Brexit Hides Behind Covid While Boris Lies and Blusters

 

 

Matt Hancock

As I have now revealed to everyone including myself that I will return to live in Britain some time in the New Year, I think I will share my feelings about the current state of this Promised Land. The view from here is not good! Inexorably, the country, my country, is moving to the right and doing so on a tide of Boris lies, half-truths and dishonesty worthy of …. let’s not mince words …. Trump or Orban or Bolsonaro. Obviously Boris is more adorable than most wannabe dictators with his ruffled hair, disregard for suitable diplomatic language, impressive classical allusions and apparently unwise, off-the-cuff remarks demonstrating his devil-may-care attitude so admired by white males. Meanwhile he attacks popular targets like the judicial system and the BBC plus other non-compliant media with a bumbling insouciance.

Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro

He ignores inconvenient behaviour by Cabinet ministers loyal to him and Brexit, ensuring that it is almost unheard-of for a minister to resign over charges of inappropriate behaviour such as bullying for instance, or for labelling lawyers “human rights activists” [Priti Patel] The recent resignation [a newly-minted move] of Matt Hancock came only after Boris refused to sack him and after the public clamour grew so loud, especially from older Conservatives in the South-East whose votes Boris needs.

Priti Patel

Astonishingly to yours truly, there seems to be comparatively little criticism of the ill effects of Brexit which continue to grow in the economic damage being done to the country. The only cris de coeur I hear on the BBC are from desperate exporters of a wide range of goods who have lost huge swathes of business because of punitive tariff procedures and bureaucracy, plus the difficulties over, for instance, a real shortage of lorry drivers. There just does not seem to have been a plan, like a National Plan for post-Brexit Britain to formalise a productive path through the minefield left after the contentious end of a forty year period as part of a union of 28 countries. Post-Brexit trade deals merely replicate chiefly what the country already had within the E.U. despite the latest agreements being sold by the preternaturally perky Liz Truss as new and better. They aren’t, and Boris’s non-existent Northern Ireland border running through the North Sea, is predictably stirring up worrying signs in Northern Ireland such as delays at Customs and supermarket shortages plus ominous rumbles of nationalistic tensions. So much for Boris’s “no border whatsoever” and his airy advice to Northern Irish businessmen to bin any

customs forms. Now the predictable problems rearing their ugly, potentially dangerous, heads are attributed by Boris to the E.U. as the cause. This is as if the agreement signed by the U.K. and the E.U. a few months before, never happened. Predictably, the message from this dishonourable, deplorable dishonesty for the rest of the world is, “Don’t make treaties/agreements/arrangements with the Brits because they cannot be trusted to keep their word.”

Peter Oborne, the journalist who wrote, The Assault on Truth describes his co-Conservative and former friend, Johnson, as having a pathological relationship with the truth. Oborne makes an important point illustrating what really drives Boris and the Brexiteers. He sees, behind the amoral and dishonest Boris behaviour, a sustained and growing attack on the judiciary, and the rule of law, the Civil Service and Parliament and the gradual, insidious move to authoritarian rule in which an unassailable Government makes un-monitored executive decisions. In a splendid article by Annette Dittert in the New Statesman, 23-29 July 2021, she attacks the media, in particular, the Murdoch Press and increasingly, the BBC 

Peter Oborne

for the their unwillingness to hold the Government to account. Press empire owners like Murdoch and the Barclay brothers, universally support and applaud Johnson’s lies and subterfuges as the perfect vehicle for a huge ideological project involving a systematic effort to dismantle oversight of the executive. Without a written constitution, just centuries of fudge and nudge and reliance on the ultimate integrity of governmental leaders, Britain seems almost defenceless in the face of an extreme right-wing government which is also integrity-free. An indication of Boris’s direction of travel is in public body appointments. Charles Moore, a professed ‘chief opponent’ of a public broadcasting system’ was first proposed by Boris as new Chairman of the BBC, and on his eventual disappearance from the field, Richard Sharp, a member of the right wing Centre for Policy Studies and a considerable Government friend and Tory donor, was appointed, Hardly the independent chair of the British public broadcasting service. Similar to the lack of a written British constitution, there is no written document guaranteeing the independence of the BBC, preventing centralised access to the BBC by politicians of any stripe.

Richard Sharp

I have always admired the Scots and their communal ability to sniff out a phony. Scotland has quickly judged Boris for his lies; unethical, often illegal, behaviour; his deeply dishonest Brexit campaign with Dominic Cummings; his vow to get back the British sovereignty which was never lost; his obfuscation as he hides behind the carefully-cultivated, lovably incompetent public persona to make empty gestures of governing when, for instance, there is no trade policy, post-Brexit [referendum, five years ago], and living standards in the Red Wall can never equal those in the rich South East for a variety of reasons such as the lack of the sorely-needed educational reforms in the North not being seriously funded. Small wonder that the Scottish independence movement is surging. Oh dear! The times I have sneered at the Posh Boys’Club as Little Englanders but I hadn’t expected to be taken this seriously!

Boris-as-naughty boy P.M.

Annette Dittert