Johnson compares resistance to Brexit
Boris Johnson was branded a “national embarrassment” yesterday after comparing Ukrainian resistance to Russia to Britain voting for Brexit.
Johnson told the Conservatives’ spring conference in Blackpool it was the “instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom”, with the Brexit vote a “famous recent example”.
However, Tory peer Lord Barwell said: “Apart from the bit where voting in a free and fair referendum isn’t in any way comparable with risking your life to defend your country against invasion and the awkward fact the Ukrainians are fighting for the freedom to join the EU, this comparison is bang on.”
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said the Prime Minister was a “national embarrassment” adding:
“To compare a referendum to women and children fleeing Putin’s bombs is an insult to every Ukrainian. He is no Churchill. He is Basil Fawlty.”
SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford said: “Boris Johnson’s comments comparing Ukraine’s life-threatening situation with Brexit was crass and distasteful, and shows just how dangerously obsessed the Tories are with Brexit.”
Johnson also said Vladimir Putin was in a “total panic” about the prospect of a popular uprising if freedom was allowed to flourish in Kyiv but he also admitted there was little hope of an imminent change in Russian leadership.
“I don’t believe that democratic freedoms are going to sprout any time soon in the Kremlin, far from it,” he said.
“But with every day that passes I think that Putin becomes a more glaring advertisement for the system that he hates and despises, and it becomes ever more obvious why we have to stick up for Ukraine.”