Knives in the Tory party are out as the ambitious scent an opportunity to move up the greasy pole at the expense of one Boris Johnson, and no, I expect nobody will be sorry to see the back of him. Sadly those who would step into his shoes are just as bad as he was (or is!)
His appearance in Kiev was fantastic; war is too far from end and this was really risky.
And behavior of his opponents, remembers me favorite Russian "talking about filament in opponent's eye, when you have log there".
I think, need something more serious, for really large penalty, which demands those people.
Behavior of police is absolutely right, they have done their work.
If opponents think this is too much evil, they should appeal.
In the UK, his actions regarding Ukraine (which I also found surprisingly brave) are generally viewed as a cynical way of using your suffering to boost his poll numbers. If I was Ukrainian, I probably wouldn't care that much (since it comes with real advantages - weapons etc), but from a UK perspective, it does turn the stomach a bit to see the PM dodge question after question about his criminal behavior by awkwardly changing the subject to Ukraine.
This is largely informed by how he has generally acted throughout his career. He's largely understood, even by his allies, as somebody without any real integrity.
Yes, you are right, that we, Ukrainians, sure on some extent using advantages of what happen.
But don't say this to other Ukrainians, because we pay very high payment for these things happening now.
I already accepted Jefferson's: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants", while others are not yet.
But I accent, for you may be blurred difference of crime from offense, but for developing countries these differences are huge important.
Because you live in country with developed justice system, but we lived in totalitarian country, where justice system constantly used for persecution of people with different from official see.
So we looking very carefully, where officials (police) could consider light offense (with light penalty). And we sure avoid, what could been considered crime with serious punishment.
Yeah, can totally see how it might come across as an incidence of 'lawfare'.
However, the UK system doesn't work like that. It's very very strongly biased to protect people like Boris Johnson from any kind of prosecution. That is perhaps why Boris Johnson is the first sitting prime minister to be fined for a criminal offense.
It's also not something that just came out of the blue. Details about the parties in his office have been being leaked to the press for months now. First, Boris denied any rules had been broken. Then, when videos surfaced, he fired people, gave speeches about how shocked and disappointed he was, and said he had no knowledge. Then, when an inquiry into it started, he said he couldn't comment on further leaks, because he wanted to wait for the results. Then, when a police investigation started, he said he couldn't comment because he didn't want to 'prejudice the investigation'. Then when he actually gets convicted, he makes out that it's not a big deal anyway.
People feel like they are being laughed at: even if the crime itself is not totally awful (although any public official would normally lose their job over it), the principle of being able to trust elected officials to have basic, table-stakes truthfulness, integrity, and honour is under threat.
Since the UK has no constitution, the democratic system is heavily reliant on politicians behaving with a reasonable degree of honesty and integrity. It's not a system with hard guarantees to protect citizens from bad actors. It's heavily reliant on politicians following conventions that protect the rights and liberties of UK citizens. A PM that follows neither convention, nor civil law, nor criminal law, is a very dangerous precedent in that system.
But except of difference of crime from offense, I mostly agree with you.
- Yes, people should not tolerate, when officials break laws.
But politics is extremely sophisticated thing, and you always should consider, who will replace Johnson, and will he good enough for these difficult times.
I will tell you scary story from real Ukrainian life.
This happen in ~ 2011. Riot in one small village, named Vradievka (Nikolaev district in South Ukraine, really far from capital).
So one day, villagers blocked police building, and demand to quit from job head of police and make investigation.
- This head participated in crime (cover gangs), rape women, tortured villagers.
Three days before riot, police captured one women, rape her, than torture her brother.
That is REAL crime system, not tea drinking, about which you talking.
And that's why after that in Ukraine happen Revolution in 2014, and why Ukrainians so much resist for Russian invasion - in Russia all those things are typical life outside capital.
Only specific, that Russians are Nazi, they mostly do violence against other nations.
My feeling is that certain kinds of governments create certain kinds of administrative cultures, and sadly, post-soviet states often end up with gangster kleptocrats, whether or not they are Russian. The fish rots from the head down, and so soon, everybody starts thinking like a gangster. (I mean, Stalin was literally a gangster, so you can see how that would trickle down).
Boris Johnson is not that bad by any means, but I still worry about politicians that test the boundaries of what you can get away with. Johnson has pushed that boundary further and further, and so far, he's been able to stay in his seat. It sets a bad precedent - before long, you end up with all the rules not mattering, and a jackass like Victor Orban in power.
> certain kinds of governments create certain kinds of administrative cultures
Not exact.
- Yes, you are right in that police is SUBsystem of government, so if government changes it will become strong factor causing changes of all subordinated organizations, but exists one huge nuance.
- Nuance is that ALL government subordinated organizations are by definition large - it is non-sense, to create small government organizations.
And ALL large organizations are very conservative in their administrative cultures.
And near ALL government organizations of post-soviet states are in fact, soviet government organizations, just subordinated to new government.
This is so huge strong factor, that governments change their habits to better fit in system.
I know only two exceptions at the moment: after revolution 2003, Georgia THREE times fired all police and recreated it from zero, before achieve adequate habits; Greece and Georgia after step into financial crisis, made first for few DECADES audit of their pension funds and found near 50% of dead souls, so half of their pension funds where plundered, and after that they very fast implemented new regulations and created new pension systems.
In Eastern Europe, things better, because after disintegration of USSR, they was extremely dependent from EU donations, and EU commission used the situation for 100%, to destroy old government organizations there and to rebuild new from zero.
In Baltic countries happened even more - they after become independent, declared that 1946-1991 where occupation, and all laws issued by occupation forces are now annulled (all returned to before 1946), and all people, who live there and have not relatives lived there before 1946, declared occupants or successors of occupants (and they become non-citizens, with limited rights).
And then they conducted elections with only "old" citizens participated, and fired all officials who where not "old" citizens.
There was some smell on these, but mostly EU close eyes, because these measures was effective, and because they conducted huge works on REintegrate people declared occupants into new society (after law checks, and learn national language, and pass exams, they got passports).
In ALL post-soviet states except Baltic and Georgia, just saved old system.
Ukraine is new exception, for many reasons, the most important being Russian invasion (which started in 2014), and Ukraine being a nation after about 2008.
There's also an unusually personal dimension. I expect a majority of people in the UK have either lost relatives or friends during the pandemic, and have had to follow rules regarding hospital visits and funerals that were pretty hard.
"The people" dont decide what front page news is though and the media played this one up for sure.
They (Barclay brothers/Murdoch/Rothermere) either decided Boris's days were numbered or that he needed knocking down a few pegs.
This is in contrast to two years ago when he was golden and they couldnt sing his praises hard enough. At the time the government was deliberately sending infected elderly patients back to care homes where they caused thousands of dead bodies to pile up - a story that got a disproportionately low level of coverage despite mattering orders of magnitude more.
Well, the point about the party story is that it's incontrovertible. With the handling of the pandemic itself, the media could spin, smoosh and soft-pedal the facts to make Boris look 'Churchillian'. Since they're completely spineless, that's what they did.
Going to a party while a sizeable chunk of people have traumatic memories of doing hospital visits through zoom will make those people hate you, and it's not very easy to smoosh, spin, or soft-pedal. It's just infuriating, and because the trauma of the pandemic was fairly evenly distributed, it has infuriated a very broad scatter of people. Presumably, some of them work in the news. Some of them are in the conservative party, even.
I can sort of feel the fire in my belly over this one because I didn't get to visit my grandad before he died, nor a close family friend. My grandad had no funeral, and I missed the family friend's because of a positive covid test. I'm not a fan of Boris's politics, but the party thing definitely cuts in a different place. I expect there are a lot of people out there who will remember some genuinely hard moments, remember what Boris was doing at the same time, and feel deeply angry.
Well, if you want to downplay it, you can point to a country like Belgium, which has a good GDP, so it's obviously a functional nation (right?), and point out their higher death numbers, then you can say that obviously the response wasn't perfect, but it was 'middle of the EU pack'.
Then the opposition has to say why it's not fair to compare death rates with poor eastern european countries, and explain that Belgium is spectacularly dysfunctional, etc, etc, and by that time, the conversation has moved on.
It's all a bit wonky and complicated. If the media were doing their jobs, if the opposition was doing their jobs, they would have baked this sort of machinery into the narrative - they are supposed to make stuff like this accessible for normal people.
The thing about the parties is it's a bit like if No 10 had their lights on full blast so they could have parties during the blitz blackouts. It's breaking a rule they set in a way that endangers the people around them. There's no way to equivocate or whatever: they broke an important rule, at a very hard time, that they set, for utterly trivial reasons.
Theres plenty of ways to equivocate. The story could also just have been buried like the tens of thousands of care home covid deaths triggered by gross negligence.
It didnt have to be given airtime. Were the media placidly cheerleading as it was two years ago it would likely never even have been investigated.
It was a deliberate choice for the tabloids to blanket us with partygate coverage and to trash Boris's reputation.
It's neither wonky nor complicated. The media are doing their job. Their** job IS to manipulate public opinion on behalf of their owners.
** Except for the BBC and the guardian who are more reactive and generally follow the pack.
Well, they did bury it. First, there were media figures (the wife of the editor of the Sun, for instance) at the parties, so obviously they didn't report on it at the time, and I remember when the first leaks started coming out, Laura Kuennsberg presented it as a 'Westminster drama' kind of story. It's impossible to imagine that media figures did not know the parties were happening at the time: Allegra Stratton is married to James Fortsyth (the editor of the Spectator), for instance.
I think the point is, british people generally have a lot of tolerance for amateurism, well-intentioned muddling through, and honest mistakes. That's a deep part of the culture. What they cannot stand is people who behave as if they are too important to follow the rules everybody else follows. That's why queue jumping is sort of like human sacrifice in the UK. When you combine an instance of this trope, with a traumatic national moment, it's going to have way more psychological impact than simple incompetence, no matter how much more damaging incompetence actually is.
Hypocrites like the Chancellor of the Exchequer putting up income taxes while his wife has non-domicile tax status on her 8 figure annual income rumored to be structured through the Cayman Islands, I guess?
I'm unsure whether we don't like hypocrites, or we like to promote them to office.
I do get that, I simply don’t get how it was/is the most important thing happening in the country. I remember having to scroll past all this on the bbc app to get at the Omicron news.
In a purely functional way, that makes sense. You already knew you're coming for omicron news and that you'll find them there - so you can scroll past the actual novel articles. More surprising or urgent things will be higher.
If it were actually a question of scandal, there are much larger ones that could be receiving media attention, like the enormous quantities of money embezzled from the government (read: taxpayer) under cover of the pandemic, or the deep connections between Tory party / Brexit campaign funding and very dirty Russian money. But those would reflect badly on the entire party in power, not just Boris. So we don't hear about those.
This is a nice, neat, Boris-only scandal. Perfect fodder for the periodic ritual cleansing of sins.
