Prime Minister Boris Johnson tries to lead the UK but has resigned on July 7, 2022

Great Debates
942

I’m not sure the child hitting, but I think it’s that for involvement of death an emergency services worker (based on a case where some teenagers dragged a policeman behind a quad, killing him, and got manslaughter).

Also adding ability for MPs to overrule the judges. This is pretty much the start of Nazi Germany v2.

A similar voting law identification law to the US probably going to come through, I’m not sure if targetting the low income, or EU citizens who’d not typically have a UK driving license or UK passport.

Also (not sure if this is through yet), the removal of prosecution of some people (emergency services, or perhaps friends of Fartrage) for involvement in the death of illegal immigrants (perhaps at sea, but let’s face it they’d be fine if they were killed in the street on a whim of some purple faced angry man).

This as well as allowing raw sewerage to be pumped into the sea, and the overturning of the suspension of a corrupt MP who was openly bribed to represent companies in parliament, but that appeared to be a step too far, and was backed out of.

Just those I can remember off the top of my head recently.

943

While now prosecution as assault is possible, it’s certainly not mandatory life sentences like claimed, even as a joke.

Especially comparing relatively sane governments in the devolved UK to what the batshit crazy stuff the main government is doing on almost a daily basis.

944

There’s also the “The government can unilaterally cancel the citizenship of any and all naturalised immigrants” thing. This apparently includes making people stateless (i.e. they can do it even if the immigrants no longer hold citizenship elsewhere). That’s a not-at-all-alarming development.

945

I wasn’t even sure if this was just for immigrants, I thought it was anyone, so perhaps could apply to “didn’t vote for the current government”.

946

It’s not only the Tory Party, it’s also the right-wing media who have turned on Johnson.

The Daily Mail, the Telegraph, and the Spectator have all taken to criticising and denouncing him. Their articles about the partying last year were vicious. Readers’ comments about him on the Daily Mail site are overwhelmingly negative.

That seems to be the best indication that his days are numbered. I don’t expect much to happen in the next few weeks, but I think early next year there will a leadership challenge.

947

Also note the Daily Mail editor was sacked around a week or two after negative press, replaced with a died in the wool mad one, so that may change.

948

Do you think the oh-so-woke Tory base would accept a non-white, non-Christian PM?

949

They have elected two women Prime Ministers in the past. I would not be at all surprised if the next PM is from a suitably privileged background who makes the right Conservative noises. There are several candidates that have a immigrant heritage and that would certainly inspire a lot of support from the many conservatives that share that background who have ministerial experience. However, there are limits! I cannot see much support for Pritti Patel, whose aggressive approach to the Immigration policy leads many to suppose she would have deported her own parents. Rishi would be a front runner, for sure, as long as the economy holds up

Really I don’t think Conservatives care that much about background. They want a vote winner and policies out manoeuvre Labour. Now they are probably adding competence to the list and that narrows the field of candidates considerably.

It will be interesting to see if Johnson can recover confidence after these latest screw ups. I expect there will be some scapegoating of ministers close to Johnson who will then start gathering support for a challenge next year. If there is another big screw up it may happen sooner rather than later. Conservatives can be quite ruthless, even when they are sitting on a large majority.

950

I think as long as they’re able to screw over their own parents and friends then no problem, it pretty much is a pre-requirement for anyone high up in the Tory party.

They thrive on taking women and minorities and make them betray their origins. Thatcher was a classic one, basically a bloke in a dress, and betrayed any sort of feminism associated with her. But that’s pretty much the Tory line, pure anti Woke, f**k them all, and you can be any colour or sex as long as you’re a b*stard.

It utterly baffles me how they’re still a party in this country, and how pensioners vote for them despite them doing very little at all for them in their working or post working lives. It’s as if they’ve been hit on their head with a hammer aged 55…

951

This article is worth reading. It blames emotional damage from public schools.

We learned to stay detached, some would say cold – “You had to have a coldness in yourself,” writes Watkins. “Of all the rules I learned and later threw away, this one I kept. If you did not know it, you could get hurt very badly at a place like Eton.”

Later in life, these unwritten school rules could infect every type of relationship. Prematurely detached from our parents, we had a preference for abandoning others before getting abandoned ourselves. Jump ship. Also, to be on the safe side, keep an emotional reserve.

952

And now they’re having another go at modifying the Human Rights Act (the "British Bill Of Rights Cameron nade such a song and dance about 15-odd years ago, but somehow no concrete proposal ever emerged until now).

953

Probably brown people no longer human, but cockroaches, as is tradition with far right governments.

954

The main reform that they are interested in is the ultimate authority for judgement residing with a court in Europe ,even though British judges would sit on it.

It is the national sovereignty issue that drives a lot of the objections. There is a faction in the Conservative party that refuses to compromise on any international agreement that they see as undermining or compromising the sovereign power of the UK as a nation state.

This is a reaction to a perceived tendency towards EU and other European internationals organisations to embrace the F- word: Federalism. This drove much of the Brexit debate and it is not an exclusively Conservative political position.

The sad thing is that the UK was very involved in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the UN in 1948. Many of the principles have wide support. They are are intended to address the terrible injustices that happen when governments become too powerful and begin to oppress minorities.

The UK position seems to be that they agree with the principles but the government reserves the power to act independently and will not be bound by treaty that invests authority in a court bases outside the UK.

So there has a been talk of a British Bill of Rights or some set of laws that repatriate these principles. This sounds very good. But there is a cost to this: it requires some Constitutional legislation that will require a huge amount of time to get right. They also have to repeal existing legislation.

These are the sort of details the Boris is not interested in.

Populists have very simple answers to very complicated questions.

His slogan was ‘Get Brexit Done’ and became a rallying cry for the anti-European Union faction in the Conservative Party. The details…surely they will sort themselves out in time?

Sadly the details are rather important. You have to replace the EU trading arrangements with a viable alternative and with Human Rights legislation you can make a great song and dance about repealing some laws that were supposed to compromise UK sovereignty. But…you have to replace both trading agreements and laws with something else…which requires a lot of work.

So what do you do? Cut and paste! And paper over the cracks and difficult legal contradictions.

Boris Johnson will fudge important issues with a lot of waffle and pass the difficult bits on to one of his ministers. Hoping for some landmark issue that would be a more suitable testament to his leadership. I think he has gone off the idea of a victory over the Covid pandemic or the latest thing, Champion of the Environment.

Johnson wants to be as famous as Churchill. Who, despite a chequered political career, finally found lasting fame leading the nation in the fight against the Nazis.

Maybe he wants to go down in history as the inspired leader who bravely fought Global warming by vanquishing all the silly rules from the EU HQ in Brussels and led the country to a brighter, greener future. This presupposes that there is anything left of the economy after Brexit and Covid.

I can’t wait.

955

He wants to be famous, but he does not have any of the talents of Churchill, but does have a lot of the attributes of Churchills enemies, and the support of people standing silently at war memorials with nazi tattoos honouring their own defeat ironically.

I’m not going to both trying to challenge this idea of “sovvnrrnnnteee” which seems baked the brains into the nutters in the UK at the moment. I have no idea who and what they are fighting about, because most of it doesn’t seem to be firmly in the blame of the EU or much else. It leads, to me, to standing alone, like Russia and North Korea, except those at least have friends like Iran and China.

Johnson has neither the talent, memory, negotiating skills, or an ounce of the charisma that Churchill had, probably the only attribute he shares is the alcoholism. A cosplay Prime Minister, dreaming of being a big boy and the type of infamy he seeks usually only comes from a war so then it’s down to who and when.

956

There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Brexit: win back sovereignty from all these international bodies that compromise the sovereignty of the UK…so withdraw from these multi-lateral treaties.

…and then? Launch Global Britain! Full of talent, innovation and enterprise doing one to one deals with countries to much rejoicing and mutual benefit.

The second bit seems to consist of Liz Truss doing roll-over deals with countries that the UK formerly traded with under the EU umbrella. This is a holding operation.

The idea seems to be to restore the UK to the status of a major independent trading nation. Whether the world is quite ready for this, remains to be seen. Trade deals have been represented in a very simplistic form and the UK has very little experience in developing them having relied on the EU for this for decades. The PR suggests the world is forming an orderly line, so very keen to sign up trade deals worth billions to British business. The truth is that these things take many years to negotiate and it is entirely dependent on the dynamics of the partner country if economic interests are to coincide. They may not be ready.

I really don’t think UK businesses are ready for it either. This is a political project designed to appeal to Boris’s base within the party. The interests of the country and the relationship with our biggest trading partner, the EU, seems to come a poor second. As for the UK business community. Boris was characteristically dismissive. He is famous for saying ‘F*** Business’ in response to the concerns of the business community to the disruption in trade. This is quite a different kind of Conservative party that was always had a close relationship with the corporate interests and the wider business community. That attitude has been further underlined by that other Brexit policy: Immigration. Britain wants only the brightest and best from all over the world and now has an immigration policy that will strictly control who comes into the UK to work. And who is going decide on what skills are needed where and when? Why the Home Office under Pritti Patel will keep a list of shortage occupations. When she is not contriving ways of discouraging refugees to seek refuge in the UK.

What could possibly go wrong?

Boris Johnson’s policies are primarily aimed at keeping him in power by appeasing factions within the Conservative Party.

This is not to be confused with statesmanship.

Politician generally try to leave behind one or two changes that are to the benefit of the nation. Something that can be looked back on as a job well done.

It is difficult to see what Johnson will leave behind that is not broken.

957

And neither the work ethic nor the lifetime commitment to the national interest, I’d say.

958

This is fun.

959

I don’t think it remains to be seen. It was a masturbatory fantasy of idiots who had imagined the past as presented by victorian myth. The UK thrived in trade by ripping off it’s colonies, and it has none to do this with now. They used to export cotton from India, make it into cloth in the UK, then selling back at a premium. Pretend to not like the slave trade, but it was the UK’s colonies who were the last to stop, the UK made plenty of money in the meanwhile.

Stripped of these resources they’ve got nothing. The world is international standards, and the larger groups such as EU and US dictate these standards. The idea that the UK makes it’s own is utter idiocy. Who do they sell this to?

The overall problem with the Tory party, and indeed the PM, is that most of them don’t even know how stupid they are. They are often cleverer than their very stupid friends, but that does not make them clever. They use the term “free trade” wrongly, and think it means no restrictions or regulations, whereas free trade needs restrictions and regulations to remove the barriers, such as a making fruit consistently graded across a whole trade block. This is what they claim to be experts on, and don’t even understand the basics. It’s madness. The group behind Brexit, the ERG is arguably a drinking group for the most stupidest of Tories.

It’s the type of thing which makes Cummings look like a genius. He was pressing for scientific advancement of the country, yet his understanding of science has been picked up from the type of glossy magazines in an airport lounge. Cut yourself out the research groups? Make it more difficult to immigrate there? It’s the type of thing which makes the likes of Einstein walk past and go to somewhere better.

And this will persist past the point when Johnson is gone. He’s a dancing fool. A distraction while they fleece the place, stripping assets and cashing out. I think they know Gove won’t be next, Truss seems an easy one to put in place while doing the same thing.

There’s even talk that the party thinks Johnson is too left wing. And they have a point. Take away the culture war, and the racism and you see a government which Corbyn would have dreamt of. He’s been spraying the cash around like a drunk Communist PM, imaginary bridges and tunnels and all sort of crap which money has been wasted on. The farmers having been screwed over by trade deals, are getting paid to retire. They’re all being bought off, money seems no object. But this bites back to push even further right wing because then they’ve got an excuse to further dismantle the country: Debt from Johnson giving everyone money to stay in power, and none of the type of benefits a leftist government would have spent it on, to strip away. There’s no fat to cut.

I think this was originally a last throw of the dice for the Tory party, around 2016, their demographic disappearing, and nobody new wanted them. I also think they’re quite shocked to still be in power, and actively tried to lose (just other powers wouldn’t let them, such as with Brexit). Its dark days here, and leaving the country is no longer an option for us (except to Ireland).

960

Hey, why don’t you come down off the fence and tell us what you really think?

And you missed out the inter-generational Rees-Mogg ‘Sovereign Individual’ crap.

961

I’m sorry, I really struggle to try and justify the nonsense they speak. It’s not even basically parseable. It just doesn’t make any sense and I know plenty of people who believe it. Yet if you try and get any sense out of them they’ll make “straight cucumber jokes” and divert away from any basic sense with more nonsense. It breaks down to “I durnt like forrnneiighhhers”.

This guy has been taking the Brexit and Tories apart in detail weekly for the last four years. Even reading one of his posts makes it clear how little any of it makes sense.

" That damage isn’t just economic. Those who believed promises of a boost for Britain’s global stature have been rewarded with at best international bemusement and at worst a country deemed untrustworthy and liable to break international law and treaty obligations. Those expecting a revivified national democracy have instead seen an illegal prorogation of parliament and a spectacular and ongoing power grab by the Executive."