Will BoJo be shown to have lied to the Queen?

I despise Boris Johnson, (hereinafter BoJo).

I have always despised the mendacious fuckrat and I am not about to change my mind now.

I have had the misfortune to meet this loathsome man on two separate occasions before, and on both occasions his words have been nothing but empty hot air. I have watched him over the years and I have never had any occasion to change my views that he is an unmitigated liar, a self-appointed braggart and bully, who learned his ill-treatment of women from his disgusting father; who acquired his truculent manners at Eton; and who honed his aggressive behaviour as a member of the infamous Bullingdon Club at Oxford. His bullying conduct has been evidenced in the past by his agreement with an old Eton and Oxford friend, Darius Guppy to arrange for a journalist to be the victim of a grievous bodily harm attack.

And now, he is a carpetbagging, unelected Prime Minister, shoe-horned into office by a miniscule bunch of dysfunctional and non-representative aged Tory geriatrics who believe, somehow, that this truculent priapic man-child will restore the UK to a world position of influence and power, but based upon nothing other than empty sound-bites and lies gerrymandered by this most dishonest of politicians.

BoJo's behaviour has been to ride roughshod over the hugely important elements of our unwritten constitution, aspects of public behaviour which are vital in order to make our peculiar system work effectively. These include the importance of 'conventions' and 'precedent', and if these well-defined elements are not recognised and adhered to, our constitutional functionality breaks down.

BoJo and his selected satraps, including the modern Lord Snooty, Jacob Rees-Mogg, claim that his decision to drag H.M.the Q into this most disreputable of debates, is perfectly normal and a proper use of Her Majesty's time. Well, this is so obviously a lie that it hardly needs nailing, but because there are so many ignorant and ill-informed members of the public who claim a democratic right to spout their uninformed opinions and to pour abuse on anyone with whom they do not agree, it becomes necessary to try and put this debate into context.

Thankfully, some very brave and informed individuals are now seeking to bring legal constraints upon BoJo and his team of publicly-funded liars, and Gina Miller has sought an action in the High Court to challenge the legitimacy and truthfulness of BoJo's advice to the Queen in order to force her to sign an Order proroguing Parliament.

I have used the word 'force' deliberately because I do not believe for one minute that H.M.the Q is unaware of the unconstitutional quality of this action, but she has no choice if confronted by what appears to be a proper request from her Prime Minister to prorogue Parliament, than to accede.  She is not a lawyer and she is not required to debate the legality of the action, that is the prerogative of the High Court.

So the Court will look at the nature and quality of the request by BoJo, and they will judge its bona fides. It is perfectly clear to anyone who has been watching this debate that the primary aim of the prorogation is to prevent and to stymie any legitimate Parliamentary time to debate the issue proposed by BoJo and his team of liars.

What will weigh very heavily in their deliberations will be the public utterances made by Tory politicians in the past few months about the possibility of shutting down Parliament.

In order to be persuaded that the Prorogation is lawful, the Court must examine the evidence of the reason for its request to the Queen. If the Court is satisfied, on a balance of probabilities that the request was made entirely and purely for the purpose of facilitating a Queen's Speech, (a process that usually takes no longer than 2 weeks), which is the explanation being proffered by BoJo the Liar, and his bought and paid for fellow-liars, like Jacob Rees-Smugg, then the Court is likely to deny the request from Gina Miller.  

However, if the Court, having considered all the evidence, (and that will now include the evidence of Sir John Major which is likely to be highly persuasive; the evidence of the Government minister saying too much at a conference recently, and BoJo's own conduct earlier in the year when he privately assured Tory Brexiteers that he would not rule out suspending Parliament to ram through a No Deal Brexit on October 31, will be highly difficult to overcome.

The then front-runner for the Tory leadership publicly voiced his opposition to the idea of proroguing this session of Parliament, and his spokesman repeated the candidate was 'instinctively averse' to the option.

He told MPs that he was 'strongly not attracted to' the option at an event after the official launch of his campaign yesterday.

But The Times was told the former foreign secretary had privately assured the hard-Brexit European Research Group (ERG) of backbench Tory MPs that he would not explicitly rule it out.

All this is evidence, and there will be a whole lot more which should point overwhelmingly to BoJo being found to be a liar and a charlatan, and to have acted in bad faith, and if the Court so finds, they have the option of saying so loudly and at great length. Even if they did not overturn the decision to prorogue, it would still make BoJo's position untenable, as a Prime Minister who lied to his Queen.

I myself have no doubt he lied to the Queen, even by default, but that is BoJo's leitmotif. He is a liar, pure and simple, and we should never forget it.

Spuddling the facts, muddying the waters.

In his very cleverly worded piece in the Sunday Times of 18.8.19, entitled "...It casts itself as the good guy, but the EU's aim has been to humiliate and cheat..." Sir Peter Marshall, adopting frankly undiplomatic language states;

"...Our partners (The EU) also loaded the dice against us. Article 50(2) specifies that the European Council shall provide guidelines in the light of which “the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State . . . [The agreement] shall be concluded on behalf of the Union by the Council” (not the European Council, comprising heads of government, but the body a rung below, known as the council of ministers)…". The words in brackets are those of Sir Peter.

"...But they were not having that. The guidelines announced that the European Council “will remain permanently seized of the matter”. The whole withdrawal process was thus further prolonged by its subjection to the European Council’s ponderous timetable..."

Marshall's point is that the EU have deliberately made the negotiating of the EU Withdrawal Process as convoluted and difficult as possible. He appears to effect surprise that the EU would want to fight tooth and nail to protect the integrity of their Union and to make it difficult for members to leave whenever they wished.

His words are pretty clear, and he rings in a dubious interpretation of the meaning of the word 'Council', suggesting that it means something other than that which it became. What is clear is that Sir Peter appears to be of the opinion that the European Council, by remaining "...permanently seized of the matter..." was a matter for regret at the least, but he builds it up to support his wider allegation of bad faith and cheating.

Now consider his words in an earlier article he published in a piece called "...Light at the End of the Tunnel..?, published as a 'Brexit Briefing' on 28.3,18.

In the polemic it states; 

"...Sir Peter Marshall reviews the course of the negotiations over the year since invoking article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. His assessment is “very positive”.

Maundy Thursday March 29^th marks the first anniversary of the despatch of the letter from the Prime Minister to the European Council triggering the Article 50 process. At the half way stage in the allotted span of two years for settling the withdrawal process, how should we assess our progress? The answer is “very positively”..".

Later in the piece it states;

"...the European Council wisely decided to remain seized of the matter of UK withdrawal throughout, instead of delegating it in effect from the board room to the shop floor, as specified in paragraph 2 of Article 50..."

Sir Peter chooses to interpret these words as meaning that the work should have been carried out by the Council of Ministers, but the legislation does not use those words at all, in fact there is no mention of the Council of Ministers, and this is only Sir Peter's interpretation. In any event, he says that the decision to keep the matter in the hands of the European Council, was a 'wise decision'.

So in March 2018, this former Mandarin thought the process '...is proceeding very positively..,' while now, he has significant cause to doubt the bona fides of our EU friends, and accuses them of bad faith and cheating.

So what is the truth?

My points here are only small ones, but from little acorns, etc, etc.

Having had quite a wide experience of the devious nature of some senior Mandarins in my career, I know only too well how they can swerve seamlessly around issues which do not appeal to them.

Why the Tories cannot come to terms with the end of the last war!

Michael Portillo has fronted a superb documentary for Channel 5 "...What's the matter with the Tories..."

He seeks to try and understand why the UK is still so bedevilled with our apparently damaging obsession with our membership of the EU.

What the programme demonstrates most clearly is the dysfunctional way in which our constitutional democracy is run, and how, most politics, even today, are deeply infected by  the British disease of looking backwards over our shoulders to a mythical and frankly non-representative time when this country was overwhelmingly white, Protestant, when the Church of England represented the Tory Party at prayer; when MPs were mostly middle-aged and older men, when cricket was still played on Sundays in country villages, and there was still honey for tea!

Alright, I may have been guilty of a small degree of hyperbole, but what the programme demonstrates is how generations of Tory politicians have exercised and demonstrated severe anxieties about Europe and the political dimension.

There is a significant degree of chatter about sovereignty and the inalienable rights of Nation States to determine their own policies and financings, but very little, if any debate on the impact and disregard for historical change.

One element was very instructive. Nicholas Soames, Winston Churchill's grandson was interviewed and he was asked why the Tories find it so hard to engage sensibly with the EU. He said; "...The Tory Party has never come to terms with the end of the last war..."

In this one simple observation, Soames, a true blue Tory to his bootstraps, put his finger on the kernel of the conundrum..

This country has always been obsessed with the part we played in defeating Hitler. It is an issue which some people in Parliament, like that pint-sized clown, Mark Francois (whom Soames, to his eternal credit, clearly loathes with a passion), cannot seem to put down, and are forever invoking its memories and image.

Soames believes it has something to do with the psychology of 'standing alone', a kind of 'backs to the wall' meme, and a rejection of any kind of solidarity with other European countries. For myself, I think this conflates with the traditional British dislike of foreigners of whatever kind, their distrust of the French, their lack of respect for the Italians and their fear of the Germans.

What is fascinating is how the most committed members of the EU and some of the earliest members committed to the success of the European construct were those countries, France, Germany and Italy, closely followed by the Benelux countries, which had suffered so much in World War 2.

They had been invaded, colonised, their political models smashed, their legal structures trashed, their people abused and massive volumes of death and destruction visited on them. To re-build, they could begin again with a tabula rasa, and adopt the new and emerging emphasis on trading bloc status.

The focus on integrated trading blocs was designed to reflect the emergence of other supra-national consolidated trading groups elsewhere in the world. The age of the Nation State was over, it finally died in the rubble of 1944, and a new economic and political model of closer cooperation and trading interests was emerging.

The European Economic Community (EEC) was a regional organisation which aimed to bring about economic integration among its member states. It was created by the Treaty of Rome of 1957  Upon the formation of the European Union (EU) in 1993, the EEC was incorporated and renamed as the European Community (EC). In 2009 the EC's institutions were absorbed into the EU's wider framework and the community ceased to exist.

The Community's initial aim was to bring about economic integration, including a common market and customs union, among its six founding members: Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany. In 1993 a complete single market was achieved, known as the internal market, which allowed for the free movement of goods, capital, services, and people within the EEC.

This was a new, and very different way of looking at the world, and because it did not incorporate the United Kingdom, the UK looked upon it with great suspicion. Nevertheless, the British Empire was breaking up, and the Commonwealth no longer looked to Britain for its leading role in their autonomy.

But Britain had not experienced the same degree of invasion, colonisation and destruction as the Europeans and they would not willingly liken themselves to being in the same political position as the Euro countries.

The British national position adopted by all the Little Englanders and right-wing loopies was that we had won the war, and therefore we did not need to change. They forgot, or at least overlooked the fact that despite not having been the political losers of the conflict, our country was ruined. We were financially bereft, and that we existed entirely due to the willingness of the Americans to bail us out financially on a temporary basis while we tried to rebuild our economy which we had mortgaged to defeat Hitler. We also overlooked the fact that without the USA and to an even greater extent, Russia who lost in the region of 26 million people in defeating the Nazis, we would never have emerged victorious.

Effectively, in terms of finance, manpower, and infrastructure, we, the British were the losers in WW2, and we were not even in a similar position to Germany to benefit from the reconstruction process in Europe. I believe that this was very influential in developing an integral and visceral distrust of Germany and therefore an unwillingness to face the new future as an open and committed partner of the new emerging Democratic Republic of the new Germany.

For me, this is one of the biggest influences behind the Little Englander's dislike of anything that hints of European-ism.

All the time we, the Brits, refuse to accept that the times have changed dramatically and that we now live in a new political paradigm where the power-blocs are no longer determined by outdated and irrelevant 19th century concepts such as the Nation State, we will continue to be the sheet anchor on any ability to move forward. It is imperative that we understand this and accept that the political and cooperative model of economic and corporate co-existence in Europe has moved on, and we will never again revert to the models of the post-war era.

We have to learn to get over the outcome of WW2 and stop surrounding ourselves with replications of invasions and reiterations of old battles. There is no need to forget the sacrifices of those who died to protect their country, but those people would find it very hard to recognise the present state of affairs in the UK. My father who fought through both WW2 and Korea was a committed European and believed in the need for us to make common cause with the other European countries.

Those politicians like Mark Francois and the other petty dictators in the House of Commons who so ritually trot out the useless and outmoded memes of nationhood, sovereignty and control freakery (ever noticed how many of them are former military types?) need to start reading some modern history and recognise that our development as a modern outward-looking nation did not come to an end in 1945, but in reality, began to develop a new way of looking at the world.

Our future lies in trade, but trade with our closest neighbours, not with the USA which doesn't give a flying fuck for us or our people. The Americans parrot the trash about 'special relationships' when it suits them, but that is only when they want to invade some hapless country and they want the UK to sacrifice our young people in support of American 'shock and awe' tactics.

A close and meaningful relationship with the EU, the biggest trading bloc in the world, is our real future. Never forget, Napoleon, quoting Voltaire once said; "...God is on the side of the big battalions..."

Why the Brexit debate has taken on such a hate-filled rhetoric.

I have been following the debate on Brexit with mounting dismay and concern in  recent days.

Last week I made a contribution to a FaceBook page posted by the European Parliament. encouraging EU citizens in the UK to register to vote if they wanted to vote in the forthcoming EU elections. I posted a mild supporting statement because I want the EU Parliament to encourage men and women of good faith and best intentions to become EU Parliamentarians. I want them to put a spoke in the wheel of the emergent neo-Nazis and extreme right-wing radicals that are being increasingly thrown up in Europe, and whose hate-filled views and septic memes are poisoning the well of debate.

Recall, I said the EU parliament.

If the UK gets to vote in this election, I do not imagine that anyone elected to sit in the EU Parliament will be members for very long, much as I would like them to be. I fear that the UK will be dragged out of the EU by the swivel-eyed anti-EU nutters who increasingly populate our debates in Parliament and on social media.

The page suddenly became the target for an attack from the denizens of extremist opinion and angry, irrational rhetoric, the like of which I have never before experienced. It was as if every flag-waving, tattooed, pit-bull owning, motor-cycle riding, and every other form of uninformed right-wing political fantasist decided to air their lack of logic, their factual ignorance about the EU, and, yes, let's admit it, their downright visceral hatred of Brussels and everything that spells European Union.

It was a truly horrible experience. I don't mind personal attacks, I just ignore them. If ignorant and uneducated "...graduates from the school of hard knocks and the university of life...", (which a lot of them proudly claim to be, parading their uneducated ignorance like a badge of honour) want to bad mouth me for expressing my views, well, so be it. They simply make themselves look ridiculous and ill-informed for anyone with a modicum of intelligence to identify. But the levels of sheer hatred and vituperation that some of these Neanderthals voiced was truly awful, and did not bode well for the safe future of this country or of Europe. 

Most of them appeared to parrot the same memes of support for that charlatan, Nigel Farage and his new Brexit Party. None of them appear to have realised that the new entity is a private vehicle for Farage and his galere, over which he has absolute control, and over which he has absolutely no intention of allowing hoi polloi to exercise any control. I wish them joy of the worm, Farage will soon disabuse them of any sense of honour or dignity if he gets his way.

I am far more concerned with the level of hatred and vileness more generally which is flooding into public life and debate presently. Where is this level of rhetoric coming from, who is generating this 'Dad's Army' level of swivel-eyed and misplaced Imperialistic nonsense?

Some of the blame has to be laid at the door of some of our more egocentric MP's. Men like Jacob Rees-Smugg, parading his deliberately mal-manipulated logic, or Mark Francois with his war-like rhetoric, identifying the fact that despite being too young for WWII, he wants to start WWIII so he can get a walk-on part.

Most recently, Nicky Morgan, M.P, a sensible, logical and caring woman, has accused veteran Euro-hater and antediluvian roadblock to progress, Sir William Cash for fuelling violence with a 'vain and bitter' article. This is a very important allegation, because it identifies how the ignorant and the uninformed can be encouraged to engage in vile imprecations, incited by the rabid mouthings and the hysterical language employed by a senior MP, albeit one who has revelled in his anti-Europeanism for many years.

  

Senior Eurosceptic Cash has been accused of fuelling violence against politicians after he accused Theresa May of "abject surrender" and "capitulation" to the EU. Just reading this use of language, one could be forgiven for believing that Cash and his flag-waving band of false patriots believe we are at war with our colleagues and friends inside Europe. No wonder the Little Englanders and the loony-tune Brexiteer tendency feel empowered to parade their ignorance, and vile hatreds. 

Former cabinet minister Nicky Morgan generously said Sir Bill's words were "not helpful" while former Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt accused the veteran MP, a senior member of the European Research Group of anti-EU Tories, of a publishing "a vain and bitter article".

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, the house magazine of Euro-haters and the headbanger-brigade membership, Sir Bill compounded the wartime memes and the adoption of his Captain Mainwaring persona when he said this was an "abject surrender" and accused the prime minister of "capitulation" and "appeasement".

His comments were strongly condemned by pro-EU Tories.

Ms Morgan, a former education secretary, told BBC Radio 4's Today: "I understand that Sir Bill Cash has written an article in which there are all sorts of phrases about betrayal and capitulation and all the rest of it.

"As my colleague Alistair Burt has pointed out, this kind of language is not helpful. It's not the kind of language that our councillors or frankly any normal people would use."

Nicky Morgan, who has previously received death threats, said she saw a link between the type of comments made by Sir Bill and violence directed against MPs. I say its influence extends even further and influences public debate more generally. Her answers are instructive because they point up the connection between these silly and juvenile remarks by someone who should know better, and the kind of pure nastiness being spouted by supporters of the new Brexit Party.

Asked if she believed there was a connection, she said: "I do. I think it's been shown that the language that MPs or campaigners, mainly in favour of Brexit, are using is stoking up other people, often who are sitting at home watching all this stuff and it gets them really, really angry and fired up and then they say things that they would never say face to face."

She added: "Language is important and the One Nation group of MPs that I am co-chairing has said very clearly that we should all think about the language that we are using in these debates. We need to remember that politics is about much more than Brexit."

Mr Burt, who resigned as a Foreign Office minister last month in order to vote against the government on Brexit, wrote to Sir Bill on Twitter: "A vain and bitter article focused on your prime minister, with your opinions expressed in words such as mendacity, surrender, betrayal, appeasement, bended knee...Does it ever cross your mind what you're contributing to?"

I am afraid that Cash and his satraps know precisely what they are doing. These are dog-whistle words, and he and his  Ton-Ton Macoutes know that they play well with the narrow-minded and blinkered false patriots who are now flooding to support the Faragista circus of clowns and wibbly-wobbly men.

Let us always remember the words of Dr Johnson when he succinctly observed that (False) patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. How many of these new Brexit party supporters will turn out to be simply misinformed and mistaken or downright scoundrels, only time and Brexit will tell!