So Arcuri report shelved until after election 
ALPHABETICAL FOOD AND DRINK (Jan 26)
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Boris Johnson and his lies
(523 Posts)The independent think tank UK in a Changing Europe has today found that Johnson's deal would reduce GDP per capita by between 2.3% and 7% over the next decade. This compares with May's deal where the estimate was between 1.9% and 5.5%. They also suggest that a deal would hit public finances by £16bn and £49bn.
Today in parliament Johnson promised that high standards on workers rights an environmental protections will be maintained.
The political declaration can enter UK law but it is only a statement of intent and he can therefore promise the ERG that, if he wins the next election, he will set aside the political declaration and pivot towards deregulation and a sweetheart deal with Trump. The purpose of the ERG is to deregulate at home in order to strike trade deals with the US and emerging markets.
Would someone please explain why he should now be trusted when he has lied throughout the whole of his career. After all, leopards don't change their spots. It would take too long to list all his lies, but here's some, as a reminder:
1. When suspended from the cable car across the Thames, the mechanism apparently failed. Of course, it was deliberately stopped and he claimed it failed for a good photo opportunity.
2. In his manifesto for the London Mayor election he promised that he would ensure that there would be manned ticket offices at every train station. he then agreed to widespread closures in order to fund 24 hour tube trains
3. Also in his manifesto he promised to eradicate rough sleeping - it doubled during his tenure
4. He lied about the reason for proroguing parliament
5. He repeated his lie about the EU regulating the shape of bananas
6. He lied about there being no press when he was at GOS Hospital
Now for the money wasted whilst mayor on vanity projects:
1. Feasibility study into the Garden Bridge - £52 million
2. Cable car £24 million
3. Boris bikes £225 million (original idea Ken Livingstone but BJ implemented it)
4. Water cannon £323,000 - not allowed under UK law, unsold and now scrapped
5. Estuary airport feasibility study £5.2 million
6. Olympic stadium conversion to football pitch for West Ham - £305 million. The club was supposed to contribute £153 million but in the end it only paid £15 million and now pays annual rent of £2.5 million.
7. Routemaster hybrid buses £321.6 million - superseded by the introduction of electric buses. It's USP is now defunct because the doors at the rear "hop on hop off" platforms are closed in moving traffic (and that includes at walking pace)
A few of these projects had small amounts of sponsorship money but most of the costs were funded by the tax payer
Jura 
I am getting increasingly fed up with all the somewhat stupid smearing. Today's rubbish is how much the Labour proposals will cost. I don't mine when it is factual but they haven't even published their manifesto yet so it can only be a smear. Is it because they are stupid or because they think we are?
When the Financial Times says it:
www.ft.com/content/645d8786-d9f2-11e9-8f9b-77216ebe1f17?fbclid=IwAR3lia-guKw3jFiFFpRMgfrGlARX8EijRERqF3qkE6qZa39bkALeX5Gq9kw
Sunday smile
The Tories don’t get it do they?
They may once have got away with it when they could rely on the MSM to back their lies but no longer. Social media calls them out every time. The MSM has no choice but to follow
Tory Fibs
@ToryFibs
53 seconds pure television gold showing both Sky News & the BBC destroy the Tory fake news on Labour’s spending. At one point, the Sky journalist struggles to contain their laughter at the ludicrousness of Tory claims
This is so wrong. No one else would be allowed such leeway.
John West ?
@JohnWest_JAWS
·
Both the Russia and Acuri investigations shelved until after the election
You vote Tory, you vote for a potential fellon.
You deserve no respect
That would’ve had more impact if he had spelt felon correctly!
No Urmsongran- I'd say your pedantry adds JW's comment.
As the FT link was behind a paywall, here is a copy:
What will she be thinking when he next tips up at Buckingham Palace? Queen Elizabeth II is Britain’s longest reigning monarch. As titular head of state, she has granted regular weekly “audiences” to her prime ministers for 67 years. There have been 14 in all — the first, Winston Churchill, the latest, Boris Johnson. The Queen has not divulged a word from these private encounters. Now she hears that, just two months in office, Mr Johnson has been lying to her.
It is a fair guess that one or two others among the 14 may have occasionally shaded the truth. I wonder if Anthony Eden was entirely honest about the Suez debacle? Mr Johnson, though, has put himself in a class of his own. He stands charged by three senior judges with premeditated deception in persuading the Queen to suspend parliament so he can force through Britain’s departure from the EU on October 31.
This prime minister, of course, is no stranger to mendacity. But lying to Her Majesty? Deceiving someone so widely respected around the world for her probity and commitment to public service? It is hard to think of a sharper collision between mendacity and integrity.
Such is the dark morass into which Mr Johnson’s government has fallen in pursuit of his obsession to meet the Brexit deadline. When MPs were sent home from Westminster for five weeks until mid-October, the official story was that the government needed time to draw up a new legislative programme. Three senior Scottish judges concluded that this was deliberate subterfuge: Mr Johnson’s real objective was to frustrate the efforts of MPs to block his path to a no-deal Brexit. The suspension, the court ruled, was therefore unlawful.
The High Court in London took a different tack. It declined to comment one way or the other on whether Mr Johnson had told the truth. Instead, the English judges said they were being asked to determine matters beyond their competence. It was not for the court to decide on a matter that they deemed to be essentially political.
It has been left to the UK Supreme Court to make a definitive ruling. The prime minister’s desperate hope is that a majority of the 11 chief justices take the non-justiciable path set out by the English court. The damage has been done. You will not find a soul in the long corridors of Whitehall who believes that the prime minister they are sworn to serve is telling the truth.
Two former Conservative prime ministers — John Major and David Cameron — have joined those accusing Mr Johnson of seeking to suppress parliamentary debate. Sir John is among those who made submissions to the Supreme Court to argue that the prorogation was an abuse of power. Mr Cameron, who bears much of the responsibility for the present mess, due to his reckless decision to call the EU referendum in 2016, has used the publication of his memoirs to launch a series of broadsides against Mr Johnson’s habitual lying.
The present prime minister and his fellow Brexiter Michael Gove, Mr Cameron charges, quite simply “left the truth at home” during the 2016 referendum campaign. Back then the three politicians were pals. Mr Cameron now says that Mr Johnson never even believed in Brexit. He embraced the Eurosceptic cause purely to advance his consuming personal ambition by winning favour among Tory Brexiters.
Mr Gove, Mr Cameron adds, promoted the mendacious, and borderline racist, claim that just about the entire population of Turkey would soon be heading for Britain if it voted to remain in the EU. Mr Gove has since been given the job of overseeing Brexit preparations. Contemptuous in 2016 of the views of “experts” worried about the costs of Brexit, he is as dismissive now of advice from his officials about the serious risks of a no-deal departure from the EU.
At this point, some may be tempted to shrug. Put lying to the Queen to one side and fear and loathing among politicians in the same party is hardly new. As for Mr Johnson’s lies, well, no one trusts politicians. What matters is that the government gets on with Brexit, even if it means crashing out of the EU.
As for shutting down parliament, well, MPs were obstructing what Brexiters have solemnly declared to be “the will of the people”. This, of course, is just another falsehood. Of those who voted in the 2016 referendum, some 52 per cent backed Leave. Of those eligible to vote, the proportion was 37 per cent — scarcely the will of the people.
Dry constitutional debates about the respective authority of the government, parliament and the judiciary matter. And the frantic back-stabbing among senior Tories speaks volumes about the truly sorry condition of British Conservatism. Neither should obscure the bigger picture of the damage being inflicted on the nation’s democracy.
The lying reveals a profound disdain for the traditions, institutions and laws that sustain Britain’s parliamentary ecosystem. Whitehall officials say rules of proper behaviour are simply torn up. “We can do as we please,” runs the refrain in Downing Street.
Mr Johnson’s public refusal to say he will uphold the law in all circumstances underpins this contempt. If the government can cheat, it will; Mr Gove’s preference for “listening to the people” over reasoned argument speaks to the same tilt towards demagogy. Strip democracy of trust, self-restraint and shared truths and what remains is a majoritarianism of the mob.
Whitewavemark2 Sun 10-Nov-19 17:26:25 'potential'? I think you are being far too kind!
Urmstongran Sun 10-Nov-19 17:55:50 that was beneath you, petty.
jura2 Sun 10-Nov-19 18:14:24 thank you. I wish I understood how they get away with it. I still think we need more than 'Get Brexit Done' and 'Get Brexit Gone', we need to be told over and over again what the implications are. This was not pressed in 2016 and is not being pressed now. We need the headlines to make people think, they don't read the text below.
Urm I expect better of you - delaying these two issues is fundamentally undemocratic and an abuse of power as you well know.
The Tories’ plan for a shameful Nurse Tax
www.libdems.org.uk/nurse-tax
What is Johnson trying to hide?
BBC Politics
@BBCPolitics
"Every person who votes in this country deserves to see that report before your election happens"
Hillary Clinton says it's "inexplicable and shameful" that the UK government is yet to publish a report on alleged Russian interference in British politics
The shocking lies of the election campaign, and why this matters
Fighting for votes by telling fibs threatens the very basis on which democracy rests.
www.thetablet.co.uk/blogs/1/1323/the-shocking-lies-of-the-election-campaign-and-why-this-matters
As the 1930s began it dawned on Nazi leaders like Joseph Goebbels that their way to power was blocked by the truth itself – it wasn't true that the Jews had organised the First World War as some dastardly plot by the non-existent Elders of Zion, nor that "Jewish bankers" caused the 1930's depression, nor that the British and French Governments were the puppets of international Jewry. But the Nazis needed people to believe it so they could represent themselves as the solution to this utterly fictional and evil mythology, and by 1939, enough of them did. And that is what happens when a democracy ceases to believe in the possibility of truth, and what you believe to be the case depends entirely on where you stand.
It is sobering to watch what is happening in American politics just now. Whether you believe the mounting evidence that Donald Trump tried to bribe the Ukraine Government by withholding massive defence subsidies, or that no such thought ever entered his innocent head, depends entirely on whether you are a Republican or Democrat regardless of the evidence.
And if we are not careful that is where we are heading too. To court people's votes by lying to them is bad enough, but sooner or later they stop believing in anything any politician says. At that point democracy stops. The Daily Telegraph's duty is to point out when Labour is genuinely telling lies, real ones, and do the same for the Conservatives – but to blow the whistle only when the facts compel them to. Their fundamental responsibility is to keep politics honest, not to poison the wells even further.
www.thetablet.co.uk/blogs/1/1323/the-shocking-lies-of-the-election-campaign-and-why-this-matters
mobile.twitter.com/chrisgpackham/status/1194251091988373504
Getting this message over to the press might help.
General election: Boris Johnson calls protesters 'crusty' as he cancels bakery visit at Glastonbury
The under-fire PM had been due to visit a bakery in the Somerset town, but large groups of protesters who gathered outside brandishing placards and chanting prompted a rethink
www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/general-election-boris-johnson-cancels-20880758
This man, like Trump, has divided the nation instead of uniting and bringing it together. I can’t think of a PM in recent years who is loathed as much as BJ (apart from Thatcher perhaps).
And poor Blair who was hated by most of his own party!
I don’t recall Blair being hated by most of his own party, or, more importantly, to the extent BJ is by many parts of the UK - certainly not at the beginning. BJ is doing a grand job of turning families and communities against each other at a time when a more able politician would be seeking to unite the UK. Bluff and bluster is not a good look for a leader.
Gosh; you'd have to hate a party leader that won three elections for you, along with bringing about peace in Ireland and Yugoslavia wouldn't you 
….
Thank Christ BJ isn’t trying to achieve that - we’d be hurtling towards WW3
But they did didn’t they? The hard left thought he was a traitor to the true Labour Party and whenever his misdeeds are brought up they disown him!
The ‘hard left’ wasn’t most of the party
Surely that depends on your own viewpoint? Depending on who we support and what our personal politics are, we all have our own views on every politician. To say that BJ is hated by many parts of the UK is questionable at best, and a blatant lie at worst. Have you actually spoken to every person in every part of the UK? No, of course you haven't. From what I see on the TV, some people like him, others don't. Stop making it sound as though your personal opinion is fact - it isn't.
This thread is pure left wing propaganda,
Aaron Bastani
@AaronBastani
Nigel Farage alleges that people ‘deep in Number 10’ tried to buy off 8 senior figures in the Brexit party with a seat in the House of Lords for the party to stand down in Labour seats.
If that is true, it is a criminal offence.
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