As far as I know Sarah Murphy is not a relative of mine. I mention her because she is great on Twitter, and this is typical of her succinct and decidedly targeted commentary:
Freedom Day. Independence Day. Levelling up. Build back better. Oven ready deal. Take back control. World-beating. Global Britain.
Just a torrent of horseshit where responsible governance should be…
Even The Times sounds fed up. pic.twitter.com/FvuseLmVlJ
— sarah murphy (@13sarahmurphy) July 16, 2021
Sarah also provides a link to The Times editorial. Click on that tweet, then when in Twitter click on the image and it is easy to read in full.
The headline is pretty important though. The FT has recently condemned Johnson. Now the FT is calling him an empty vessel.
Murdoch is moving against Johnson. The times (upper and lower case), they may be a' changin'.
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Indeed, times may well be changing, but change is not always beneficial to the majority. Say, Murdoch topples Johnson, who do they replace him with? Hancock was toppled and replaced with Javid, who is much worse for the health of UK citizens.
The ‘clear alternative to Tory misrule’ was deliberately sabotaged from the inside. The evidence submitted has been buried even without Forde’s name on the headstone.
The role of the present Loyal (the blatant clue is in that title) LOTO is, like one of his predecessors, continuity Conservatism as the reserve administration when the first team occasionally runs out of steam.
You can have any version of cola you want but water ain’t on the menu. That’s why the biggest single voting block in the UK, particularly since NL, isn’t the two Continuity Party’s but those who’ve stopped voting – including deliberately spoilt papers.
The times may well be a changing, but until the opposition get their finger out and actually offer something different it will not necessarily change for the kind of better outcome that some of us would hope for. We know how this ends for the Tories. They will simply get rid of Johnson, stab him in the back, when the moment is right and inflict someone else on us. There will be new promises, commitments, whatever, but ultimately it will be the same old Tory crap.
I couldn’t care less about the Tories, they are what they are and always will be.
I only care about what the alternative is. I want to see a clear alternative to the Tory misrule. The pandemic and Brexit have given the opposition parties a clear opportunity to offer something different to the Tory normal. So far they have failed.
His speech yesterday was an inverted pyramid of piffle. Top heavy on wordy fluff, and desperately short on any actual policy. What does “levelling up” actually mean? What is going to change? What are you actually going to do to achieve it? How do we measure its success? Are we to expect a reduction in inequality, for example? Gini coefficients?
Perhaps the closest he got was “I believe we will have made progress in levelling up when we have begun to raise living standards, spread opportunity, improved our public services and restored people’s sense of pride in their community.” OK, lets see how living standards, opportunity, public services, and community cohesion change in the next couple of years.
He praises Germany for levelling up the east after reunification. I don’t know when he was last in Saxony or Brandenburg, but the regional electoral success of the AfD suggests all is not sunshine and roses. But if he is truly interested in solidarity, perhaps he would like to invest £100 billion a year, over several decades, like the Germans did.
How this looks from Germany: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2021/07/politics-lies-boris-johnson-and-erosion-rule-law
“it is not unthinkable that Johnson will end up being the last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and instead go down in history as the uncrowned king of a democratically dubious Little England. In retrospect, British democracy would then have been nothing more than what it already is for many of its critics due to its vulnerable, unwritten constitution: a beautiful illusion that worked brilliantly as long as everyone wanted to hold on to it.”
Indeed….
Exactly Andrew. A terrifying and depressing article about our current situation. Perhaps the Labour party would like to stop it’s internal civil war, drop it’s pathetic decidedly anti-progressive tribalism, and join forces with all other non right wing parties in opposing Johnson’ regime, and doing their utmost to get rid it, as a mtter of national emergency?
Oh, and then there’s this, copied stright from The Guardian, and echoing exactly what Richard’s been saying for weeks:
“Boris Johnson’s plan to lift virtually all of England’s pandemic restrictions on Monday is a threat to the world and provides fertile ground for the emergence of vaccine-resistant variants, international experts say.
Britain’s position as a global transport hub would mean any new variant here would rapidly spread around the world, scientists and physicians warned at an emergency summit. They also expressed grave concerns about Downing Street’s plans.
Government advisers in New Zealand, Israel and Italy were among those who sounded alarm bells about the policy, while more than 1,200 scientists backed a letter to the Lancet journal warning the strategy could allow vaccine-resistant variants to develop.
An adviser to New Zealand’s government told the summit he and his colleagues were astounded at the approach being taken in England.”
I wonder if those countries might at some time prosecute?
@Richard Murphy
More likely a complete ban on travellers from the UK. I have family, including a daughter there. I want to go next Northern summer but It may be that living in these plague islands mean even as a citizen who is fully vaccinated I cannot.
NZGov has publicly stated that it is not in the business of allowing harms to come or in harming NZ’s people. It will do what it can to protect people. It is buying all the vaccines it can lay its hands on and get shipped there. There is some anxiety about the reliablity of the shipping. But they are working on it.
Meanwhile even as a citizen I would need a confirmed place in managed quarantine which are scarce as hen’s teeth before even thinking of booking a flight.
Richard – you may have already come across this German viewof teh Johnson era – absolutely nails it –
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2021/07/politics-lies-boris-johnson-and-erosion-rule-law
Excellent
Worth reading
I’m a big fan of Sarah too. She deserves massive credit for taking the fight to the Tories. Without people like her, Marina Hyde, John Crace, and a small army on Twitter, I would probably have gone mad. We’re now at peak insanity. Our own government has decided to play roulette with our lives for what can only be the briefest of political gains. Cynical doesn’t come close. Our government is risking a new variant that could devastate the world. These people will not worry though because they are not part of the world. They came through the public school system. As “freedom day” approaches, Covid cases broke 50k, while our leader launched his meaningless levelling up agenda and the bill to sell off the NHS quietly slipped through its second reading. For those who pay attention to such things, the future looks as empty as Johnson’s speech. A big fat void. An ocean of nothingness. These are desperate times.
Or to quote the sometimes caustic Marina Hyde
“What a week for England, when arse-flare guy looks like our brightest spark……
“….If that really was the government’s big idea, then we’re not so much running on fumes as on arse-flares.
It’s a typically good article by her