[Politics] Boris Johnson, the new UK Prime Minister

Wrong-Direction said:

BBC catch up . How the middle class ruined Britain

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Herr Tubthumper said:

Deleted. On reflection I can’t be arsed to respond to you.

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Mouldy Boots said:

I voted OUT and that means OUT deal or no deal.

I have said it before but I will repeat again If we go into recession so be it we will come back stronger long term.

We have been into recession on a regular basis, what goes up must come down and so on, this is a common pattern we WILL deal with it and life will go on.

However, if we do not leave the EU it will kick off for years to come and will be far more damaging to our country forever.

Let's get out and look to the future.

Leave means Leave.

The sooner those clowns in the Labour, Lib dem and tw+ts like Rory (undercover) Stewart, start to get behind any sensible Brexit deal the better.

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Wrong-Direction said:

BBC catch up . How the middle class ruined Britain

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Gwylan said:

OK.

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I don't think I've missed your point at all. You said that you fear what Labour would do to the economy. I can't recall the exact figures but I think the plans in the last Labour manifesto were said to cost about £15 to 20 billion - cue jibes about the magic money tree. Johnson announces plans for about three or four times that much and not a word is said about the economy. That's precisely the point I'm making.

You also talk about extremist advisers. Well, I think a chief adviser who has already broken electoral law, who can't get a Commons pass because of his contempt of parliament is pretty extreme. Throw in people from the Tax Payers Alliance, a shadowy body who repeatedly refuse to say how they're funded and we're on dodgy ground. And as for tolerance of other views, we've just seen Johnson purge his cabinet of anyone who voted for his rival - Corbyn's shadow cabinet contains many people who aren't Corbynistas - and yet he's the one who can't bear criticism.

And yes, many Labour MPs aren't happy with him but we have Tory MPs openly plotting to vote agains their own leader - but it's Corbyn who is the problem.

You illustrate my point exactly - Corbyn is being judged by completely different standards to Johnson, by the press and by NSCers (I agree about his lack of intellect though - I think Corbyn's a decent bloke but he's not the sharpest tool in the box: Johnson, despite his image, is no fool)

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Wrong-Direction said:

BBC catch up . How the middle class ruined Britain

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beorhthelm said:

its on now, seems a string of straw man and preconceptions of middle class, so far nothing about how they are ruining anything.

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beorhthelm said:

its on now, seems a string of straw man and preconceptions of middle class, so far nothing about how they are ruining anything.

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JC Footy Genius said:

Rubbish ... if Johnson or any Tory had spent his entire career opposing his own front bench, siding with anyone anti-west and associated with terrorist groups in the name of 'peace' while they were killing Uk civilians and soldiers he wouldn't get anywhere near being PM ... rightly so.

You may have also missed the Deputy Labour Leader Tom Watson leading many moderate Labour MP's in a fight to the death for the soul of the Labour party against Corbyn and his far-left Marxist clique and his union backers. Plus of course, the openly Marxist shadow chancellor has a stated goal of bringing down capitalism and then there's the anti semitism, bullying intimidation and the fact a female BBC reporter needed a minder at the Labour conference in Brighton ... yes poor old Corbyn

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Thunder Bolt said:

And now Chloe Westley is number 10s Digital Advisor. Basically a hotline to Steve Bannon.

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The head of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street social media team was under pressure last night to resign for praising a far-right activist who is an associate of Tommy Robinson.

In a 2016 tweet, Chloe Westley, who was only appointed to her role yesterday, endorsed the work of Anne Marie Waters, who has described Islam as “evil”.

Ms Westley, who worked for the campaign group Taxpayers’ Alliance, described Ms Waters as “a hero” and said that her work should be widely published.

Ms Waters is the former deputy leader of Pegida UK, a British offshoot of the German far right and anti-Islam group which she launched jointly with Mr Robinson, the former leader of the English Defence League.

A year before Ms Westley’s tweet Ms Waters stood for Ukip in the general election and was filmed calling for a ban on Muslim immigration.

She told an undercover reporter for the Daily Mirror: “For a start the immigration from Islamic countries has to stop entirely, that is just the way it is. A lot of people need to be deported. Many mosques need to be closed down. It really has to get tough.”

In her new role Ms Westley is expected to be in charge of all Downing Street social media campaigns including the government’s planned no-deal public information blitz.

A No 10 spokesman declined to comment but a source suggested that it was standing by her appointment and said: “Ms Westley regrets her ill-judged tweet and does not support or endorse the views [of] Anne Marie Waters.”

Anti-racism campaigners said someone who held such views should not be employed by the government.

“Anne Marie Waters leads a far-right party with virulent Islamophobia at its core,” Matthew McGregor, campaign director of Hope Not Hate, said. “If Waters now has someone who called her ‘a hero’ at the heart of the No 10 operation it would be chilling. Downing Street has serious questions to answer.”

Jon Trickett, the shadow cabinet office minister, called on Mr Johnson to sack Ms Westley. He said: “It is profoundly shocking that someone who holds these views should be at the heart of government. She should never have been appointed in the first place and Mr Johnson must now move swiftly to dismiss her.”

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JC Footy Genius said:

Rubbish ... if Johnson or any Tory had spent his entire career opposing his own front bench, siding with anyone anti-west and associated with terrorist groups in the name of 'peace' while they were killing Uk civilians and soldiers he wouldn't get anywhere near being PM ... rightly so.

You may have also missed the Deputy Labour Leader Tom Watson leading many moderate Labour MP's in a fight to the death for the soul of the Labour party against Corbyn and his far-left Marxist clique and his union backers. Plus of course, the openly Marxist shadow chancellor has a stated goal of bringing down capitalism and then there's the anti semitism, bullying intimidation and the fact a female BBC reporter needed a minder at the Labour conference in Brighton ... yes poor old Corbyn

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ManOfSussex said:

I read in The Times this morning, Chloe Westley once described Anne Marie Waters as 'a hero'.

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Guinness Boy said:

**** me what a state Geoff Norcott is. “Ohhh look at me, I’m a working class Tory comic. You don’t get many of them.”

Except for the fact that Saturday night telly when I grew up was absolutely full of the back to fronts. Davidson, Tarbie, Manning. Working class golf club halfwits with jokes that were as funny as malaria.

Still, don’t let that stop you doing avocado jokes or joining a protest organised by the hard left against the hard left that must be the only one of its kind in Britain.

And don’t pretend not to know what Cowes Week is you absolute gimp

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BLOCK F said:

Good Morning Sussex,
Hmm, Chloe Westley's appointment looks distinctly dubious to me.
Not a good move I reckon.
You and I agree!

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Garry Nelson's teacher said:

I've thought for a while that the real danger is not so much Johnson as the people he has around him and backing him.

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BLOCK F said:

Good Morning Sussex,
Hmm, Chloe Westley's appointment looks distinctly dubious to me.
Not a good move I reckon.
You and I agree!

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highflyer said:

Chloe Westley. Matthew Elliot. Dominic Cummings.

I think it is obvious what is happening.

Am I rattled? Yes, I am. Because this is so dangerous and could work. Having used Brexit to stoke up division and blind people to anything else, the powers behind these people (the dark money donors of IEA, TPA and Policy Exchange) are now using this moment to shift the UK decisively to the right and to open the doors of 'Tax Haven UK'. This is the same shift from democracy to Oligarchy that we have seen elsewhere.

As i said, it could work. The media are, in most part, supine. Dazzled by the 'Boris' factor and under orders of their owners and controllers. Meanwhile, too many people have been fooled into thinking this is just about Brexit.

Let's hope the British people are better than this. But recent experience from elsewhere in the world does not give cause for optimism.

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Seven years ago the impressionist Rory Bremner complained that politicians had become so boring that few of them were worth mimicking: “They’re quite homogenous and dull these days … It’s as if character is seen as a liability.” Today his profession has the opposite problem: however extreme satire becomes, it struggles to keep pace with reality. The political sphere, so dull and grey a few years ago, is now populated by preposterous exhibitionists.



This trend is not confined to the UK – everywhere the killer clowns are taking over. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Scott Morrison, Rodrigo Duterte, Matteo Salvini, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán and a host of other ludicrous strongmen – or weakmen, as they so often turn out to be – dominate nations that would once have laughed them off stage. The question is why? Why are the technocrats who held sway almost everywhere a few years ago giving way to extravagant buffoons?

Social media, an incubator of absurdity, is certainly part of the story. But while there has been plenty of good work investigating the means, there has been surprisingly little thinking about the ends. Why are the ultra-rich, who until recently used their money and newspapers to promote charisma-free politicians, now funding this circus? Why would capital wish to be represented by middle managers one moment and jesters the next?


The reason, I believe, is that the nature of capitalism has changed. The dominant force of the 1990s and early 2000s – corporate power – demanded technocratic government. It wanted people who could simultaneously run a competent, secure state and protect profits from democratic change. In 2012, when Bremner made his complaint, power was already shifting to a different place, but politics had not caught up.

The policies that were supposed to promote enterprise – slashing taxes for the rich, ripping down public protections, destroying trade unions – instead stimulated a powerful spiral of patrimonial wealth accumulation. The largest fortunes are now made not through entrepreneurial brilliance but through inheritance, monopoly and rent-seeking: securing exclusive control of crucial assets such as land and buildings privatised utilities and intellectual property, and assembling service monopolies such as trading hubs, software and social media platforms, then charging user fees far higher than the costs of production and delivery. In Russia, people who enrich themselves this way are called oligarchs. But this is a global phenomenon. Today corporate power is overlain by – and mutating into – oligarchic power.


What the oligarchs want is not the same as what the old corporations wanted. In the words of their favoured theorist, Steve Bannon, they seek the “deconstruction of the administrative state”. Chaos is the profit multiplier for the disaster capitalism on which the new billionaires thrive. Every rupture is used to seize more of the assets on which our lives depend. The chaos of an undeliverable Brexit, the repeated meltdowns and shutdowns of government under Trump: these are the kind of deconstructions Bannon foresaw. As institutions, rules and democratic oversight implode, the oligarchs extend their wealth and power at our expense.

The killer clowns offer the oligarchs something else too: distraction and deflection. While the kleptocrats fleece us, we are urged to look elsewhere. We are mesmerised by buffoons who encourage us to channel the anger that should be reserved for billionaires towards immigrants, women, Jews, Muslims, people of colour and other imaginary enemies and customary scapegoats. Just as it was in the 1930s, the new demagoguery is a con, a revolt against the impacts of capital, financed by capitalists.

The oligarch’s interests always lie offshore: in tax havens and secrecy regimes. Paradoxically, these interests are best promoted by nationalists and nativists. The politicians who most loudly proclaim their patriotism and defence of sovereignty are always the first to sell their nations down the river. It is no coincidence that most of the newspapers promoting the nativist agenda, whipping up hatred against immigrants and thundering about sovereignty, are owned by billionaire tax exiles, living offshore.

As economic life has been offshored, so has political life. The political rules that are supposed to prevent foreign money from funding domestic politics have collapsed. The main beneficiaries are the self-proclaimed defenders of sovereignty who rise to power with the help of social media ads bought by persons unknown, and thinktanks and lobbyists that refuse to reveal their funders. A recent essay by the academics Reijer Hendrikse and Rodrigo Fernandez argues that offshore finance involves “the rampant unbundling and commercialisation of state sovereignty” and the shifting of power into a secretive, extraterritorial legal space, beyond the control of any state. In this offshore world, they contend, “financialised and hypermobile global capital effectively is the state”.

Today’s billionaires are the real citizens of nowhere. They fantasise, like the plutocrats in Ayn Rand’s terrible novel Atlas Shrugged, about further escape. Look at the “seasteading” venture funded by PayPal’s founder, Peter Thiel, that sought to build artificial islands in the middle of the ocean, whose citizens could enact a libertarian fantasy of escape from the state, its laws, regulations and taxes, and from organised labour. Scarcely a month goes by without a billionaire raising the prospect of leaving the Earth altogether, and colonising space pods or other planets.

Those whose identity is offshore seek only to travel farther offshore. To them, the nation state is both facilitator and encumbrance, source of wealth and imposer of tax, pool of cheap labour and seething mass of ungrateful plebs, from whom they must flee, leaving the wretched earthlings to their well-deserved fate.


Defending ourselves from oligarchy means taxing it to oblivion. It’s easy to get hooked up on discussions about what tax level maximises the generation of revenue. There are endless arguments about the Laffer curve, which purports to show where this level lies. But these discussions overlook something crucial: raising revenue is only one of the purposes of tax. Another is breaking the spiral of patrimonial wealth accumulation.

Breaking this spiral is a democratic necessity: otherwise the oligarchs, as we have seen, come to dominate national and international life. The spiral does not stop by itself: only government action can do it. This is one of the reasons why, during the 1940s, the top rate of income tax in the US rose to 94%, and in the UK to 98%. A fair society requires periodic corrections on this scale. But these days the steepest taxes would be better aimed at accumulated unearned wealth.

Of course, the offshore world the billionaires have created makes such bold policies extremely difficult: this, after all, is one of its purposes. But at least we know what the aim should be, and can begin to see the scale of the challenge. To fight something, first we need to understand it.

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