THE black art of duplicitous “spin” is alive and thriving in the world of unelected fork-tongued Prime Minister Theresa May.

In her conference speech, she said: “We will do everything we can to give you more control over your lives. When we take the big calls, we’ll think not of the powerful, but you.”

Is May “avin” a laugh at our expense? Within days of this high-sounding rhetoric, her government had done precisely the opposite – giving the go-ahead, against vast swathes of public opposition, to frack the beautiful county of Lancashire.

This appalling decision brings a new meaning to the term “con-sultation”, with just 200 submissions to the con-sultation having supported fracking, while nearly 20,000 submissions opposed it. This is just the beginning: I predict that in May’s Machiavellian world, in coming months we’re going to be treated to repeated examples of “saying one thing and doing the-opposite”.

Plundering Mother Earth of her resources in the most violent and environmentally toxic of ways is an utter disgrace in our post-Paris agreement world, and yet this is what fork-tongued Theresa is subjecting us to, with short-term corporate greed yet again taking precedence over local democratic preferences.

Let’s be clear: the Tories invariably nurture and advance the interests of the corporations and their wealthy backers, while in their propagandising rhetoric, they keep repeating the transparently ludicrous mantra that they’re on the side of “ordinary working people”.

Those who take any interest in politics will easily see straight through this manipulative dishonesty; yet the cynical Tory calculation is that they’ll be able hood-wink sufficient numbers of propaganda-susceptible voters for this duplicitous fork-tongued strategy to work at the ballot box.

The task of all progressive thinkers is to make sure that it doesn’t, by exposing the mendacity of fork-tongued Theresa and her government at every available opportunity.

Dr Richard House

Stroud