Johnson Must Go

[Future17]

A charity fears a British-Iranian woman held in Iran could have her prison sentence doubled following remarks made by the foreign secretary.

Boris Johnson told a Commons committee Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was "training journalists" when she was arrested at Tehran Airport in 2016.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation said she was seeing family and urged Mr Johnson to correct his "serious mistake".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41890885

Some people, for reasons that escape me, seem to find this bumbling oaf endearing. I think the fact he holds the position he does in British politics is terrifying and this story is an example of one of the reasons why.

[Dalianwanda]

A charity fears a British-Iranian woman held in Iran could have her prison sentence doubled following remarks made by the foreign secretary.

Boris Johnson told a Commons committee Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was "training journalists" when she was arrested at Tehran Airport in 2016.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation said she was seeing family and urged Mr Johnson to correct his "serious mistake".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41890885

Some people, for reasons that escape me, seem to find this bumbling oaf endearing. I think the fact he holds the position he does in British politics is terrifying and this story is an example of one of the reasons why.

I watch 'In the Thick of It' to get any understanding of why idiots like him get into any position of power.

[--------]

A charity fears a British-Iranian woman held in Iran could have her prison sentence doubled following remarks made by the foreign secretary.

Boris Johnson told a Commons committee Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was "training journalists" when she was arrested at Tehran Airport in 2016.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation said she was seeing family and urged Mr Johnson to correct his "serious mistake".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41890885

Some people, for reasons that escape me, seem to find this bumbling oaf endearing. I think the fact he holds the position he does in British politics is terrifying and this story is an example of one of the reasons why.


He's just the worst in the worst Westminster administration I can remember in my lifetime.

I wouldn't allow any one of them to look after my hamster.

People support them because they share and reinforce the worst prejudices and misconceptions of the most clueless sections of the electorate.

[heretoday]

He'll get away with it while the Patel woman gets the boot. As far as I know she hasn't consigned anyone to another stretch in an Iranian slammer.

[steakbake]

He's just the worst in the worst Westminster administration I can remember in my lifetime.

I wouldn't allow any one of them to look after my hamster.

People support them because they share and reinforce the worst prejudices and misconceptions of the most clueless sections of the electorate.

Thick b***ards the length and breadth of the country like him because of his carefully curated clownish persona. Sound familiar?

This current shower of ****whippets has to be the worst I've ever seen. Probably in our most significant moment in the post-war era and they're not even at the wheel.

Strong and stable...

[JeMeSouviens]

He'll get away with it while the Patel woman gets the boot. As far as I know she hasn't consigned anyone to another stretch in an Iranian slammer.

Although, to be fair, starting your own ad-hoc contacts with controversial governments while on your holibags is similarly brain dead. :rolleyes:

[weecounty hibby]

He'll get away with it while the Patel woman gets the boot. As far as I know she hasn't consigned anyone to another stretch in an Iranian slammer.

No but she was allegedly looking at ways that the British government could use funds to support the Israeli army in disputed territories. All without telling any other official in her department or party. Very very dubious practices

Edit. Perhaps not the govt but she was looking at how tax payers money could be used there. Even after being told by govt officials that it wasn't appropriate

[Hibrandenburg]

Johnson is a Hoof****ing Bungle**** of the highest order. It beggars belief that any working class person could cast a vote for him.

[Hibs Class]

This is pretty much an accurate report on what has happened.

http://newsthump.com/2017/11/08/media-blamed-for-british-iranian-mums-extended-jail-sentence-after-accurately-reporting-words-said-by-boris-johnson/

[hibsbollah]

Watching Justine Greening on QT, and again it reminded me of how when you repeat a lie in modern political life it becomes truth. Boris did NOT apologise for his actions! I've heard a number of times from Tory MPs that he has,without evidence.

[JeMeSouviens]

Watching Justine Greening on QT, and again it reminded me of how when you repeat a lie in modern political life it becomes truth. Boris did NOT apologise for his actions! I've heard a number of times from Tory MPs that he has,without evidence.

:agree:

This seems to be the sum total of any apology:


Eventually, after almost one hour of questioning, he added: “I'm sorry if any words of mine have been taken out of context and misconstrued to cause anxiety to Nazanin's family.”

[--------]

Although, to be fair, starting your own ad-hoc contacts with controversial governments while on your holibags is similarly brain dead. :rolleyes:


Well, that's OK then. We'll all just shut up and let the Iranians and Fat Boris get on with it then. :rolleyes:

[Future17]

Well, that's OK then. We'll all just shut up and let the Iranians and Fat Boris get on with it then. :rolleyes:

Erm, I don't think anyone said that...

[Colr]

Unless what he said i what she was doing.

The government could always be lying to us.

[JeMeSouviens]

Well, that's OK then. We'll all just shut up and let the Iranians and Fat Boris get on with it then. :rolleyes:

I meant BoJo and PP should both be sacked!

[--------]

I meant BoJo and PP should both be sacked!


Sorry! Read it again and sussed out what you meant - perfectly clear now the penny's finally dropped.

I thought you were referring to Nazanin being on holiday, not Pretty Polly.

Got you now. 100% agreement.

Again, apologies! :embarrass

[JeMeSouviens]

Sorry! Read it again and sussed out what you meant - perfectly clear now the penny's finally dropped.

I thought you were referring to Nazanin being on holiday, not Pretty Polly.

Got you now. 100% agreement.

Again, apologies! :embarrass

Hehe, no worries. :aok:

[Colr]

Looks like Johnson’s gaff is going to cost all of US a cool £400m

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/15/britain-preparing-plan-transfer-400m-iran-boris-johnson-vows/

[Hibbyradge]

Looks like Johnson’s gaff is going to cost all of US a cool £400m

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/15/britain-preparing-plan-transfer-400m-iran-boris-johnson-vows/

Cuh. We could give that to the NHS...

[Jim44]

Sorry if I’m ignorant of the real facts of this situation, but is it par for the course to pay £400m to secure the release of an innocent ‘Brit’, falsely imprisonned abroad?

[Hibs Class]

Is it being suggested that Britain has to find £400m to maybe pay over? From the part of the article I can read it sounds like the cash is already frozen in an account and the question is whether or not to release it.

[-Jonesy-]

Sorry if I’m ignorant of the real facts of this situation, but is it par for the course to pay £400m to secure the release of an innocent ‘Brit’, falsely imprisonned abroad?

Definitely, definitely not...I guess this is being considered to save face of the etonian f***wit

[Speedy]

What was she doing? What made him believe she was teaching journalism?

The foreign office is right, his comments shouldn't carry any weight - a shame they do.

[Hibrandenburg]

What was she doing? What made him believe she was teaching journalism?

The foreign office is right, his comments shouldn't carry any weight - a shame they do.

It's absolutely incredulous that a hoof****ing bungle**** like him can get elected never mind anyone take what he says seriously.

[Pete]

It's absolutely incredulous that a hoof****ing bungle**** like him can get elected never mind anyone take what he says seriously.

While he might be a daft toff who bumbles along from one disaster to another, he's a cuddly one. We collectively read our papers and watch our news programs that convince us that while they might be flawed, these people are better than us. They are to be trusted and they are from a reassuring elite who have done the whole leadership thing before.

Add in the media that wraps people in flags, blames the poor, the left wing and the foreigners for all our ills then you've got a lot of the idiots who don't quite know what's going on to vote for people like him too.

I can only come to the conclusion that in general, people in the UK are sheep, they're thick, they're fundamentally selfish and they'll believe what they're told without questioning things, even when they've got someone's foot on their throat

[heretoday]

Cripes! Johnson's younger brother is an MP too!
In fact he's Minister of Universities. He's just been on the telly.
It's like the Eton Debating Society.

[JeMeSouviens]

This is brilliant (albeit a couple of years old). Sir Richard Evans, a professor of history at Cambridge reviews Boris' biography of Churchill:


Boris Johnson, as the subtitle of this book proclaims, is a firm believer in the “great man” theory of history. Not for him the subtleties of the complex interplay of historical forces and individual personalities. Subtlety is not Boris’s strong point. Winston Churchill alone, he writes, “saved our civilisation”. He “invented the RAF and the tank”. He founded the welfare state (although Boris gives David Lloyd George a bit of credit for this, as well). All of this, he argues, confounds what he sees as the fashion of the past few decades to write off “so-called great men and women” as “meretricious bubbles on the vast tides of social history”. The story of Winston Churchill “is a pretty withering retort to all that malarkey. He, and he alone, made the difference.”

Marxists, he writes, go eat your words. Except that it’s not just Marxists who have argued for the impact of wider economic, social, cultural and even ideological forces on history. Anyone who has the time or energy to press a couple of keys on a computer to look up “tank”, “RAF”, “welfare state” or even “the Second World War” on Wikipedia will see Boris’s sweeping claims vanish in a cloud of inconvenient facts. Churchill did not, as Boris claims, invent the term “Iron Curtain” to describe the barrier between Soviet-dominated Europe and western Europe. It was first used by the Nazis – above all, by their propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Nor did he invent the term “Middle East”: it was coined by the American naval thinker Alfred T Mahan in 1902.

At many junctures in the book, the ability to think historically deserts its author. He describes men such as Hitler as “short” when their height (5ft 8in in his case) exactly matched the average height of European men at the time; and he describes Churchill as a “Victorian Whig”, though the Whigs’ attitude to the state in legislation such as the 1834 Poor Law was entirely different to Churchill’s. The contemporary references to television shows such as Downton Abbey are among the many factors that will ensure this book has a very brief shelf life. Boris writes disapprovingly of the extramarital affairs of Edith Aylesford, a society lady of the late-Victorian era. “That was how they carried on in those days, you see,” he comments. Not just in those days, Boris.

Johnson doesn’t weigh up policies and ideas with any care or penetration. If he doesn’t like them, he dismisses them as “rot”, “tripe”, “loopy”, “bonkers”, “barmy” or “nuts”; their advocates and practitioners as “loonies”, “plodders”, “Stilton-eating surrender monkeys”, and so on.

There are some truly cringe-making metaphors and wordplay in the book. Churchill, we learn, was “mustard keen on gas” as a weapon in the First World War. He was “the large protruding nail on which destiny snagged her coat”. Young Tories “think of him as the people of Parma think of the formaggio Parmigiano. He is their biggest cheese.” And Chamberlain’s “refusal to stand up to Hitler” was “spaghetti-like” (clearly Boris is rather fond of Italian food).

The book reads as if it was dictated, not written. All the way through we hear Boris’s voice; it’s like being cornered in the Drones Club and harangued for hours by Bertie Wooster. The gung-ho style inhibits thought instead of stimulating it. There’s huge condescension here. The Churchill Factor advertises itself as an attempt to educate “young people” who think that Churchill is a bulldog in a television advertisement rather than Britain’s greatest statesman but talking down to them is no way to achieve this aim.

In a book that involves a good deal of modern European history, Boris the Eurosceptic clearly doesn’t find it necessary to master the details. Croatia, he tells us casually, was ruled by “some Ustasha creep or other” in the interwar years (it was not), while in the same period there was a plague of “communist uprisings in eastern Europe” (there was not). The Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, he writes in his offhand way, was “originally intended for some minor offshoot of the Hohenzollern dynasty” (it was not – it was built for the crown prince, heir to the German throne). He thinks that German industrial relations before 1914 were characterised by “co-operation between bosses and workers” (they were not). Hitler did not plan to kill the disabled, as he claims: most of the disabled in Germany in the 1930s were war veterans. The Germans did not capture Stalingrad, though this book claims they did.

Boris ties himself up in knots trying to distance Churchill from the idea of European unity, salvaging a mildly sceptical quote from the apogee of his imperialist enthusiasm in the 1930s to undermine his hero’s advocacy of European unity in the 1950s.

Present-day politics obtrude in other ways, too. Anyone who wonders why Boris has written this book need look no further than the general election that is due in a few months’ time. If the Conservatives lose, the leadership of the party will be up for grabs and Boris will be a candidate. Writing a book about Churchill might help people take him seriously. After all, Churchill, he writes, “spoke in short Anglo-Saxon zingers”. He was a “rogue elephant” in the Tory party. He made a career as a highly paid journalist. He was definitely not a “lefty-liberal Milquetoast”. “He was no party-pooper.” He was “incorrigibly cheerful” and his verbal style was both “demotic and verbally inventive”. He “incarnated something essential about the British character – and that was his continual and unselfconscious eccentricity”. Now, who is this meant to remind you of?

[lapsedhibee]

This is brilliant (albeit a couple of years old). Sir Richard Evans, a professor of history at Cambridge reviews Boris' biography of Churchill:

Would rather have the Richard Evans bloke as PM than either Boris or the present incumbent.

[Tomsk]

Would rather have the Richard Evans bloke as PM than either Boris or the present incumbent.

Richard Evans is well versed in dealing with charlatans and liars. If you've seen the film Denial about that other nasty right-wing bigot David Irving you will remember him as the character played by John Sessions. He went on to write a book about the trial called Telling Lies About Hitler. Perhaps he could write one about Johnson and call it Telling Lies About Brexit.

[heretoday]

So that society can get a break from the sight of this man Johnson should be required to wear a burka in public - henceforth known as the berka in his case.

[Hibrandenburg]

Johnson is a tit. He could have expressed his opinion on the burka at numerous meetings with middle eastern diplomats whilst he was foreign secretary, instead he has now come out after his dismissal with this blatantly racist guff because he knows it will undermine May and her government.

[IGRIGI]

****ing tragic, women risk their lives in Iran to fight against headwear and we have the usual mocha latte drinking do gooder social justice warrior toss pots out in force in the UK supporting the burka just so they can win smug points on social media.

I hope he stands his ground and doesn't apologise, it's time the left realises their faux outrage and horror can't force everyone to apologise and kneel to their fascism.

[Pretty Boy]

I'm not mad keen on the Burka, Niqab, Hijab etc. Mainly because I question how much choice is actually involved in wearing them. There always seems a level of hypocrisy when you see a woman dressed head to toe in black on a sweltering hot day whilst her husband strolls next to her in a t shirt, shorts and sunglasses. Seems traditional dress beliefs don't apply across the board.

There are ways of expressing an opinion tough and calling people 'letterboxes' is hardly appropriate.

[Lester B]

****ing tragic, women risk their lives in Iran to fight against headwear and we have the usual mocha latte drinking do gooder social justice warrior toss pots out in force in the UK supporting the burka just so they can win smug points on social media.

I hope he stands his ground and doesn't apologise, it's time the left realises their faux outrage and horror can't force everyone to apologise and kneel to their fascism.

This is the point when you now officially go beyond the realms of parody.

Mocha latte? Nonsense. Double espresso all the way. You need that energy boost to be one of the "do gooder social justice warrior toss pots" [sic]

[Chic Murray]

****ing tragic, women risk their lives in Iran to fight against headwear and we have the usual mocha latte drinking do gooder social justice warrior toss pots out in force in the UK supporting the burka just so they can win smug points on social media.

I hope he stands his ground and doesn't apologise, it's time the left realises their faux outrage and horror can't force everyone to apologise and kneel to their fascism.

Interesting about Iran, I have Iranian friends and wasn't aware of any of this. In fact, Iranian women have the highest rate of plastic surgery in the world, and I'd be surprised if they would do that, if they could hide behind a burka.

Are you sure any of what you wrote is true? A link to some evidence that it is would be really helpful.

And inverted snobbery over coffee is so last year. You do know that McDonald's and Greggs sell real coffee these days?

But, I hope the dumb ass stands his ground as well. People have every right to open their mouths and make an eejit of themselves - that's why I'm going to admit here, I don't see any need for the burka, find it slightly creepy, and wish the women wouldn't wear it.

[Pretty Boy]

Interesting about Iran, I have Iranian friends and wasn't aware of any of this. In fact, Iranian women have the highest rate of plastic surgery in the world, and I'd be surprised if they would do that, if they could hide behind a burka.

Are you sure any of what you wrote is true? A link to some evidence that it is would be really helpful.

And inverted snobbery over coffee is so last year. You do know that McDonald's and Greggs sell real coffee these days?

But, I hope the dumb ass stands his ground as well. People have every right to open their mouths and make an eejit of themselves - that's why I'm going to admit here, I don't see any need for the burka, find it slightly creepy, and wish the women wouldn't wear it.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/irans-brave-women-fighting-right-ditch-hijabs/amp/

Obviously there is a difference between a burka and hijab but the article suggests it is an issue being taken on.

[Chic Murray]

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/irans-brave-women-fighting-right-ditch-hijabs/amp/

Obviously there is a difference between a burka and hijab but the article suggests it is an issue being taken on.

Interesting, thanks.

Illustrates the diversity of opinion within Islam, which seems to mirror the diversity within Christianity.

[NORTHERNHIBBY]

If this is Bojo's way of pushing himself to the front of the queue to be the next leader of the Tory party then that is a worrying state of affairs. As a career rather than conviction driven politician, he waited until the last minute to decide his position on Brexit to check how the wind was blowing. If he believes that this will get him support in a major political party then it is a sad day for us all.

[Pretty Boy]

Interesting, thanks.

Illustrates the diversity of opinion within Islam, which seems to mirror the diversity within Christianity.

Indeed.

Got to a Society of St Pius X Tridentine Catholic Mass and women are still encouraged to wear a head scarf. I go to Mass in shorts and trainers.

Religions are a broad church. Pun intended.