By Tommy Sheridan

July 27, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  Boris Johnson has become Prime Minister of the UK in name only. He possesses not a morsel, a crumb or a grain of democratic legitimacy or political credibility.

Of the numerous empty soundbites and meaningless waffle he has uttered over the past forty eight hours surely his “we are going to restore trust in our democracy” drivel takes the biscuit. Democracy? Away and look up a definition Mr ‘Less Than One Percent’.

The word 'democracy' has its origins in the Greek language. It combines two shorter words: 'demos' meaning whole citizen living within a particular city-state and 'kratos' meaning power or rule. Under absolutely no circumstances can the elevation of Boris Johnson to Prime Minister based on the votes of 92,153 members of the selfish, self-seeking and self-serving Conservative Party be described as democratic. ‘North Korean servility’? A ‘palace coup’? ‘A grand fraud’? Yes to all three descriptions but never democratic.

The three appropriate descriptions above were used by Boris Johnson himself to describe the flitting of Chancellor Gordon Brown from Number 11 Downing Street to become Prime Minister in Number 10 Downing Street in 2007. The Blair/Brown New Labour Government at least had a working majority when the Prime Minister without public consent was appointed but it was undemocratic nonetheless. Gordon Brown was not an elected Prime Minister. He was appointed and therefore bereft of democratic legitimacy and credibility. Johnson agreed with that assessment in 2007 but 12 years later his egotistical enhanced hypocrisy is exposed for all to see. He often conjures up giants in his flourishes of verbal buffoonery but the reality is Johnson is a political pygmy without an iota of integrity.

The Tories are a minority government kept in office through bribes paid to the reactionary DUP of Northern Ireland. They have no authority to select a new PM. Sure they have the right to elect privileged public school boy Boris as their leader but the members who voted for him represent a tiny 0.14% of the 46 million people registered to vote across the UK. Pause and consider that statistic again. Not just less than 1% but less than 0.5% of the adult registered voters have decided who should become the Prime Minister of the three countries and Northern Irish enclave that constitute the United Kingdom.

It is not just undemocratic it is an outrage, a scandal and a disgrace that would never be accepted by a genuinely free and democratic press and media.