Tag: Boris Johnson

Prof. Rebecca Walkowitz of Rutgers claims that the only way to deal with racial inequality is to get rid of grammar altogether.

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The word “moronic” was never a particular favorite of mine, but a few years ago it started coming to mind increasingly at things I heard people say. At first I thought I must be getting less tolerant, but I eventually concluded that there was indeed a rising tide of moronity. To record the fact, I started making a note of statements that especially triggered me. (more…)

Britain’s new “conservative” Prime Minister, Liz Truss (right), has just appointed the first cabinet in British history including no white men.

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In a 2009 essay for the for the London Evening Standard titled “Don’t listen to the whingers — London needs immigrants,” former Tony Blair speechwriter and Labour Party advisor Andrew Neather famously likened his government’s immigration policy to a dog owner rubbing the disobedient pooch’s nose in shit:

. . . mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural. (more…)

Kemi Badenoch, ironically the only true conservative in the lot.

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After Boris Johnson’s fall from grace, or whatever state you would describe his ineffective premiership as, the runners and riders for the inevitable Conservative leadership election immediately started jostling in the stalls. Almost all were well-known names in Westminster and beyond. Favorite — and extraordinarily wealthy after marrying into an Indian industrial family — Rishi Sunak had been Chancellor of the Exchequer; Priti Patel was, apparently, Home Secretary; and the weaselly Jeremy Hunt slunk around as Health Secretary. (more…)

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So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed
It would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed.
— Leonard Cohen, “Death of a Ladies’ Man”

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson could have walked straight out of a novel by Evelyn Waugh. His Englishness is close to caricature. Educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, Johnson followed a classic rite of passage for the British ruling class. (more…)

Vikki Spit and her fiancée. Spit has become the first person in the UK to receive compensation from the government for a death — her fiancée’s — resulting from the Covid-19 vaccine.

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Beware the Ides of June

Under British parliamentary rules, a vote of no confidence in a Prime Minister is similar to a recall vote in the United States, but it is the members of the incumbent PM’s parliamentary party — 359 Conservative MPs, in this case — who vote, and not the people. The peons only get to vote in general elections, where their choice is essentially between two brands of the same soap powder. (more…)

Steve Laws, a Briton and a citizen journalist who was arrested by the UK’s Border Force for documenting the ongoing migrant crisis along Britain’s Channel coast.

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It is a political axiom in contemporary Britain that there is no problem that Boris Johnson’s government can’t make worse. The supplementary lemma is: How much of it is intentional? Last week’s farcical events involving supposed flights of illegal immigrants from Britain to Rwanda for asylum application processing look at first glance like government idiocy. I suspect not. (more…)

Beloved British cartoon character Peppa Pig has been unmasked as a horrible racist after being shown doing such unconscionable things as buying fiddles and attending an Irish dancing festival during a trip to Ireland.

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Late to the party

There seems to be a political axiom whereby it is clear that a party or its leaders are in trouble when they start doing things, or at least start talking about doing things, which the majority of people actually want done. Thus, we see Angela Rayner, the blowsy Deputy Shadow Prime Minister, “talking tough” (translated from politico, that means horse-shitting) on crime. Ms. Rayner recently called Tories “scum” on social media. I don’t know where she thinks these mythical Tories are, but they certainly aren’t in the Conservative Party. (more…)

Boris Johnson and colleagues enjoying some wine at Downing Street in May 2020, when the British police were using drones to harass ordinary citizens who weren’t following social distancing guidelines and lockdown measures.

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Now I can say that I’ve lived in a plague house. Everyone caught the coof here. I became one of the critics of The Narrative about COVID-19 who caught its latest incarnation. Normally this sort of thing is a great occasion for critics of the critics to throw around a lot of snark. Not so fast, though — I caught it from a boarder who is double vaxxed, and of all of us, seems to have had the worst of it. (more…)

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This is the first installment of Mark Gullick’s monthly roundup of the news from the United Kingdom, which we plan to publish during the last week of each month henceforth.

Sometimes I look at the old country and wonder how we ever got an empire organized without tripping over our own shoelaces. (more…)

J. K. Rowling, who earned praise for getting herself cancelled this year by refusing to back down from her normal views on genitalia and gender.

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We can be heroes just for one day. — David Bowie

Hans, are we the baddies? — Mitchell and Webb sketch featuring Nazi soldiers

As European and Commonwealth countries act like faithful servants to the autocratic global coup currently taking place, my own home country of England has fallen into step like a good foot-soldier. The government, nominally Conservative but actually a sort of Green Socialist elite oligarchy, has gone full Bezmenov, contradicting itself on a daily basis about COVID and preventing its people from seeing dying loved ones while it parties maskless indoors. (more…)

Mária Schmidt & Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán

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Following the Hungary-England football match in Budapest on Thursday, September 2, during which racist abuse against the British team was reported, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson posted a tweet in which he expressed that it was “completely unacceptable that England players were racially abused in Hungary.” (more…)

The map of the European Union after Brexit.

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Recently I had dinner with an Englishman who could have stood in as “a good man from the Shire” sort of character on an episode of PBS’ Masterpiece Theater. I raised the question of Brexit: good or bad? His response was very negative. He then went on to describe the many problems of Britain’s exit from the European Union. (more…)