WE expect our general elections to be dirty but after Boris Johnson’s opening insult I’m a bit worried for him.
Because when you kick off your campaign comparing the Leader of the Opposition to a monstrous dictator who killed 20 million of his own people, you wonder if Dominic Cummings has ordered enough JCBs to dig up enough muck to keep going for the next five weeks.
As Johnson flashed the V sign after talking about delivering Britain a glorious future free from European tyranny, the Tory strategy became clear. They’re making it a Churchill v Stalin election, asking us to falsely choose between the courageous freedom fighter and the communist enslaver.
Which is risky if you recall the 1945 poll, held two months after VE Day, when the Tories believed the nation’s war hero Churchill would ride to power on a tidal wave of patriotic gratitude, crushing a dull metropolitan leftie on the way. And Labour’s Clement Attlee won by a landslide.
The reasons were two-fold. Ordinary people were sick of being told to know their place and pined for Labour’s new economic order. And the working class didn’t love Churchill half as much as the Tories thought.
Those with memories recalled him ordering troops to shoot strikers in Tonypandy and Liverpool, dismissing Jarrow hunger marchers as shirkers, sending the Black and Tans to brutally subjugate the Irish while arguing that imperialism was necessary as “a higher-grade race” could lead the “primitive” and “subject” races.
In other words, those without breeding are too thick to look after themselves and need to be led by richer, cleverer people who were born to rule. And it’s irrelevant if some are slaughtered so long as the superior caste remains in charge. Which is effectively how Johnson’s hard-right Tory Government thinks today.
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s inane and heartless view that 72 people died in Grenfell because they couldn’t think for themselves, perfectly sums up the mentality. It’s doubtful the Lord Snooty clone has ever set foot inside a tower block or knows what cladding is, as it wasn’t required on his Grade II-listed £6million London townhouse nor his wife’s 365-room ancestral pile.
But when his fellow Old Etonian leader had been so cavalier about the potential threat to the lives of London’s tower block dwellers who can blame him?
During Johnson’s time as London Mayor, before the Grenfell blaze, he shut 10 London fire stations, sacked 588 front-line firefighters and retired 27 fire engines. When Labour Assembly member Andrew Dismore warned Johnson these cuts would cost lives it fell on deaf ears.
That callous contempt for people’s safety is being repeated today as critics question his race-to-the-bottom Brexit deal that has right-wing ERG hard-liners salivating.
If you want to know if your workplace rights, food quality and NHS will survive in the unknown world that awaits, or how much these ruthless, self-serving, multi-millionaire free-marketeers really think about your family’s security, look no further than how they view the voiceless Grenfell victims whose concerns were ignored for years by Tory-run Kensington Council. That dismal, charred shell offers a window into their icy souls.
During that debate on fire cuts Dismore was told to “get stuffed” by Johnson after he accused him of “lying to the people of London in his election”.
Remember that when you enter the ballot box next month before giving this Poundland Churchill a proper two-fingered salute.
