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Westminster Politics
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If I remember rightly wasn't Boris particularly vocal about that being an outrage when brown succeeded Blair?
Yeah mainly because they dont know or need a stick to beat someone with. Have a look at democratic socialism in europe, especially nordic countries. They're not failures at all.
That doesn't sound like Boris. He would never change his opinion like that.
There were umpteen references about saving the party too, rather than giving a feck about the actual country.
Yep, even Rory the Tory seemed more concerned about his Party & career than his country at the rally today.
Sounds like Boris.
Is Rory Stewart’s past as an MI6 agent likely to hinder to boost his appeal in this situation?
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The Telegraph are desperate. Should this shit even be legal? A PM candidate has his own personal propaganda news corp.
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We need massive changes to our parliamentary system.
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Of course he does, they all do, truth be told we all do, that's why there is 'Nibyism', why 'no one trains in the national interest' etc. Politicians by and larger know they have to get into power to exercise it and to have influence on it, but somehow on their way to gaining that power they seem to lose something. From personal observation I would say there are only two remaining politicians who still retain their personal beliefs after years of involvement in Parliament, Frank Field and Ken Clarke. Both of these stalwart parliamentarians now residing on their respective party back benches, the rest have swayed one way or another as the wind blows, some to good effect it has to be said. However the question "will the real xyz please stand up," is not a game you can play with success with most politicians"
I have zero trust in Boris and even less faith in his ability.
Interesting talk on 5live this morning asking the question - how many children does our future PM actually have. Is it five or six. He refuses to answer.
Now. It is a fairly simple question and the number of children the next PM has fathered and whom with deserves an honest answer.
And if he is refuses to answer that what else is he hiding.
You have to laugh, else you'll cry.
Same here. I find his attitude to the electorate quite refreshing.
Contrast that with Boris who has decided to keep his mouth shut and simply will not give his electorate the time of day.
Business as usual:
Guardian said:
It is not popular because he is telling the truth about Brexit. Just about the only one who has the guts to tell it like it is.
The Al Yamamah contact to sell British built Tornado and Hawk jets to Saudi Arabia was at the time the biggest ever export contact. Similar for the contract to sell British built Typhoon jets.
However, don't think that if we did not sell them our jets that this conflict would not happen.
Either the US or France would have been delighted to sell their aircraft and take all those jobs and money.
That is the reality of the situation I am afraid.
What the feck? A majority of Conservative Party members would want Brexit even if it means that their party is destroyed, but not not if it means Corbyn is Prime Minister? That's... insane.
What's the beef with Stewart being a former spy? Lets face it, he probably was.
@2cents
this is the stuff that looks like irrational fanatacism in comparison to what corbyn is. Destroying their own country and the most successful political party in world history = ok, losing an election = not.
Fintan O'Toole absolutely eviscerating Johnson in the IT today:
If lies were flies, the swarm around him would be so thick that Boris Johnson would be invisible. His gruff, mock-jovial Etonian tones would be drowned out by their incessant, deafening hum. There is ordinary political lying – evasions, circumlocutions, omissions, half-truths. And then there is Johnsonian lying – bare-faced, full-throated, unabashed. I wonder is this the real mark of how far British political life has fallen: people are so sick of the first kind of dishonesty that they actually find Johnson’s upfront mendacity refreshing. Is this the only kind of authenticity some of them can now imagine: the honest liar whose fabrications are unadulterated by any vestigial belief that truth even exists?
When Johnson was Brussels correspondent of the Telegraph, his colleagues from the rest of the British media made up a version of Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda in his honour: “Boris told such dreadful lies/ It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes./ His desk, which from its earliest youth/ Had kept a strict regard for truth,/ Attempted to believe each scoop / Until they landed in the soup.” He got away with it, of course, because mostly what he lied about, in public at least, was the European Union. Even for once-respectable Tory papers such as the Telegraph, the EU has always been a free-fire zone. The rules of engagement are different – minimal respect for facts is not required.
I went back and read Johnson’s Telegraph column of March 16th, 2016. It is important because it is the one in which he announced that he was backing Brexit in the referendum. We now know that Johnson had in fact submitted two columns – the other one arguing passionately for Remain – because he had not, at deadline time, decided where the greatest advantage lay for his own career. Had the other column been printed, Brexit would not have happened: polls show that Johnson was by far the most influential figure in the referendum campaign. On such idiocies the fate of nations turns.
The core of the column that did appear is the intolerable craziness of EU legislation: “Sometimes these EU rules sound simply ludicrous, like the rule that you can’t recycle a teabag, or that children under eight cannot blow up balloons, or the limits on the power of vacuum cleaners. Sometimes they can be truly infuriating – like the time I discovered, in 2013, that there was nothing we could do to bring in better-designed cab windows for trucks, to stop cyclists being crushed.”
The EU says you can’t recycle a teabag – lie. The truth is that some local councils in Britain itself had introduced this restriction: nothing to do with the EU. Children under eight cannot blow up balloons – lie. EU safety rules simply say that packets of balloons should carry the words: “Warning: children under eight can choke or suffocate.” Limits on the power of vacuum cleaners – half true. The EU did have such limits, for good environmental reasons, but they were subsequently overturned by the European Court, which Johnson hates. Johnson as mayor of London being prevented by the EU from requiring safer cab windows to protect cyclists – a flaming beacon of deceit. In 2014, when he was mayor, Johnson actually made precisely the opposite complaint, that the British government was failing to back EU proposals for safer cab windows: “If these amendments, supported by dozens of cities across Europe, can succeed, we can save literally hundreds of lives across the EU in years to come. I am deeply concerned at the position of the British government and urge them to embrace this vital issue.”
How does he continue to thrive on lies? In part because of a disgraceful dereliction of duty on the part of the Telegraph, which pays him almost €300,000 a year but refuses to hold him to the most basic standards of professional journalism. In April, when the paper was forced to retract a false claim by Johnson that polls showed a no-deal Brexit to be the most popular option, it added that Johnson was “entitled to make sweeping generalisations based on his opinions” and that his column “was clearly comically polemical, and could not be reasonably read as a serious, empirical, in-depth analysis of hard factual matters”.
He operates in the space between politics and buffoonery and shifts from one side to the other whenever it suits him
Comically polemical says it all. Johnson has managed to claim the privileges of the Fool while seeking to play the King. He operates in the space between politics and buffoonery and shifts from one side to the other whenever it suits him. When he is lying, he is making political statements that shape the views of millions. When he is called out on the lies, they are just jokes.
In this, Johnson embodies more than anyone else the weirdly performative nature of Brexit as a jolly jape with real and awful consequences. It is simultaneously tragic and farcical. No one better captures this than BoJo the clown who doubles as Johnson the ringmaster. There is a horrible logic to the man whose own newspaper insists he “could not be taken seriously” rising to lead his country in its most profound crisis for many decades. Who better to speak for a reckless and decadent ruling class for whom everything is desperate but nothing is serious?
When Johnson was Brussels correspondent of the Telegraph, his colleagues from the rest of the British media made up a version of Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda in his honour: “Boris told such dreadful lies/ It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes./ His desk, which from its earliest youth/ Had kept a strict regard for truth,/ Attempted to believe each scoop / Until they landed in the soup.” He got away with it, of course, because mostly what he lied about, in public at least, was the European Union. Even for once-respectable Tory papers such as the Telegraph, the EU has always been a free-fire zone. The rules of engagement are different – minimal respect for facts is not required.
I went back and read Johnson’s Telegraph column of March 16th, 2016. It is important because it is the one in which he announced that he was backing Brexit in the referendum. We now know that Johnson had in fact submitted two columns – the other one arguing passionately for Remain – because he had not, at deadline time, decided where the greatest advantage lay for his own career. Had the other column been printed, Brexit would not have happened: polls show that Johnson was by far the most influential figure in the referendum campaign. On such idiocies the fate of nations turns.
The core of the column that did appear is the intolerable craziness of EU legislation: “Sometimes these EU rules sound simply ludicrous, like the rule that you can’t recycle a teabag, or that children under eight cannot blow up balloons, or the limits on the power of vacuum cleaners. Sometimes they can be truly infuriating – like the time I discovered, in 2013, that there was nothing we could do to bring in better-designed cab windows for trucks, to stop cyclists being crushed.”
The EU says you can’t recycle a teabag – lie. The truth is that some local councils in Britain itself had introduced this restriction: nothing to do with the EU. Children under eight cannot blow up balloons – lie. EU safety rules simply say that packets of balloons should carry the words: “Warning: children under eight can choke or suffocate.” Limits on the power of vacuum cleaners – half true. The EU did have such limits, for good environmental reasons, but they were subsequently overturned by the European Court, which Johnson hates. Johnson as mayor of London being prevented by the EU from requiring safer cab windows to protect cyclists – a flaming beacon of deceit. In 2014, when he was mayor, Johnson actually made precisely the opposite complaint, that the British government was failing to back EU proposals for safer cab windows: “If these amendments, supported by dozens of cities across Europe, can succeed, we can save literally hundreds of lives across the EU in years to come. I am deeply concerned at the position of the British government and urge them to embrace this vital issue.”
How does he continue to thrive on lies? In part because of a disgraceful dereliction of duty on the part of the Telegraph, which pays him almost €300,000 a year but refuses to hold him to the most basic standards of professional journalism. In April, when the paper was forced to retract a false claim by Johnson that polls showed a no-deal Brexit to be the most popular option, it added that Johnson was “entitled to make sweeping generalisations based on his opinions” and that his column “was clearly comically polemical, and could not be reasonably read as a serious, empirical, in-depth analysis of hard factual matters”.
He operates in the space between politics and buffoonery and shifts from one side to the other whenever it suits him
Comically polemical says it all. Johnson has managed to claim the privileges of the Fool while seeking to play the King. He operates in the space between politics and buffoonery and shifts from one side to the other whenever it suits him. When he is lying, he is making political statements that shape the views of millions. When he is called out on the lies, they are just jokes.
In this, Johnson embodies more than anyone else the weirdly performative nature of Brexit as a jolly jape with real and awful consequences. It is simultaneously tragic and farcical. No one better captures this than BoJo the clown who doubles as Johnson the ringmaster. There is a horrible logic to the man whose own newspaper insists he “could not be taken seriously” rising to lead his country in its most profound crisis for many decades. Who better to speak for a reckless and decadent ruling class for whom everything is desperate but nothing is serious?
Really intrigued to see Ruth Davidson's approach to all this - champions herself as the union voice of Scotland when her party UK-wide now appear to be the biggest threat to its continuation.
The issue has become that Stewart or someone in his inner circle has likely leaked it to boost his credentials.
Another issue is that he's trying to be clever with his answers when reports question him about being a spy. He just shouldn't be discussing it at all.
Doesn't seem much of an issue to me.
Casting calls begin for potential new Bond villain:
(L-R Licence To Kill, The World Is Not Enough, Govefinger
On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Spectre, Thunderbald)
(L-R Licence To Kill, The World Is Not Enough, Govefinger
On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Spectre, Thunderbald)
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Casting calls begin for potential new Bond villain:
The distance between Javid's eyebrows and the top of his head is enormous.Casting calls begin for potential new Bond villain:
(L-R Licence To Kill, The World Is Not Enough, Govefinger
On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Spectre, Thunderbald)
Lie another DayCasting calls begin for potential new Bond villain:
(L-R Licence To Kill, The World Is Not Enough, Govefinger
On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Spectre, Thunderbald)
Conservative Party Leadership contest down to five: Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid, Boris Johnson and Rory Stewart
Raab out. Javid just makes it through on 33.
Stewart almost doubles his support.
People that support Hunt are genuinely interesting me, he is a void of talent and personality.
People that support Hunt are genuinely interesting me, he is a void of talent and personality.
Javid looks like a giant baby.
Ha. Out of all the candidates, Raab is the one who inspires the most contempt, which is no mean feat.
There was talk that Johnson had instructed 15 or so of his supporters to vote for Hunt, for precisely that reason.
Never know we might get lucky and the roof collapses on the lot of them.
Suspect Javid will drop out before tomorrows ballot. Stewart will have to pick up a good chunk of Javid's votes if he wants to get through tomorrows round.
He got 43 in the first round!
If that's the case can we just get this dictatorship over with and give Johnson the win?
I mean, second time lucky I guess since he was so fecking incompetent the first time around when May ended up winning by default, but doubtful you'd be able to ask him about that failure since he's so spineless he'd run away and hide in a bush if you tried to bring it up.
Thank god that turnip isn't going to be PM.
After this is done how soon after can we expect a General Election? Genuine question.