FAIR PLAY IN POLITICS

IT’S an unreal Alice In Wonderland world where political rhetoric lacks any congruence with observable realities, yet is applauded, embraced and utterly normalised.

Conservatives chose Boris Johnson as a gravity defying ‘winner’.

Local Tories embraced Boris’s Brexit to get Farage’s vote and to beat Labour, the enemy.

Ideological left-right tribalism is destructive, normal opinions are kaleidoscopic, not only on a left/right axis. It’s only about power, not prosperity or the common good.

I thought decent Conservative voters (I include friends) hold values like those learned on the cricket field: fairplay, a straight bat, not cricket – to deplore liars, cheats, fraudsters and especially bullies.

The whole nation once aspired to these values and the English phrase ‘fair-play’ is still used in other European languages.

Johnson and his allies ‘lied on an industrial scale’ (Professor Michael Dougan) to win the 2016 referendum. They lie pathologically still.

That fact alone, in utter defiance of the Nolan principles of public office, should disqualify them.

This Churchillian charlatan would crash us out of the EU with no deal, whilst he fantastically protests a ‘no deal’ is million to one against.

Leaving the EU is ‘a strategic mistake you can see from space’ (Professor Michael Clarke, former director general, the Royal United Services Institute).

A co-operative of European states has clout on a global scale yet the ‘do or die’ pseudo patriotic camouflage is designed to distract from the reality, making a virtue of the economic and social fallout that follows from ripping all agreements with our largest trading partner and its associated global network.

How can we ever be better off or more independent, making deals with other big players – the USA, China and India – for whom a desperate UK will be shark bait than operating within the EU?

‘Do or die’ – it won’t be Boris, who does, or dies but it will be those whose lives are destroyed when their businesses, farms are trashed, when radioactive isotopes are not delivered in time, when there are drug shortages.

Boris, and his adviser Cummings, have slammed the door on a managed process, hoping to emasculate a fractured Parliament, or win an election on empty slogans, gestures and a blame story.

No deal Brexit is on the cards - we need opposition parties to co-operate, establish the facts, the evidence, and deliver real options.

‘Getting it done’ is the biggest lie of all. Fractious discussions to sort future relationships will dominate us for years, decades to come.

Better tell the truth. Better stop Boris.