An unelected prime minister today delivered a speech at the Conservative party conference, criticising a parliamentary establishment she has worked in for 19 years.

Theresa May argued that the Brexit vote wasn't just about the European Union but that "it had come to represent something broader".

That it was was about "a sense, deep, profound and let's face it, often justified, that people have today, that the world works well for a privileged few, but not for them. It was a vote not just for a change in Britain's relationship with the European Union, but a change in the way our country works and the people for whom it works, forever".

The question, verbatim, was:

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

The prime minister also criticised anyone who disparaged the motives of those who voted to leave the EU, depsite campaigning for Remain:

Just listen to the way a lot of politicians and commentators talk about the public. They find their patriotism distasteful, their concerns about immigration parochial, their views about crime illiberal, their attachment to their job security inconvenient. They find the fact that more than 17 million people voted to leave the European Union simply bewildering.

It's not bewildering, it's completely understandable given those who have helped peddle myths about immigration and wages in Westminster for twenty years to obtain a convenient populist vote.

She later said:

If you are on low wages because of immigration, life does not seem fair.

A Bank of England analysis showed that immigration can harm lower-skilled wages, to a very small degree, but that immigration has a positive effect overall on wages.

May's speech also promised to "take the centre ground of politics" by borrowing policies from both Labour and Ukip;

She blamed immigration (a matter she presided over for six years as home secretary, during which time immigration rose to record highs), and also business, demanding that firms list foreign workers.

Business leaders have said migrants benefit the economy and that firms will not welcome further restrictions on high skilled migration.

The SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Green party responded to the announcement by releasing a joint statement condemning anti-foreigner rhetoric from the Conservative conference as "toxic politics":

The private and then grammar school educated prime minister, who then studied at Oxford prior to the introduction of tuition fees (which tripled under a Conservative government), criticised an unequal platform in our education system, proposing to open the first grammar schools for 50 years - a widely discredited policy.

Even the Scottish Conservative leader, Ruth Davidson, criticised reintroducing more selective schools in the country yesterday, citing her own education in a comprehensive.

The prime minister also told the Conservative Party conference that people should "pay their full share of tax".

May also praised Jeremy Hunt's NHS reforms, despite ongoing junior doctor strikes and his toxicity with health professionals.

She claimed that Labour have "given up the right" to call themselves the party of the NHS, claiming this was now in the realm of the Conservatives.

Last month the chief executive of NHS providers, the organisations largest trade body, said:

Years of underfunding means the NHS is increasingly failing to do the job it wants to do, and the public needs it to do, through no fault of its own.

At the same time, she continued to ignore the elephant in the room of the false Brexit promise of £350 million a year for the NHS.

Where is the fulfillment of this promise, if Brexit was about something more than the EU? They put it on their campaign bus.

Picture: Getty images

The reaction to the speech was damning from both sides of the political spectrum: