1988: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is sacked by the Times for #fabricating a quote.
1995: a recording emerges in which Pfeffel agrees to provide Darius Guppy with the address of a journalist who was investigating him so that he could have him beaten up.
2004: Pfeffel sacked by Michael Howard for #lying about an affair.
2012: Pfeffel apologises for #accusing Liverpudlians of wallowing in "victim status" in a 2004 article.
2016: Pfeffel fails to apologise equates the EU’s efforts to unify Europe with those undertaken by Hitler.
2017 Pfeffel #accused of worsening the plight of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe after wrongly claiming she was in the country teaching journalism.
2017: Pfeffel forced to apologise to Parliament for #failing to declare outside earnings totalling more than £50,000 on nine occasions.
2018: Pfeffel offensively & divisively describes Muslim women who wear the niqab or the burka as looking like “letterboxes” & “bank robbers”.
2018: Pfeffel fails to apologise for #lying when he claimed Britain’s top military laboratory was certain novichok came from Russia.
2019: Pfeffel #investigated by Independent Office for Police Conduct over his four year relationship with Jennifer Arcuri following reports Arcuri’s tech firm was able to access £25,000 in public funds & that she was allowed onto three overseas trade missions.
2019: Elected by Tory members as leader, Pfeffel pledges to “unite the country” - Britain is now more polarised than at any time since the Thatcher Government.
2019: Pfeffel #lies to the Queen about proroguing Parliament.
2020 - 2022: Pfeffel's #catastrophic handing of COVID, in which he reacted slowly & supported the dangerous 'herd immunity' approach, results in untold #suffering for millions, 180,000 largely avoidable #deaths, & £billions in taxpayers' money #wasted, often on friends of Tories.
2021: Pfeffel's independent adviser on ministerial interests Sir Alex Allan quits after Pfeffel overruled his finding that Priti Patel boke Ministerial Code (again) & bullied civil servants. Philip Rutnam receives £340,000 plus his legal costs over his claim for unfair dismissal.
2021 - 2022: Pfeffel deliberately, shamelessly & relentlessly lies to & misleads Parliament & voters in regard to #Partygate, holding both in utter contempt.
2022: Pfeffel continues to lie, mislead, obfuscate & behave like the damaged immoral sociopath he truly is.
For more insights into *Dear Leader*, & the mystifying Cult Of Personality that has grown up around the profoundly damaged & dangerously irresponsible sociopathic liar, who is destroying trust in politicians, undermining democracy, & ruining Britain, see:
Another #THREAD about truth, the culture war, money, & our broken news media.
Following eerily similar stories in the Mail & the Express, Nick Robinson's apology is all over @Twitter, posted almost exclusively by culture war warriors - who hate the @BBC - as "proof" of #BBCbias.
The 'outrage' is fuelled by a false claim made by Nick Robinson - a former Chairman of the National Young Conservatives & President of the Oxford University Conservative Association - that a Ministry of Justice cleaner, Mr Gomes, had died 'of Covid' while working in Downing St.
It transpires that Mr Gomes had not been working at Downing St at the time of his death, but at the nearby MoJ. And while colleagues had raised concerns he'd been suffering Covid-like symptoms in the lead up to his death, a coroner's report recorded it as heart hypertension.
According to the Center for Homeland Defense & Security’s K-12 School Shooting Database, there were 222 US school shootings in 2021 - an all-time high.
That’s over 100 more school shootings in 2021 than in 2019 or 2018, respectively the second- & third-worst years on record.
School shootings are considered by many to be an epidemic in the USA, as is gun violence in general.
According to data from Everytown Research, the US averaged just over 87 school shootings each year from 2013 to 2021, resulting in an annual average of 28 dead & 60 wounded.
The #WindfallTax was a tax on "the excess profits of the privatised utilities" introduced by the 'New @UKLabour' government of Tony Blair in 1997, following a manifesto commitment to impose a "windfall levy" on the privatised utilities.
Was it any good?
New Labour's #WindfallTax came after 18 years of Tory rule, which had seen #neoliberal privatisation of many state-owned assets, at prices which many considered too low.
It aimed to "put right the bad deal which customers & taxpayers got from the privatisation of the utilities".
The #WindfallTax produced a one-off income to the Govt of £5 billion, used to fund the New Deal, a questionable 'welfare-to-work' (workfare) program, & capital investment for schools & 'Learndirect', a training provider owned by the private equity firm Queens Park Equity.
Let's have a quick #THREAD on troubled Johnson-brown-nosing robotic hard-right Tory MP Jonathan Gullis - a controversial member of the European Research Group, & a parliamentary backer of FREER, an initiative run by the opaquely funded neoliberal Institute of Economic Affairs.
He stood in Washington & Sunderland West at #GE2017, losing to the incumbent Labour MP Sharon Hodgson, but somehow was elected as the MP for Stoke-on-Trent North at #GE2019, unseating Labour's Ruth Smeeth & becoming the first Conservative to represent the constituency.
At the time of his election, Gullis was employed as a school teacher & head of year at an Academy in Sutton Coldfield, & somewhat bizarrely for a Tory MP, served as the school's trade union representative, but he's spent his time as an MP railing against the Left & the 'woke'.
“#HostileEnvironment policies have changed the fabric of society. No other policy in living memory has left such a malign mark, a stain like an oil slick. It's racist, xenophobic, immoral, illegal, unfair, punishing, divisive, mean-spirited, discriminatory & counterproductive.”
Shami Chakrabarti, a former shadow attorney general, said: “Ten years of the hostile environment have been a disaster for race relations, community cohesion and national pride. Using starvation and destitution as a means of control led directly to the #Windrush scandal.”
Analysis of Berlusconi's & Trump's racist & misogynist insults & 'impoliteness' rhetoric, for which they never apologise, involve violations of the traditional moral order that are part of a far-right populist agenda of 'shameless normalisation'.
Linguist Ruth Wodak’s (2021) definition of 'shameless normalisation' explicitly refers to ‘impolite or shameless behaviour’:
"The far-right populists’ agendas (and related rhetoric) are reaching or have already reached the political mainstream."
"We are confronted with widespread & growing normalisation of far-right policies, of formerly tabooed topics, wordings & impolite or shameless behaviour (i.e. ‘bad manners’). The boundaries of the ‘sayable’ are being shifted, & (now) ‘anything goes’."