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Boris Johnson


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Looking forward to the spin after today's announcements/bullshit regarding rebuilding the economy:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/29/absolutely-fanciful-boris-johnsons-new-deal-not-rooseveltian-say-critics

 

The £1.5bn for new and refurbished schools, for example,.is nowhere near enough. We've spent £4bn+ since 2014 and the building stock is still widely inadequate. 

 

As much as tree planting is welcome, where's the investment in green infrastructure and technology or the refurbishment and upgrading of our housing stock? Rooseveltian my arse, the fraud.

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53 minutes ago, Karl_b said:

Looking forward to the spin after today's announcements/bullshit regarding rebuilding the economy:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/29/absolutely-fanciful-boris-johnsons-new-deal-not-rooseveltian-say-critics

 

The £1.5bn for new and refurbished schools, for example,.is nowhere near enough. We've spent £4bn+ since 2014 and the building stock is still widely inadequate. 

 

As much as tree planting is welcome, where's the investment in green infrastructure and technology or the refurbishment and upgrading of our housing stock? Rooseveltian my arse, the fraud.

The beeb have swallowed it hook line and sinker, they ran with the massive investment story all day so in Cummings eyes its job done.

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Realised what he reminded me of recently, and it's to be expected given the amount of estranged kids he's got, but a 'disappointing dad'. 

 

You know these divorced dads that promise to take their kids to McDonalds on Saturday or turn up to sports day, but it turns out they've been in bed all day with the clap? 

 

That's what pretty much everything out of his mouth sounds like. "I'm going to invest huge amounts in the British economy, it'll be like Roosevelt." 

 

A couple of racists from Burnley and an old bastard from Leamington Spa are still looking out the window waiting for him to turn up, but he's not coming. 

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19 minutes ago, Numero said:

His economic vision for Britain seems pretty bleak. He's comparing it to FDR's New Deal. The New Deal was something like 7% of GDP. Johnson's is something like 0.25%. Cool. 


40%, is what was put towards it, I read earlier, but could be wrong.

 

Alex’s plan is 0.2.

 

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2020/06/why-it-s-absurd-boris-johnson-compare-his-spending-plans-fdr-s-new-deal

 

Again, bluster you’re way to the hearts and minds of people who don’t pick up news papers or have access to the internet, or television, or radio, or any other means of mass communication which could cut through this bullshit in two seconds.

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57 minutes ago, Numero said:

His economic vision for Britain seems pretty bleak. He's comparing it to FDR's New Deal. The New Deal was something like 7% of GDP. Johnson's is something like 0.25%. Cool. 

I suspect his grand stimulus package will consist largely of cutting planning regulations to allow Tory donors to turn the country into one giant Barrett estate and pay hardly any tax on it. 

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22 minutes ago, Duff Man said:

The point, surely, is that the people who gobble this nonsense up do pick up papers/turn on the radio/browse the web etc. That's exactly how the bullshit is inserted, with laser like accuracy, into their brain boxes.


The first thing after every report has been Starmer rolling his eyes and saying ‘this is the same shit he told you last year repackaged’ the Welsh leader saying that Wales has seen none of this has ever, or will ever see any of this imaginary money. This is directly after the Alex’s incoherent mess of a speech and provided without commentary. 

 

The informations there and people are so intrenched that the choose to ignore it as ‘commie’ nonsense, or they’re too thick to be able to delineate between sources, or, far worse they know it’s a lie, but they’ve been brow beaten to the point they no longer chose to listen to the dissenting voices of opposition parties. All are risible.   

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7 minutes ago, Bruce Spanner said:

The first thing after every report has been Starmer rolling his eyes and saying ‘this is the same shit he told you last year repackaged’ the Welsh leader saying that none of this has ever, or will ever see any of this imaginary money. This is directly after the Alex’s incoherent mess of a speech.

 

The informations there and people are so intrenched that the choose to ignore it as ‘commie’ nonsense, or they’re too thick to be able to delineate between sources, or, far worse they know it’s a lie, but they’ve been brow breather to the point they no longer chose to listen to the dissenting voices of opposition parties. All are risible.   

Right, but they're convinced it's commie nonsense because pretty much the entire media has just spent 4 years warning them of the radical Marxists in charge of the Labour party who'll nationalise their sausages given half a chance. Barry from Bolsover doesn't come to those kind of nonsensical conclusions on his own, and as we're now seeing, it's going to take a little while to undo that damage, if it's even possible at all.

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15 minutes ago, Duff Man said:

 

Right, but they're convinced it's commie nonsense because pretty much the entire media has just spent 4 years warning them of the radical Marxists in charge of the Labour party who'll nationalise their sausages given half a chance. Barry from Bolsover doesn't come to those kind of nonsensical conclusions on his own, and as we're now seeing, it's going to take a little while to undo that damage, if it's even possible at all.


Oh, we sing from the same hymn sheet, I’m just bored of retards not having the wherewithal to realise they’re being played for fools.

 

They’ll be applauding the outstanding coronavirus success’ within the next month or so.

 

I actually got in to an argument the other day with a bloke i work with who was singing Alex’s praises ‘Nobody could have done a better job than Boris’ ‘Er, yeah, about that. Sit down you thick cunt and listen’

 

 

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40 minutes ago, Karl_b said:

Brilliant lines-

 

“BUILD BUILD BUILD”, as Johnson’s podium this morning had it. Once again we find ourselves within the great cowboy builders cycle of Conservative rule, where the guys who basically caused the problem will now explain that only they can fix it. Having spent a decade starving your school of cash to the point of structural collapse, they now stand there tutting and going: “Yeah, you’re going to need to rebuild that … Whole lot wants pulling out. But yeah, I can do it for you.” Pause. “A thank you would be nice. Gratitude doesn’t cost you anything, does it, luv?”

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2 hours ago, Karl_b said:


I just had to look the book review up. It’s pretty damning. Enjoy.

 

 

The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History 

Boris Johnson 
Hodder & Stoughton, 408pp, £25

 

Boris Johnson, as the subtitle of this book proclaims, is a firm believer in the “great man” theory of history. Not for him the subtleties of the complex interplay of historical forces and individual personalities. Subtlety is not Boris’s strong point. Winston Churchill alone, he writes, “saved our civilisation”. He “invented the RAF and the tank”. He founded the welfare state (although Boris gives David Lloyd George a bit of credit for this, as well). All of this, he argues, confounds what he sees as the fashion of the past few decades to write off “so-called great men and women” as “meretricious bubbles on the vast tides of social history”. The story of Winston Churchill “is a pretty withering retort to all that malarkey. He, and he alone, made the difference.”
 

Marxists, he writes, go eat your words. Except that it’s not just Marxists who have argued for the impact of wider economic, social, cultural and even ideological forces on history. Anyone who has the time or energy to press a couple of keys on a computer to look up “tank”, “RAF”, “welfare state” or even “the Second World War” on Wikipedia will see Boris’s sweeping claims vanish in a cloud of inconvenient facts. Churchill did not, as Boris claims, invent the term “Iron Curtain” to describe the barrier between Soviet-dominated Europe and western Europe. It was first used by the Nazis – above all, by their propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Nor did he invent the term “Middle East”: it was coined by the American naval thinker Alfred T Mahan in 1902.

 

At many junctures in the book, the ability to think historically deserts its author. He describes men such as Hitler as “short” when their height (5ft 8in in his case) exactly matched the average height of European men at the time; and he describes Churchill as a “Victorian Whig”, though the Whigs’ attitude to the state in legislation such as the 1834 Poor Law was entirely different to Churchill’s. The contemporary references to television shows such as Downton Abbey are among the many factors that will ensure this book has a very brief shelf life. Boris writes disapprovingly of the extramarital affairs of Edith Aylesford, a society lady of the late-Victorian era. “That was how they carried on in those days, you see,” he comments. Not just in those days, Boris.

 

Johnson doesn’t weigh up policies and ideas with any care or penetration. If he doesn’t like them, he dismisses them as “rot”, “tripe”, “loopy”, “bonkers”, “barmy” or “nuts”; their advocates and practitioners as “loonies”, “plodders”, “Stilton-eating surrender monkeys”, and so on.

 

There are some truly cringe-making metaphors and wordplay in the book. Churchill, we learn, was “mustard keen on gas” as a weapon in the First World War. He was “the large protruding nail on which destiny snagged her coat”. Young Tories “think of him as the people of Parma think of the formaggio Parmigiano. He is their biggest cheese.” And Chamberlain’s “refusal to stand up to Hitler” was “spaghetti-like” (clearly Boris is rather fond of Italian food).

 

The book reads as if it was dictated, not written. All the way through we hear Boris’s voice; it’s like being cornered in the Drones Club and harangued for hours by Bertie Wooster. The gung-ho style inhibits thought instead of stimulating it. There’s huge condescension here. The Churchill Factoradvertises itself as an attempt to educate “young people” who think that Churchill is a bulldog in a television advertisement rather than Britain’s greatest statesman but talking down to them is no way to achieve this aim.

 

In a book that involves a good deal of modern European history, Boris the Eurosceptic clearly doesn’t find it necessary to master the details. Croatia, he tells us casually, was ruled by “some Ustasha creep or other” in the interwar years (it was not), while in the same period there was a plague of “communist uprisings in eastern Europe” (there was not). The Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, he writes in his offhand way, was “originally intended for some minor offshoot of the Hohenzollern dynasty” (it was not – it was built for the crown prince, heir to the German throne). He thinks that German industrial relations before 1914 were characterised by “co-operation between bosses and workers” (they were not). Hitler did not plan to kill the disabled, as he claims: most of the disabled in Germany in the 1930s were war veterans. The Germans did not capture Stalingrad, though this book claims they did.

 

Boris ties himself up in knots trying to distance Churchill from the idea of European unity, salvaging a mildly sceptical quote from the apogee of his imperialist enthusiasm in the 1930s to undermine his hero’s advocacy of European unity in the 1950s.

Present-day politics obtrude in other ways, too. Anyone who wonders why Boris has written this book need look no further than the general election that is due in a few months’ time. If the Conservatives lose, the leadership of the party will be up for grabs and Boris will be a candidate. Writing a book about Churchill might help people take him seriously. After all, Churchill, he writes, “spoke in short Anglo-Saxon zingers”. He was a “rogue elephant” in the Tory party. He made a career as a highly paid journalist. He was definitely not a “lefty-liberal Milquetoast”. “He was no party-pooper.” He was “incorrigibly cheerful” and his verbal style was both “demotic and verbally inventive”. He “incarnated something essential about the British character – and that was his continual and unselfconscious eccentricity”. Now, who is this meant to remind you of? 

 

Richard J Evans is Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge

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Guest Pistonbroke
On 29/06/2020 at 21:47, lifetime fan said:


He’s been doing it for years. 
 

Even his sister grassed him up for it. 

 

I remember watching his sister on 'The Last Leg' and she ripped him to bits about it. 

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Imagine if Starmer said this

Quote

UK will not accept Israeli annexation of Palestinian land, Johnson warns

Boris Johnson has warned that Britain will not accept Israeli annexation of Palestinian territory, which is being pushed by Benjamin Netanyahu.

The PM said he believed the plan would work against Israel's long-term interests, and would be a violation of international law.

In an op-ed for Ynet News, Mr Johnson wrote: "As a life-long friend, admirer and supporter of Israel, I am fearful that these proposals will fail in their objective of securing Israel’s borders and will be contrary to Israel’s own long-term interests.

"Annexation would put in jeopardy the progress that Israel has made in improving relationships with the Arab and Muslim world.

"Israel’s enemies would seize upon it, and use it against those in the Middle East who want to see progress.

"Annexation would represent a violation of international law.  It would also be a gift to those who want to perpetuate the old stories about Israel."

The UK will not recognise any changes to demarcation lines drawn up in 1967, except where they are accepted by both sides, the PM added.

 

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