is scheduled to decouple from the EU – then we would all be feeling those effects and she would be taking the blame for any adverse consequences.

The fact that she is calling an election now means she does not expect Brexit to result in the new Golden Age we were all promised.

Mrs May has also indicated that she is calling her election to end divisions over Brexit in the House of Commons. She is hoping for a Conservative landslide, to silence any criticism of her ‘hard Brexit’ plan in Parliament.

Her party already owns the mass media, of course. But this means that her decision – and comments – resulted in this:

Nice one.

In a single headline, the Mail and Mrs May have alienated 16,141,241 voters – many of whom may have voted Conservative.

Anyone would think twice about supporting her after she called them “saboteurs”, right?

And the shadow of totalitarianism casts itself very strongly over the statement: Mrs May is saying she considers anybody who disagrees with her – in any way – to be an enemy. Do we really want our country to be run by a far-right extremist who considers any dissent to be treason?

This man doesn’t:

And he is not alone.

Despite having been asked to denounce the Daily Mail front, Mrs May has shown no sign of doing so.

Consider, also, the following:

Meanwhile, others have been quick to point out that

Mrs May’s protest that Parliament is weakening her negotiations with the EU is, of course, nonsense – and she has been called out on it:

Of course, some have much simpler reasons for opposing Mrs May:

Finally – and hugely pertinent to the causes championed by This Site – Mrs May clearly hasn’t considered the following:

https://twitter.com/Alice__Kirby/status/854376907311378432

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