| This article is adapted from my book, The Great Brexit Swindle (2016, Clairview Books). The British Conservative and Unionist Party (Tories) boasts 160,000 or so members. Untold numbers are UK Independence Party and Brexit Party entryists. But the majority are the Tory faithful. The majority are wealthy, older-to-elderly white males. They represent 0.3 percent of the British voting population. Because Britain is a “democracy,” the mother of all parliamentary democracies we are told, it is this percentage that chose PM Theresa May’s successor. For years, Tory MPs kept the pathetic May in power because any successor would fail to win a general election. However, the ex-City trader and millionaire Nigel Farage, who wants to leave the neoliberal European Union in order to pursue an ultra-neoliberal Brexit, got together with some fellow millionaires and multimillionaires to form the Brexit Party. At that point, self-deception set in among many of the Tory MPs. Fearing electoral wipeout from Farage, they suddenly “got” the appeal of the grassroots Tories’ favourite, Boris Johnson (BoJo). Just as the Republican grassroots supported Trump, giving the GOP little choice but to back him, the Tory grassroots now, thanks to Farage, have the chance to cast off the fake veneer of “centrist liberalism” brought in rhetorically (but not in reality) by PM David Cameron in a futile effort to appeal to younger voters. Now, with the “existential threat” of the Brexit Party on the horizon, the Tories feel justified in allowing May’s successor to be an openly racist buffoon, whom they’d previously confined to the benches of Parliament; especially after his disastrous spell as Foreign Secretary. Officials in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office reportedly refer to BoJo’s resignation as Foreign Secretary as “liberation day,” describing him as unfocused, unreliable, and a liability. Foreign Minister Alan Duncan, who resigned one day before BoJo took over as leader of the Tory Party in order to put a failed motion of confidence before Parliament, described him as “a circus act.” BoJo’s hero is the notoriously racist PM Winston Churchill, who among many other things believed in a global Jewish conspiracy, writing in 1920: “This [anarchist-communist] movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States)... this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.” He later wrote: “[Jews] are inviting persecution — that they have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer.” Guilt-by-association is a logical fallacy. But that doesn’t stop the media from relentlessly attacking the Labour Party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, for leading a Party that is allegedly anti-Semitic on the basis that he associates with a small number of anti-Semites. The media are silent about BoJo’s endorsement of the anti-Semitic Churchill. (In fact, the right-wing Jewish Chronicle published an article championing Boris as perhaps the new Churchill. It said nothing about Churchill’s anti-Semitism.) BoJo was appointed Foreign Secretary by May (her advisers in reality), to the surprise and disgust of many. BoJo worked at The Times, The Spectator, and as The Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, where, according to one of the editors, he intentionally invented blatant fake news about the EU in order to “single-handedly” (a boast on the part of the editor, I’m sure) whip up “Euroscepticism” among the readership. His appointment sent a signal to the world that Britain is not only prepared to use apocalyptic violence to have its way (May herself told Parliament that she would nuke 100,000 men, women, and children without qualms), but that Britain considers its trade and investment partners to be vermin. BoJo wrote, perhaps ironically, that the Commonwealth supplies the queen “with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies” (an archaic, racist word for small black children). He said, in sarcasm to Tony Blair, that the Congolese “will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down.” On Uganda, BoJo wrote: “The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more ... [T]he British planted coffee and cotton and tobacco, and they were broadly right ... If left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain.” “We do not need to teach babies Mandarin,” he said. “Compared with the old British Empire and the new American imperium, Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil.” BoJo also referred to ping pong (a Chinese invention) as “whiff-waff.” He wrote a poem alleging that Turkey’s leader, Erdoğan, had copulated with a goat. At a meeting of the World Islamic Economic Forum, London, BoJo said that Malaysian women “have got to [go to university] to find men to marry.” In defence of women’s right to wear the burka, while simultaneously generalizing that it is a symbol of oppression, he wrote that such attire makes women look like “letterboxes” and “bank robbers.” He also compared British party politics to “Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing.” He described Russian President Vladimir Putin as “looking a bit like Dobby the House Elf,” from the Harry Potter franchise. Making this blatantly racist, chronically unreliable clown PM is a step in the right direction because, despite the pain, it speeds up the possibility of a Corbyn-led government and the further possibility, but by no means certainty, of ending the electoral credibility of the Tory organisation for a long time. Dr. T.J. Coles is an Associate Researcher at the Organisation for Propaganda Studies and the author of several books, including Human Wrongs (iff Books). |