Let’s get one thing straight: Theresa May is strong and stable. She is firm and unwavering in her stance to deliver her fantasy of regulating the internet and making it her own political playground.

May introduced the Investigatory Powers Act, aptly nicknamed the snooper’s charter, during her time as home secretary, and her time as prime minister has not changed her attack-dog stance on internet surveillance. After the terrorist attacks in Manchester and London Bridge, May continued on her warpath to decrypt the internet and make our data security weak and wobbly. As May stood outside Downing Street in the aftermath of the Finsbury Park terrorist attack on Monday, the prime minister announced that she would establish a new commission for countering extremism and once again, reiterated giving police and security services the powers that they need.

What this stance ignores is that many of those culpable for such atrocities were already known to intelligence staff (although not in the case of Finsbury Park). It is not sweeping mass surveillance we need more of – it is police officers, so that we can have the resources to keep an eye on the true dangers, not the innocent millions who will be fished up in the net and caught in the crossfire of web insecurity.

When asked by the Evening Standard on 5 June about whether she would rule out implementing the levels of cyberblocking that China has in place, May did not say no, simply reiterating her point about regulation. No commitment to free speech, no worry expressed about aping the behaviour of a repressive regime. Her failure to win a majority does not appear to have shifted her position.

In May’s “victory” speech, she swore to continue her crackdown on extremist Islamist ideology and suggested that she would give the security services the powers they need to keep our country safe. And by this, she seems to mean regulating the internet as laid out in the Conservative manifesto.

The snooper’s charter already forced internet providers to store browser histories and has asked technology companies, such as WhatsApp, to build backdoors into their messaging platforms. But I don’t think May realises her fixation with being the “global leader” in internet regulation runs contrary to the ideals of the internet when it was created – that it should be a free and open network. That cannot be when the manifesto is telling us that the Conservatives would “put a responsibility on industry not to direct users – even unintentionally – to hate speech, pornography or other sources of harm”.

The manifesto says that she will “take steps to protect the reliability and objectivity of information that is essential to our democracy”. In other words, you can’t post something on Twitter and Facebook that isn’t reliable or objective. Tweets about May being strong and stable the only exception, of course. Who will be the judge of that? What would the criteria be? How would election campaigning such as “£350m for the NHS a week” pass any test as reliable or objective?

The Tory manifesto has a heading that reads “the safest place to be online”. The irony is laughable. It is not safe when people are involuntarily forced to give away our data through backdoors into applications that are supposed to be encrypted. This will only serve to make us and our data more unsafe. We will be opening ourselves up to opportunistic criminals.

May is bringing in sweeping surveillance powers and hopes to restructure the internet in a way that will cause us to be at risk of hacking, thus leading to more terrorism and cybercriminality. Let us not allow the prime minister to hide behind promises that mass surveillance is key to keeping the public safe. Terrorist attacks have been around since before the internet and regulating what is said on the internet and seen on the internet is not going to change that. As Brexit negotiations get under way, a European parliamentary committee has only yesterday put forward draft legislation that would ban backdoors into end-to-end encryption and protect personal data from government surveillance, moving in the polar opposite direction to May.

The fightback against this has to begin now, because very soon, we won’t be allowed to make any noise at all. May’s government is crumbling as it tries to rush around muddling together something that looks like it has some iota of stability. In truth the only strength and stability May has ever demonstrated is in her commitment to bring internet security to its knees – exposing our data to hackers and the government. She seems all too keen to bring us closer to the world Orwell dreamed up.