6 Reasons Why Boris is Bad News for Britain
On July 23, 92,153 predominantly middle to upper class, right-wing males with an average age of 57 voted for Boris Johnson to become the next Conservative Party leader and therefore Prime Minister of the UK. The result has left many Britons reeling, comparing his election to that of Donald Trump in the USA. But, why do just so many people dislike Johnson and consider him to be bad news for Britain?
His racist comments
Johnson has regularly been called out for racist comments. Whilst editor of the Spectator in 2008, Johnson was criticized for publishing an article saying: ‘orientals… have larger brains and higher IQ scores. Blacks are at the other end of the pole.’ In 2016, he also referred to Africa as “that country” whilst describing the world as a “less safe, more dangerous and more worrying place’ than it had been a decade previously.
More recently, Johnson described women who wear burqas and niqabs as ‘looking like letter boxes’ in his column for the Daily Telegraph. ‘If a female student turned up at school or at a university lecture looking like a bank robber, then ditto,’ he continued, saying he would tell them to remove it.
His performance as foreign secretary
The Guardian reported that ministers who observed Johnson’s work as foreign secretary were very critical of his performance in the role due to his ‘laziness, inattention to detail, contempt for relationships, congenital unseriousness and dangerous indiscretion’.
In addition, during a trip to Myanmar, the British Ambassador to Myanmar had to stop Johnson mid-way through his recital of a Rudyard Kipling poem in the country’s most sacred temple which referenced British colonialism in the country through the eyes of a retired British serviceman. He also referred to a golden statue in the temple as a “very big guinea pig.”
This was not the only blunder Boris made during his time in office. In 2017, Johnson stated that Nazanin Zakhari-Ratcliffe, a British citizen detained in Iran, was in the country to train journalists. Following his comments, she was brought in front of an Iranian court and told that her sentence would be doubled.
His performance as Mayor of London
During his time as the Mayor of London from 2008 to 2009, Johnson left a string of failures in his wake. Knife crime increased, he missed his affordable housing target, closed fire stations, firing 552 firefighters, apprenticeships fell by 100,000 despite his promises to increase them, and his garden bridge project left a £43 million bill. Perhaps the worst blunder of all: he forked out £320,000 on a water cannon which he was banned from using. The Guardian estimated that his ‘vanity projects’ amounted to £940 million of taxpayers’ money.
His stance on Brexit
Johnson played a monumental role in the Leave Campaign in the run up to the EU referendum in 2016. He is known for his claims that 80 million Turks will arrive in the UK and that £350 million spent on the EU would instead be spent on the NHS. Now, he has promised the UK a hard Brexit, insisting that the country will leave the EU on October 31, with or without a deal.
His false claims and facts
Johnson’s false claims permeate more than just the Leave Campaign. In the last hustings of the leadership contest, he was berated for his remarks about kippers (a fish). Whilst waving a kipper on stage, he ranted about “pointless, expensive, environmentally damaging” EU regulations imposed by Brussels bureaucracy. However, it was, in fact, the UK government which imposed regulations, not the EU.
By Amy Jones
Image source – The Telegraph