Stop treating Brexit like a plague of boils
Johnson rails against ‘zombie’ Corbyn’s 1970s ideology and attacks the Remainer ‘pessimists’
‘It is time to be bold and seize the opportunity. And there is no country better placed than Britain’
BORIS JOHNSON said Britain must stop treating Brexit like a “plague of boils” in a half-hour conference attack on the “pessimists” who “make Eeyore look positively exuberant”.
His speech wandered off his foreign policy brief and touched on the economy, house building and education, added to mounting speculation about his leadership ambitions. But to quell the speculation he hailed the Prime Minister for her “steadfast” leadership.
He was given a standing ovation by party activists who had packed the conference hall to hear the Foreign Secretary reserve his strongest criticism for Jeremy Corbyn, describing the Labour leader as a “zombie” and comparing John Mcdonnell to “Pol Pot”.
He said an entire generation was suffering “amnesia” about the realities of socialism in the Seventies and had to fight again for a free-market economy.
Brexit negativity
The Foreign Secretary said the UK must stop treating Brexit as if it is “an inexplicable aberration by 17.4million people.
“It is time to be bold, and to seize the opportunities,” he said. “And there is no country better placed than Britain.”
He singled out the Financial Times, saying: “Every day a distinguished pink newspaper manages to make Eeyore look positively exuberant and across the world the impression is being given that this country is not up to it; that we are going to bottle out of Brexit and end up in some dingy ante-room of the EU, pathetically waiting for the scraps but no longer in control of the menu.”
He said no country was better placed than Britain to “seize the opportunities” presented by Brexit.
Corbyn is Caracas
The Foreign Secretary condemned Jeremy Corbyn as a “Nato bashing, Trident scrapping, would-be abolisher of the British Army”.
He said Mr Corbyn’s “first instinct” in the wake of any international disaster was to try to blame British foreign policy.
“He says he still admires Bolivarian revolutionary socialism,” Mr Johnson said. “I say he’s Caracas.”
He added: “It is a disgrace – and I can tell you there are many Labour MPS who feel appalled that their party is still led by this man.”
Mr Johnson accused Mr Corbyn of “talking this country down” with his “ludicrous and vacillating” policy on Brexit. “In the customs union one week, out the next, in the single market, out the next,” he said. “In out, in out. Faster than one of those members of the shadow cabinet who gets sacked before she knows she has even been appointed.
“A kind of manifestation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. It would be disastrous.”
Spectre of socialism
Mr Johnson acknowledged that for an entire generation, references to socialism in the Seventies were meaningless.
He said: “We think they get the reference but unfortunately going back to the Seventies sounds to too many people like a massive joint revival concert by David Bowie, Led Zep and the Rolling Stones. They have forgotten that we had to fight and win battles of ideas and in a way that is entirely understandable – because our victory has been so comprehensive.”
He said Labour’s manifesto, including £200billion worth or renationalisation, represented “a display of economic masochism that would do incalculable damage to the future of our children”. He said: “We want a country with a government that works for everyone. Corbyn wants a Britain where everyone works for the government.”
He added: “This battle of ideas is not lost in memories of the Seventies. It is back from the grave – its zombie fingers straining for the levers of power and that is why we cannot rest.”
Domestic policy
The Foreign Secretary said that despite its “illustrious battle honours” the Conservatives now had to “win the battle for the future”.
He said that the Tories must not “junk our gains” and “attack the market economy” but make it work better for everyone.
The party must “make it work better for the low paid” with a national living wage and build hundreds of thousands of homes for those “who worry their kids will never find a home to own”.
He said that, above all, the party must help those struggling by “driving benefit reforms” and increasing employment. “Our one nation conservatism that, for all its faults, an open free-trading and thriving market economy is the only sustainable way to create the wealth we will always need to help the poorest,” he said.
Nation’s debt to May
After a week in which Mr Johnson has been repeatedly accused by his Cabinet colleagues of undermining Theresa May, the Foreign Secretary hailed her for winning the election.
He said: “She won more votes than any party leader and took this party to its highest share of the vote in any election in the last 25 years and the whole country owes her a debt for her steadfastness in taking Britain forward as she will to a great Brexit deal.”
He said that the whole Cabinet was behind Mrs May after her Brexit speech in Florence: “Based on that Florence speech on whose every syllable, I can tell you the whole Cabinet is united.”
Britain after Brexit
The UK will be “freed to stop being negative”, Mr Johnson said, and would be able to extol the virtues of free trade.
He later said that Brexit will have a “galvanising effect” on the UK because “we won’t be able to blame Brussels anymore”. He said: “Yes we are leaving the EU – but as the PM has said in her Florence speech we can create a deep and special partnership built on free trade. But success will be achieved not by allowing the UK to retreat from our global role but by reinforcing that role.”
Foreign policy
The Foreign Secretary said that Britain was “big enough to do amazing things”.
He highlighted the work of British soldiers in Nigeria helping local forces “defeat the numbskulls of Boko Haram” and the work of British ships helping stop illegal migration from Libya.
He also highlighted the role of British soldiers in Estonia, congratulating them “on resisting the honey traps allegedly placed in their way by Russian intelligence” before adding: “At least they said they had resisted.”
Jokes on colleagues
He could not resist a poke at colleagues. The Northern Powerhouse meant jobs in finance, academia, journalism and the arts, all “held by George Osborne” he said, and described Sir Alan Duncan as the “Mount Rushmore of wisdom”.