Conservatives are turning John Bull into a whimpering lap dog

POOR Mr Johnson. You really have to feel sorry for him. On Thursday he was not invited to the EU meeting in Brussels. Mr J was miffed, seeming to forget that by ‘getting Brexit done’ he has excluded the UK from such meetings. At the Nato meeting photo shoot he was ignored by many leaders; this must have hurt because the PM wanted to impress on the international stage in order to take our minds off his continuing “achievements” at home, where his lies and thoughtlessness show that he does not deserve his job and has no capacity for it.

Among his stupidities while Foreign Minister he asserted that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was teaching journalism in Iran; this contributed significantly to the length of her imprisonment. More recently, he made that despicable insinuation about Keir Starmer and Jimmy Savile. On Wednesday, when Rishi Sunak was regretting, in the Commons, the destruction of Ukraine, Johnson was grinning like a prep school boy about to get extra custard.

Why do we still suffer such a ‘Government’? When Mr J’s team break every principle and get drunk, while we obey lockdown with no socialising, Mr Rees-Mogg says their behaviour was merely ‘fluff ’, the same Rees-Mogg who lay full length on the Government front bench in the House of Commons as if in the Eton prefects’ room. It’s not fluff, it’s signalling that we should respect ‘top’ boys, whatever they do.

After the scandalous Owen Paterson affair, when Johnson tried to change the parliamentary rules to help his chum, the Government indicated that they would remove the MPs’ second jobs corruption. Recently they have burned that promise; Sir Geoffrey Cox, poster boy for MPs’ bulging pockets, must feel smart.

While our attention is on the Ukraine, this Government of antidemocracy bandits continues its onslaught on our political system. One of the new laws they are determined to push through will limit our freedom to demonstrate. Will SW farmers want to demonstrate against the shambles they face with George Eustice’s stipulations on environmental farming? The new law says demos shouldn’t be ‘too loud’. No shouting at demos?

The proposed law on elections will reduce the rights of charities to ‘advertise’ in pre-election periods; so Oxfam or Mind can’t do anything that is remotely political in the period when the Tories start “selling their wares” before the 2024 election? And we’ll have to show photo identification to be allowed to vote in future. Apparently the Government doesn’t trust us and yet we still trust them to ‘lead’ us?

In the Nationalities Bill, the Home Office could take away our UK citizenship without even telling us that they were deciding our ‘case’. They are turning John Bull into a whimpering lap dog with the reward a one penny tax cut, just before elections.

As for Brexit. The true effects have been hidden by Covid and now by the horrific war in Ukraine. But the Office for Budget Responsibility, appointed by governments to check national finances, states that UK trade will be down by 15% and productivity by 4% because the “Bad Boys of Brexit” Farage and his financier, Aaron Banks (why did we ever listen to them?) persuaded us to jump into very shallow water with our eyes closed. And the bureaucratic checks on incoming trade from the EU haven’t even started yet.

Why are we asleep? It’s time for change: proportional representation in elections and coalition governments. Is anyone really sympathetic towards Johnson?