Johnson collapses in pool of verbal blubber
One of the most boring days I can remember at work today, and not loads happening on the campaign trail either. I'm not a regular reader of the Daily Telegraph, although its honest stick-a-knife-in-your-grandmother Right wingness is certainly preferable to the 'stealth Right' of the Times. But I will often sneak a look at Boris Johnson's Thursday column. Today's effort (requiring free registration, sadly) starts well enough, with a classic pub yarn concerning a voter who thought John Major was Labour leader in the 1997 campaign (an easy mistake to make even then.)
But it's downhill from there as Johnson appears to have come up on mescaline, or similar hallucingenic, in the midst of writing the piece. His last coherent (and amusing) sentence is as follows:
It's Brair; it's Blown, and in this partnership Brown is wearing the trousers. Brown sets the agenda, and his creature, Balls, spouts off about how Labour will sort out the mess it has made of pensions, while poor Milburn - Blair's creature - is shoved to the back of the press conference.
He then proceeds to go into a savage anti-Scottish and anti-Brown rant:
We are being asked to vote for Blair when it is highly likely that in the course of the next few years (in the event of a Labour victory) the party machine would create a Scottish prime minister to lord it over England, at a time of gross constitutional inequality between England and Scotland.
In response to which one can only point out that Boris Johnson is an MP for the Conservative and Unionist party, and the Tories were quite happy to 'lord it' over Scotland even when the Scots had almost no Tory MPs in the late 80s and early 90s. Including such wonderful initiatives as introducing Poll Tax a year early, for example. It would be hard to find a better example of political Karma...
But it's downhill from there as Johnson appears to have come up on mescaline, or similar hallucingenic, in the midst of writing the piece. His last coherent (and amusing) sentence is as follows:
It's Brair; it's Blown, and in this partnership Brown is wearing the trousers. Brown sets the agenda, and his creature, Balls, spouts off about how Labour will sort out the mess it has made of pensions, while poor Milburn - Blair's creature - is shoved to the back of the press conference.
He then proceeds to go into a savage anti-Scottish and anti-Brown rant:
We are being asked to vote for Blair when it is highly likely that in the course of the next few years (in the event of a Labour victory) the party machine would create a Scottish prime minister to lord it over England, at a time of gross constitutional inequality between England and Scotland.
In response to which one can only point out that Boris Johnson is an MP for the Conservative and Unionist party, and the Tories were quite happy to 'lord it' over Scotland even when the Scots had almost no Tory MPs in the late 80s and early 90s. Including such wonderful initiatives as introducing Poll Tax a year early, for example. It would be hard to find a better example of political Karma...
3 Comments:
Surely two wrongs do not make a right. Johnson is quite right to point out the 'gross consitutional inequality' which Labour appears quite content to accept - is it right that Scottish MPS at Westminister (including at least half a dozen ministers) are able to vote on issues affecting England whilst their English counterparts are unable to vote on Scottish matters? The fact is that without Welsh and Scottish MPs, we would never again have a Labour administration - reason enough to at the very least remove their right to vote on issues affecting England.
It's true this position places the Tories (as a Unionist party) in an invidious position, but to my mind they'd be better off ditching the Unionist Part of the title and cutting Scotland (in particular) loose to the mercies of the SNP and the other hard-left parties anyway. I'm sure within a decade an independent Scotland would have income levels approaching Poland and Hungary, Brown could be premier of his homeland, whilst England,freed of the need to fund Scottish tuition fees and Old Age care, could enjoy substantial tax reductions and a perpetual Right-wing government - an ideal solution for all parties!
I'd like to leave some lengthy comments on the disappointing LibDem manifesto unveiled yesterday, but these will have to wait until I don't have eleven proposals to read on my desk. Instead I'll merely cite agreement with the sentiment of "van patten". Now that the 11th Baronet of the Binns (aka "Tam") has retreated to the MP's old-folks home, who is going to be asking the West Lothian question?
Well I guess if one wants to take a historical view, the English annexed both Scotland and Wales (and for a long time, Ireland) several hundred years ago, so control of English policy by Scottish and Welsh Labour MPs is, if you like, 'the Payback' - and very sweet it is too. The (mainly English) Tories had plenty of time to dump Wales and Scotland out of the equation if they had so wanted during the 1980s and 1990s. The 'West Lothian question' is in fact an argument against any decision about my locality being taken by any political representative who isn't from my locality. So let's break England up into separate 'micro-nations' by county, local authority, hell - even street level, then we can all be happy that no-one's getting over on us. Ever seen 'Passport to Pimlico'?
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