Boris Johnson is the frontrunner in the Conservative Party leadership contest at the moment, but a trail of controversies have followed him. He has a very spotty record and in the past he has been called a "bigot" and "ignorant" by his critics. The former foreign secretary refuses to apologise however for writing that a Muslim woman wearing the veil resembles “a bank robber” and that it is “absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes”. He is now under investigation by his own party, which has received dozens of complaints.
He has also criticised the police for spending money on historic cases of child sex abuse in comments deemed “disgusting, ignorant” He’s historically used racist language too. In 2002, Johnson wrote in the Telegraph: “It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-wearing picaninnies.” The word “picaninnies” is a racist term used to describe black children.
In the same column he also talked about then prime minister Tony Blair, and wrote: "They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and their tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down his big white British taxpayer-funded bird." Johnson later apologised for these comments.
While he was editor of The Spectator he was criticised for allowing a number of articles deemed racist by some, to make it on to the website, including one article about racial eugenics that said “orientals” had “larger brains and higher IQ scores” while “blacks are at the other pole.”Andrew Cooper, a Conservative peer and former No 10 director of strategy, tweeted recently that “the rottenness of Boris Johnson goes deeper even than his casual racism & his equally casual courting of fascism”. Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tory leader, has demanded an apology for his “gratuitously offensive” remarks. Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general, has said he will leave the Conservative party if Johnson becomes its leader.
In less than two minutes on 9 June, Owen Jones did more than the entire media has done in months to expose Boris Johnson. Speaking to Sky News, Jones left no stone unturned when combating the Conservative leadership front-runner:
Jones said:
"One of the… big faults at the moment, in this whole debate, is the lack of scrutiny of Boris Johnson… Why aren’t we asking – does he still think that gay people should be called ‘bum boys’? Does he still think that equal marriage should be compared to… three men marrying a dog? Does he still believe that black people should be called piccaninnies with watermelon smiles? Does he still think that it’s acceptable to compare Muslim women to bank robbers and to letterboxes?
Why should we trust somebody who was sacked twice for dishonesty, once by his newspaper and once by a Conservative leader? Is somebody who once conspired with a criminal friend to beat up a journalist fit for high office? Is somebody who wrote one column supporting Remain and another column supporting Leave, is that somebody who is driven by anything else other than his own career?"
The commentator continued, criticising the corporate media’s failings:
"But we are not having this discussion because all too often… and I speak as somebody who has worked in the British media now for the best part of a decade, Boris Johnson is treated as a bit of a circus… a bit of a laugh, but he is somebody who has peddled racism, he’s serially dishonest, he’s a charlatan. But we’re not having that conversation because again – and it’s worth emphasising this – if you are from a posh background you can more or less get away with anything in this country."
Jones pulled no punches in his critique of Johnson. The corporate media, meanwhile, appears to be treating the man vying to be prime minister as a bit of a joke. This is a rank dereliction of duty.
Johnson's manifesto is to cut taxes for the higher paid and leave the EU without a deal.Two of the most divisive ideas in our society at moment and would simply hit the poorest and most vulnerable amongst us.
Few British politicians evoke such dismay in Europe as Mr Johnson, a man whom many see as the mastermind of Brexit. He told two infamous lies while campaigning for Brexit, the first of which was so braen, he had it emblaoned acrss the side of a bus Johnson toured up and down the nation on this bus covered in lies and claimed that the NHS would be £350 million better off if voters chose Brexit.https://metro.co.uk/2019/05/23/boris-johnson-will-find-fate-next-week-brexit-bus-lies-9666621/ Now he faces a private prosecution to hold him to account for his criminal lying.https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1130972/brexit-news-court-case-battle-bus-NHS-boris-johnson. As if lying about the NHS was ot heinious enough, Johnson perpetuated the racist myth that the Turkish people were foaming at the mouth to comee to the UK by their tens of millions, scaremongering and stoking up fears about "shared boders".
What we are witnessing is a man who until very recently held one of the great offices of state claiming a jester’s privilege. When he writes or speaks, he does so as an MP and privy counsellor well known for his ambition to become prime minister in the near future. He borrows the language of King Lear, to play the Fool but for many he is not a bumbling, affable, ruffle haired clown, but a calculating, ruthless, reckless, intolerant, utterly contemptible opportunist, and serial liar.
A product of Eton and Oxford and a member of the notoriously elitist and thuggish Bullingdon Club to boot and furthermore a very greedy individual who seems more interested in feathering his own nest than furthering the national interest. While Mayor of London he continued to draw a retainer for writing a column for the Daily Telegraph worth £250,000 a year. He compared this amount to chicken feed and justified it on the grounds that his Mayoral salary was too little even though in reality it was way above the national average. In reaction to the backlash at such a flagrant act of brazen greed his media team persuaded him to donate a portion of his Telegraph earnings to charity. Johnson pledged to do this and then never did. Also, towards the end of his tenure as Mayor of London when he was re-elected to the House of Commons he continued to claim both his Mayoral salary/expenses and an MPs salary and expenses too.
After the Grenfell Tower tragedy, footage emerged of him as Mayor telling a politician who challenged the wisdom of his fire serice cuts to "get stuffed"
Johnson also supported the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen and refused to block UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia, saying there is no clear evidence of breaches of international humanitarian law by Saudi Arabia in the war in Yemen. In September 2016, he was accused of blocking the UN inquiry into Saudi war crimes in Yemen.
He made a joke about "dead bodies" in Libya, insulted people in Myanmar by reciting an "inappropriate" colonialist poem, and wrongly called imprisoned Brtish-Iranian mother Nazanin Zaghari- Ratcliffe, a journalist, leading to her jail sentence being prolonged.
Do we really want a dangerous individual like this as our future Prime Minister. Heaven' forbid it, it would be catastrophic.Johnson or otherwise, the Conservatives have no mandate to simply impose another prime minister on the country. Quite simply I personally think all the current contenders are as bad as one another but none as rotten as Johnson.We need a general election now.
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