Boris Johnson may win the election. The
rest of us will lose
By
Peter Oborne
December 06, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
- A week to go until the UK
election, and Boris Johnson’s Conservative
Party is winning the popular vote hands
down. He’s cruising.
If
the polls
are right, and I guess they are, Johnson is
set to move back into Downing Street with
the most commanding Conservative victory
since Maggie Thatcher secured a
majority of 102
in 1987.
As
a lifelong Conservative, I should be
delighted. Instead, I feel despair. To
secure his victory, Johnson has sunk lower
than any prime minister in modern times. Far
lower.
Exploiting tragedy
Take his
reaction to the murder of the
young man and woman
on London Bridge last Friday. Johnson
promptly announced he would
cease to campaign
in a mark of respect to the victims. While
observing the formalities, in practice he
did nothing of the sort.
Instead,
Johnson went into overdrive to secure every
possible electoral advantage he could from
the deaths of the two young people. This was
in direct defiance of the express wishes of
the father of one of the victims, who
wrote on
Twitter: “My son, Jack, who was killed in
this attack, would not wish his death to be
used as the pretext for more draconian
sentences or for detaining people
unnecessarily.”
The
Conservatives sought to exploit the tragedy
regardless. Johnson
blamed Labour
for the early release of the attacker. He
wrote an article in the
Mail on Sunday,
titled “Give me a majority and I’ll keep you
safe from terror”. How does the prime
minister promise to achieve this? By
introducing more draconian sentences. In
Johnson’s words: “These criminals must serve
every day of their sentence, with no
exceptions.”
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
|
The prime
minister is pursuing a policy of lying and
cheating to secure a parliamentary majority.
The scale of this deceit is without
precedent in British public life. For this
reason, I have set up a
website to
list the lies uttered by the prime minister.
Keeping up is a gruelling task. He tells so
many lies that it’s impossible to keep pace.
Lies and falsehoods
Every time Johnson appears on the television
or radio, he utters more lies and
falsehoods. It’s the same when he makes a
stump speech, or when he writes articles in
the newspapers. His propaganda machine
makes sure these lies are disseminated
extensively online.
A recent
example was the prime minister’s weekend
appearance on the Andrew Marr Show on
Sunday. Johnson claimed there would be “no
tariffs and no checks”
on goods from Northern Ireland to the UK
after Brexit. His own Brexit secretary,
Stephen Barclay,
says otherwise.
He told Marr that Labour leader Jeremy
Corbyn “wants to
scrap MI5”.
Rubbish.
Nor should it
be overlooked that Johnson - as David Hearst
exposed in a brilliant
column for
Middle East Eye last week - has been guilty
of racist comments far uglier than anything
Corbyn has ever been accused of.
In
normal circumstances, Johnson would never
get away with this deceit. He would be
exposed and shamed by the press and media,
which police British public discourse.
Yet Johnson pays no serious price, because
he’s being protected by client media that
systematically fail to challenge his lies,
to expose his racism or even to question him
seriously about his plans for Brexit.
Johnson dodges
questions about
donations
by Russian oligarchs to the Conservative
Party, some with links to Russia’s feared
state intelligence service, the
FSB. According to the chairman of the
Intelligence and Security Committee, Dominic
Grieve, the report was ready for publication
before the calling of the general election.
Johnson has
suppressed
the report until after the vote.
He continues to
resist an independent
inquiry
into the virulent problem of Tory
Islamophobia, despite undeniable evidence
that the problem stretches right to the
summit of the organisation.
Dark days for UK
journalism
We have entered
one of the darkest periods of British
political journalism. Johnson has
banned the
Daily Mirror, the one national newspaper
that unequivocally supports Labour, from
travelling on the Tory campaign bus. This is
something that no British party leader has
ever done before.
One
can only imagine the outrage if Corybn had
done something similar. To their shame,
British political reporters went along with
this ugly tactic. Even with their Mirror
colleagues excluded, they got onto Johnson’s
bus.
Twenty-five years ago, when I was a
political reporter for the
Conservative-supporting Evening Standard, I
am convinced we would have stayed off the
bus in solidarity with our fellow
journalists. But the current generation of
political journalists apparently failed to
understand that Johnson’s attack on the
Daily Mirror is an attack on all journalists
and their right to report freely.
This hostility
towards a free press was there from before
Johnson (a former journalist) took office.
At the launch of his leadership campaign in
June, Conservative activists
booed Sky
News political editor Beth Rigby when she
asked a question about Johnson’s
Islamophobic comments. They received no
rebuke from Johnson.
A heavy price
By contrast,
when Labour supporters
jeered the
BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg at the party’s
manifesto launch, Corbyn immediately
intervened, telling the audience: “We don’t
do that. All journalists will be heard with
respect.”
Broadcasters
that challenge the Tory machine pay a heavy
price. Johnson was the only party leader,
apart from Nigel Farage of the Brexit Party,
to
boycott
Channel 4’s televised debate on climate
change a week ago.
As for the
state-owned BBC, it has apparently allowed
the prime minister to choose which
interviewers he faces. Corbyn, Liberal
Democrat Jo Swinson, and Scottish
Nationalist Nicola Sturgeon have all been
interviewed by the feared
Andrew Neil,
under the apparent understanding that all
the party leaders would do so.
But Johnson has
so far refused to appear. Instead, he was
interviewed by Andrew Marr in a programme
that received a
number of complaints
over Marr’s failure to challenge false
claims made by the prime minister.
Meanwhile, as I
exposed in an article for the Guardian last
week, too much
BBC reporting
has been partisan in favour of Johnson.
Abandoning decency
There are other
reasons to worry about the direction of
Johnson’s campaign. The Conservative Party’s
manifesto has largely been dismissed as
unambitious. But on page 48, there is a
sinister
statement:
“We will ensure that judicial review is
available to protect the rights of the
individuals against an overbearing state,
while ensuring that it is not abused to
conduct politics by another means or to
create needless delays.”
It
would appear Johnson is looking for a
mandate to put himself above the
law. Fairness and decency have been
abandoned by people who ought to know
better.
Johnson and his Tories may well win next
week. But they will have won through deceit
and bullying. In the long term, they will
pay a price. So - sadly - will the rest of
us.
Peter Oborne won best commentary/blogging in
2017 and was named freelancer of the year in
2016 at the Online Media Awards for articles
he wrote for Middle East Eye. He also was
British Press Awards Columnist of the Year
2013. He resigned as chief political
columnist of the Daily Telegraph in 2015.
His books include The Triumph of the
Political Class, The Rise of Political
Lying, and Why the West is Wrong about
Nuclear Iran.
This article was originally published by
"MEE"
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