UK General Discussion:The Rt. Hon Alex Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Populist Hero

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The fact that Boris is now married to someone young enough to be his daughter really needs to stick in more throats than it has .

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Can't speak for anyone else but I'm sure I probably knew about breastfeeding before primary school, unless this is some bizarre thing linked to 'woke culture' scare stories. I'm not going to waste time finding out what he meant, however. What a pathetic and sad little man.

'Chest feeding' is a transphobic straw man argument about things being relabeled in the interests of gender diversity/inclusion.

Progressive activists said that they would not try to claim young children as having trans identities. That has turned out to be a lie. No doubt they will similarly push for euthanasia laws to be extended to terminally ill little children.

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Gender critical, transphobic and homophobic comments are now a daily occurrence, alongside attacks on Stonewall and inclusive education.

Expect rollbacks.

There's definitely room for concern, especially about transphobia, but how representative are nasty people on Twitter?

A lot more representative of the population at large than the tiny minority that identify themselves as “left” in a meaningful sense.

People with a well education or a high education are neither the average person or an ordinary person.

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People Lie to pollsters. Otherwise the Australian greens here in OZ who are strongly progressive would get a lot more share of the vote in national elections then the average ten to eleven percent they do.

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Someone has been sitting on this evidence and waited for the opportune time to release it.  Johnson has got himself into a lot of trouble in recent months.

First, he tried to save a fellow Conservative MP who had been found guilty of braking lobbying rules by whipping his party to vote to change the rules.  He won the vote, narrowly, and then u-turned the next day as public opinion was so against his “one rule for him and his mates and another for everyone else” approach.  The MP resigned and there is a by-election tomorrow (17 December). The seat was extremely safe for the Conservatives and was won with a 23,000 majority.  It is now on a knife edge with many pundits expecting that the Lib Dems will win the seat.

Also, Johnson is in more trouble about how the refurbishment of the flat he lives in as PM.  He gets a £30K allowance but almost four times that was spent on it, initially paid for by his supporters which is against the rules. Johnson was initially cleared of wrongdoing having paid the money back claiming that he didn’t know who was funding it.  Last week, the Electoral Commission fined his party £18K for wrongly declaring this funding and presented evidence that Johnson had lobbied the person who paid for the refurbishment for more money in November 2020 by WhatsApp.  Johnson had told the investigator that he didn’t know who was funding it until February 2021.  Both claims cannot be true and the Electoral Commission has copies of the messages.

Those who described Johnson as Britain’s Trump were not wrong.

Sadly, with the Omicron Variant raging, the country needs a PM that is trustworthy. Johnson currently is distrusted by 64% with a net approval rating of negative 42%.  The only way some fairly minor restrictions were voted through the Commons last night was with support from the opposition parties who voted in the public interest. The measures included mandatory face masks, providing evidence of vaccination or a negative covid test to get into large venues and mandatory vaccination against covid for front line NHS staff (unless medically exempt) from next April.

Johnson is in a lot of trouble and it is likely that his party will vote that they have No Confidence in him in the next few weeks.  The likelihood increases if they lose tomorrow’s by-election or even if it is only narrowly retained.

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I think that, despite a very hubristic performance at today's PMQs, there are a lot of problems still ahead for Johnson. If this Omicron variant spreads the way that doctors and scientists believe it will then that alone will add further pressure on any PM in this position. It could be enough for him to lose a No Confidence vote. This may still be unlikely at this stage but it is a possibility.

We are still waiting for the outcome of the Cabinet Secretary's investigation into the multiple parties at No 10 and even in the PM's flat. As well as that, there is the outcome of Lord Geidt's new look at whether Johnson mislead him over the funding for the flat's refurbishment. If he is found to have done so, then he will have broken the Ministerial Code which requires him to resign. If he refused to do so then his own party would take action to remove him.

You rightly mention tomorrow's by-election: if The Tories retain the seat with a small majority, Johnson will still be in trouble. We are talking about a seat that has always been Tory and is so safe that you could put a blue rosette on a pig and it would be elected, to use a cliche. To lose one of the safest seats because of the PM's own behviour would be very serious.

The only thing that may save Johnson for a bit longer is if his own MPs don't want to do it just now. Some said last night that voting against him last night was to send him a message to change his ways. His record is always doing what he wants to so it is unlikely that he will change. the most likely outcome is probably that he limps on as a severely wounded PM and he is replaced as leader by his party about a year before the next election. The Tories are incredibly ruthless about holding on to power and remove leaders that they view as being a liability. They got rid of Thatcher - still the hero of many of them - when her Poll Tax proved incredibly unpopular; David Cameron walked after losing the EU referendum and they got rid of Theresa May when she couldn't get her EU leaving bill through the house. Currently, Labour has a nine point lead (depending on which opinion poll you use but all sow a Labour lead of six to nine points). Opinion polls are starting to show that Sire Kier Starmer is being viewed as the better PM so those figures put any Tory leader in trouble.

In case people outside the UK are not aware, there is no mechanism currently to remove a PM. Only their own party can do that by 20% of them writing letters of No Confidence to their own 1922 committee. The leader may, I think, still try to win a reprieve but most likely a new leader would be elected. This is what happened in 2019 when Theresa May was forced to stand down.

A final point: a lot of those who refused to vote for people to provide proof of Covid vaccination or a negative Lateral Flow Test did so because they oppose the idea of people having to carry 'papers'. Yet these are the same people who are in favour of people having to carry ID in order to vote in an election or referendum to counter a none existent problem of voter fraud. I think in an electorate of around 45 million, there was possibly a dozen instances of voter fraud in 2019 and each was discovered.

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The results of the North Shropshire by-election saw the Liberal Democrat candidate overturn a Conservative majority of almost 23,000 to win with a majority of nearly 6,000. It is recognised by the newly elected MP that many Labour and Green Party voters loaned their vote to her to enable a major upset to happen.

The result will add more pressure on to Johnson as it was one of the safest Conservative seats in the country.

The previous incumbent, Owen Patterson, resigned after an egregious breach of lobbying rules and an attempt by Johnson to change the rules to save him from a 30 day suspension from the House of Commons. Public opinion was strongly against the blatant attempt to change the rules and has lead to more scandals involving Johnson to come to light. These include breaches of lockdown rules or other restrictions preventing parties going ahead with several parties now known to have happened in 10 Downing Street, Johnson being accused of misleading Lord Geidt about how the Downing Street flat refurbishment was paid for.

Things are bad for Johnson with the Chair of The 1922 Committee saying yesterday that as they are now on Christmas recess, he will accept emailed letters of No Confidence from Conservative MPs provided they are followed up with a confirmatory phone call.

Seeing as Britain is facing a massive wave of infection from the Omicron variant, with almost 90,000 new cases yesterday, all these troubles are self inflicted by Johnson and the public needs a leader who they can trust to look after them. Johnson has been accused of locking down too late and opening up too soon repeatedly.

I suspect that he will face a leadership challenge and I won’t be surprised if the parliamentary party manage to gather around one candidate to avoid a lengthy leadership campaign with party members during the pandemic.

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A big issue is that there are not too many capable people in the cabinet able to take over and sort out the mess. Johnson has created a mess and broken a lot of trust with his supporters and voters. Several current cabinet members want to become leader (but none are viewed as being particularly talented) and it is believed that the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and the Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, are both reported to be 'on manoeuvres' to court back bench MPs.

In the first place, 54 Tory MPs need to write a letter of No Confidence in Johnson to their 1922 Committee (of course more than 54 could write such letters and the exact number would never be disclosed). If that threshold is reached, then a ballot is held and Johnson would need to gain the support of 50% of his MPs plus one, which is currently 181 MPs to stay in post for another year. If he fails to get that amount of support, then a new leadership contest is called and he would not be allowed to enter it.

Some commentators are saying that they are hearing MPs will not challenge him until late winter. We will have to wait and see but many commentators are saying the longer Johnson stays, the more damage he will do to his party.

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Reminds me of how the great wartime PM, John Curtin, dealt with Eddie Ward and his trouble making. He made Ward the Minister for Transport and External Territories. Of course, as Curtin gleefully pointed out, the Army had the Transport and the Japs had the External Territories

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Johnson was hit by the resignation of his Brexit minister, Lord Frost, on Saturday evening. For those unaware, Johnson and Lord Frost negotiated the Northern Ireland Protocol and hailed it as a triumph a year ago.  As time passed, it became clear that it was fraught with difficulties so they have been demanding that the EU agrees to wholesale changes to the protocol that they claimed was such a triumph…

Lord Frost’s resignation was during some quite tense discussions and clearly came at a bad time for Johnson.

According to Conservative Home, the most popular cabinet minister with Conservative members is the current Foreign Secretary, and also Minister for Equality, Liz Truss. So Johnson has given her a third role as Brexit Secretary.  Foolishly, I think, she has accepted it.

Now, this might actually be a shrewd tactic by Johnson.  Truss has been on manoeuvres for a possible leadership bid of her own and Johnson may just have given her too much to do so she will fail and have her leadership ambitions scuppered.

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Blair won three general elections for Labour. Jeremy and Ten Pound Trots Leftism will not win any general elections for Labour.

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Ramsay MacDonald was naive to expect he could just return to Labour after betraying them and enabling Tory cruelty and horrific misery.

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Attlee felt restrained from forcing too much past the Tory controlled Lords, even with the Parliament Acts.

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Blair won three general elections for Labour. Jeremy and Ten Pound Trots Leftism will not win any general elections for Labour.

blair is the only human to have led labour to victory in 48 years... what does MP Nadia Whittome have to say?

“I looked a lot prettier when i was Leon Trotsky”?

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Most people opposed Afghanistan and Iraq because they wanted the USA to fail, not because they were concerned about the people under the Taliban or Saddam.

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Speaking of anti-war left, Vanessa Redgrave accepted a damehood.

You seem a lot more surprised than I am. Like I said, people like Redgrave wanted the USA to get a black eye and just pretended it was really in support of peace and non violence.

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To Redgrave:

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Those left wingers who  gloat about the failure in Afghanistan cannot now complain the next time some junta massacres its own people and the west looks on with indifference.

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My favourite media stuff up is from here in the Antipodes in 2016. And it was committed by our paper of record not Murdoch:

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He is a head in a jar, isn’t he?

To be fair to the Herald, When has being dead for years stopped someone commenting on current events?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/snare-drummed/

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This kind of creating an internal enquiry solely to kill press stories is so precisely “Yes, Prime Minister”. Sad that we can’t ask Eddington and Hawthorne about it…

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Does whip removed mean expelled from the parliamentary party?

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you get the feeling Corbyn’s been involved in a number of cults, both as a leader and a follower. You have more fun as a follower but make more money as a leader.

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The LibDems are the party of Gladstone and Asquith just with Democrats as a suffix. The ex-Labour element was never that essential.