Boris  Johnson, a grubby liar and hypocrite.

Yesterday, I was the person who spent just two minutes researching Boris Johnson’s position and previous comments in the media on Osama Bin Laden. While researching, I found the Telegraph article that the Johnson wrote in 2001. The Conservatives have condemned Jeremy Corbyn’s statement that Bin Laden should have faced a trial. 

Grubby, nasty quote mining and giant unverifiable inductive leaps over the amoral void, by habitual hypocrits and liars. That sums up Conservative propaganda.

In 2011, a special forces raid on the al-Qaida chief’s Pakistan compound resulted in Bin Laden and four others being shot dead.

George Osborne, among other Conservatives, claimed a Labour Party led by Corbyn would “pose a threat to national security” because, he claimed, Corbyn “sympathises with terrorists”.

This claim has been made by the Tory party many times. 

David Cameron has described Jeremy Corbyn a “security threat” and “terrorist sympathiser”. In the Corbyn interview from which Cameron quoted without context, the Labour leader had already described the New York bombings as a “tragedy”, and was explaining that the “tragedy” of Bin Laden’s death was that he was assassinated and did not face trial.

More recently, an unscrupulous and dishonest Boris Johnson accused Jeremy Corbyn of seeking to “legitimate the actions of terrorists” in his speech after the 2017 Manchester bombing, 

However, in 2001, Boris Johnson said that he also supported Bin Laden facing a trial. Curiously, no-one has yet called him a terrorist sympathiser or a threat to national security. The media have slavishy amplified the Conservatives’ propaganda without any fact checking whatsoever.

I did some fact checking because I was sick of seeing the Conservatives’ deceitful and ruthless quote mining of Jeremy Corbyn’s comments, which are taken out of context then used to prop up outrageous political claims such as “Corbyn hates the UK”. The Tories are so full of this kind of unscrupulous, flimsy propaganda shit. They’ve got away with it for far too long. This is not the standard of political discourse and debate we should expect to see in a healthy democracy. The Tories have raced to the bottom of the pit marked “amoral”, dragging a mostly unresistant media with them.

I posted Boris Johnson’s Op-Ed article in the Daily Telegraph on December 13, 2001 – just three months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks – on Twitter, to expose his sheer hypocrisy and dishonesty. It went viral.

Job done. Exposing lies and hypocrisy used to be the job of our paid journalists, but that is no longer the case here in the UK, with few notable exceptions.

RT  have run an article on this issue. I don’t expect that the UK media will.

Another under-reported matter is that Boris Johnson called for the “break up” of the NHS back in 2002. The Prime Minister made the speech in 2002 while a backbench Tory MP, criticising Labour’s refusal to consider breaking up the NHS. It comes as Donald Trump flies into the UK amid concerns of a US trade deal which would damage the health service. Johnson has previously said that the government should examine “the experience of other countries that have a far better record of health care provision … because they do not rely exclusively on a top-down monopolistic health service of the kind we have in this country.”

That’s Tory-speak for privatisation. The so-called libertarian right wing see the NHS as the last bastion of a collectivist tradition that they want to eradicate completely from British society. 

They loathe it because they see it as a form of decadence, and as antithetical to the fundamentalist principles of ‘competition; and the vulture capitalist’s right to make money out of anything – an idea that has driven more than four decades of neoliberal elitist ‘reform.’

Some of the Tories have direct connections to companies that want to make money out of NHS privatisation (see above). I wonder if that has some bearing on their view.  

Boris Johnson probably didn’t want you to see this. Or perhaps he simply has a very poor long term memory.

Boris Johnson was blocked from accessing state secrets as foreign secretary because Downing Street felt he was a security risk

The Conservatives have repeatedly claimed that HM’s opposition leader is a “risk to national security”, but don’t produce any evidence of this.

However, the party had to restrict Boris Johnson’s access to intelligence because he was such a liability:

• Theresa May tried to restrict Boris Johnson’s access to secret intelligence when he was foreign secretary.
• The then prime minister wanted Johnson not to be shown some secret intelligence when he was appointed in July 2016, BBC News reported.
• Sources said Downing Street’s decision was based on a variety of factors, including a lack of trust in Johnson, and personal enmity between him and May
• The report followed claims in 2017 that British spy chiefs were “wary” of sharing information with Johnson because they didn’t trust him.

Theresa May repeatedly withheld sensitive intelligence from Boris Johnson when he was foreign secretary, because they believed he would leak the information.

May wanted the then foreign secretary to not to be shown certain sensitive secret intelligence when he was appointed in July 2016, BBC News reported, citing multiple security sources.

Downing Street’s move is said to have worried security chiefs at the time because of the foreign secretary’s role in authorising sensitive operations.

Johnson was aware of Downing Street’s decision at the time and was “very unhappy about it,” it was reported. Sources close to Johnson insisted there was no row about information access and claimed he saw everything he needed to for his role.

Johnson first visited the headquarters of MI6, the government’s foreign intelligence service, as foreign secretary three months after his appointment when he was shown around by its chief Alex Younger.

Johnson praised the work of the security services and said: “Even from my relatively short period as foreign secretary I can testify to how vital the work they do is.”

But at the same time a row was taking place about whether Johnson should have access to all the intelligence produced by the UK’s spies, the BBC reported, despite the fact ministerial responsibility lay with Johnson for MI6 and GCHQ, another branch of the intelligence service.

The New Statesman reported at the time that multiple diplomats had doubts over Johnson’s personal style as foreign secretary.

A month previously, he had said the ISIS stronghold of Sirte, the Libyan city, could be “the next Dubai” once they “clear the dead bodies away.” It may be a sentence that would be appropriate down the pub with a few of the boys, but it isn’t a statement that reflects a prime minister of calibre.

 Boris Johnson is not fit to be prime minister. 

People like me have increasingly taken on the role of public interest journalism and research to fill the void, and most of us are unpaid.

I became too ill to work in 2010. I have lupus, which is progressive, and in my case, has many and complex symptoms. The illness has had a huge impact on my mobility, for example, and my immunity to infection. I rely on the state support that I paid into over my working life, but frequently struggle to get by, like far too many others.

I don’t like asking people for money. I rarely do, though like other independent writers, I have a donate button at the foot of most of my articles. I write first and foremost because I feel I must. We need reliable sources of information in an era of fake news and authoritarian state propaganda. Our mainstream media has badly let the UK public down. It does not hold the government to account, as a rule. This has seriously undermined the UK’s democracy. 

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Much love and solidarity X

#VoteLabour2019

 

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