Boris The Downer

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his hair survived a "no confidence" vote held by the Conservative Party in Parliament yesterday, getting 31 votes more than the 180 Conservative votes he needed to stay in office. 

Johnson may have avoided being forced out of office, but with so many Conservative Members of Parliament having voted against him, experts expect Johnson's remaining days at No. 10 Downing Street to be numbered.  Possibly a smaller number than there are days left in the year.

Johnson's exit can't come soon enough for Labour and Liberal Democrat activists who accuse the prime minister of what Trump tried to do in the United States - undermine democracy.  Johnson's attempts to subvert the democratic process in Britain have been numerous. He suspended Parliament to push through a Brexit day that would escape closer scrutiny back in 2019, but had to back down after the United Kingdom's highest court ruled it unlawful. He's also attempted to pack parliamentary committees - including the Liaison Committee, the only committee in Parliament that can summon and question the prime minister - with cronies who will do his bidding.  

In three short years, Johnson, already in trouble with the British public for flouting of his own COVID restrictions by having office parties, has exhausted the patience of many Britons in many ways, from introducing a bill to strip Britons of dual nationalities (mostly British-born children of immigrants) of their British citizenship to pushing for - yes - voter identification legislation.  "What ties all these moves together," Benjamin Ward wrote in Human Rights Watch in 2020, "is a desire by the government to be free to act no matter the cost to the rights of ordinary people."

Now you know why the Brits have kept the monarchy.

It's nice to think that British democracy will recover once Johnson is gone, but, just as Trump left his own ideology to prosper on its own, Johnson may have set up a way for a future Tory leader to make the United Kingdom - the most stable country in the world - a democracy in name only. 

England's Dreaming

In automotive terms, a variant is a station wagon derived from a sedan design - like a sedan, only larger and a bigger deal.  In medical terms, a variant of a virus is like the original virus . . . only larger and a bigger deal. 

That's what the United Kingdom is dealing with now - a variant strain of COVID that is no more deadly than the original virus but spreads faster and is easier to catch.  It's shown up in southeastern England - including London - and may have already shown up elsewhere on the planet.  Most countries are barring travel from the U.K. for at least two days.

This is happening as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is trying to finalize Britain's withdrawal from the European Union even as he tries to quell a COVID outbreak he originally downplayed before he caught the COVID bug himself.  Oh yeah, and he's had to ban public Christmas celebrations. 

The irony in all this is the Britain, which once ruled an empire with colonies, territories, dominions and dependencies in every time zone on earth and always took pride in being an island separate from the rest of Europe, is no isolated and separated from the rest of the world.  Which means that the British people are pretty much . . . stranded on their island.

And Gilligan is in charge.

Trump was the first nationalist-populist leader to go down.  If there is a God up in heaven  - or at least a mechanism available to get a no-confidence vote in Parliament - Johnson will be the second.

Union Jerk

The United Kingdom is officially out of the European Union (EU), the withdrawal having taken place this past Friday.  British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is looking forward to negotiating new trade deals with the EU before the end of the withdrawal process on December 31.

Good luck with that, Boris.  Experts who know a whole lot more about these things than I do say that Johnson will have a tremendously difficult time negotiating with a 27-nation economic bloc with a hundred million or so more people than the U.S., a country that would theoretically benefit from Britain's new free-agent status in terms of trade. Britain is a country of only sixty million people or so.  What's Johnson's leverage?

The British probably dream of restoring their empire, which is pretty hard to do when you remember that its collection of overseas dependencies is down to Bermuda, a few islands in the Caribbean, the Falkland Islands, a military base on some forgotten atoll in the Indian Ocean, and a rock on the Spanish coast.  They probably hope to re-affirm their close ties to the Commonwealth formed out of its former colonies, particularly its economic ties, but at this point re-affirming its connections to Canada and India, and other places mentioned in that Kinks song, would sort of be a parent-child relationship in which the children take care of the mother country.  Ironically, it was the Commonwealth that served as a reason for French President Charles de Gaulle to block British entry into the EU, then called the European Economic Community (EEC), or the Common Market, and worries about the fragmentation of the Commonwealth made joining the EEC made it a hot issue in Britain for the Wilson and Heath governments.  (Britain joined in 1973.)  

Britain is not profiting off its exit from the EU just yet and may not do so for a long time.  The pound is sinking (to cop a song title from Paul McCartney),  and economic growth has stagnated.  Scotland, where the EU is more popular, is thinking of seceding and joining the EU, and Ulster could re-unite with the rest of Ireland on the basis of Scottish independence.  But no matter how dumb this withdrawal from the EU may be, Brexit is nowhere nearly as stupid as the U.S. exiting the Paris Agreement.  Crashing out of a continental market is much less severe than crashing into the climate. >:-( 

Boris the Primer

That creepy-crawly guy in Britain with the messy Beatle haircut just became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson assumed the top job in the mother county yesterday, and his pugnacious, uncultured approach to politics may be the only British thing that's more difficult to swallow than mutton.  Johnson has long been compared to Trump for his hair and his attitude, and some of his beliefs are in line with the Trumpster as well.  He wants to make the United Kingdom great again, which means withdrawing from the European Union and making his country a force to be reckoned with once agin, even though he's getting off to a shaky start as he's having the same pesky trouble with Khamenei and Rouhani in Iran over harassed British oil tankers that Anthony Eden had with Nasser in Egypt over control of the Suez Canal.  He has to deal with Iran while honoring the nuclear deal brokered primarily by the United States, which has since withdrawn from said deal, but he needs to repair cracks in the 150-year special relationship with the U.S. brought about by differences between Trump and Johnson's predecessor, Theresa May.

And then there's Brexit.  May couldn't get approval for a deal that allows Britain to withdraw from the European Union that maintains Britain's obligation to abide by trade and border-crossing rules set by the EU that Britain cannot change, nor could she secure a deal that allows Britain to get out without having to adhere to EU riles at all - a soft Brexit or a hard Brexit.  Johnson has vowed to get the U.K. out of the EU even of it means no deal at all - something May was skittish about.  He's ready to plunge right ahead (or "straightaway," as the Brits like to say) like a bull in a china shop - he's fired half of the Tory Cabinet - and the next couple of months and years are going to mean anarchy in the U.K. like the Sex Pistols couldn't imagine.

Good luck, Brits, you're going to need it.  Now you'll know what it's like to live in a country run by a lunatic like we Yanks already do.

Anarchy In the U.K. (Again)

Brexit is coming.  An the United Kingdom is completely unprepared for it.

The British Parliament has been trying to find a deal that would allow the U.K. to leave the European Union with some sort of financial or economic ties with that bloc, and every effort to come up with a deal that would spare the British people an abrupt transition to being left on its own has failed. The U.K. is scheduled to leave the European Union this coming Friday (April 12) and Tory Prime Minister Theresa May is scrambling to get a deal working with . . . the Labour opposition. Led by a guy some of called a Marxist.  Yeah, that'll work out fine.

Many of the British people who support Brexit pine for an imperial past, a strain that has persisted  long after the Empire was dismantled.  People saw that strain fifty years ago when the British sent troops to put down a pro-independence faction in one of their remaining colonies . . . the West Indian island of Anguilla.  It was obvious when Margaret Thatcher allied herself so closely to Ronald Reagan and dragged her heels negotiating the fate of Hong Kong with China.  And of course, there was the Falklands War.  Britain is still a global power in terms of its influence and multilateral activity, but it's going to end up being a global pretender, the way things are going with a backward scheme like Brexit.

The only consolation I get from watching the Brexit controversy is that there's at least one national government out in the world as screwed up as the American government.    

Luck Of the Irish

Ireland became the latest country in the sixteen-nation zone that uses the euro currency to apply for a bailout, totalling nearly $140 billion, which would come from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The Irish Finance Ministry reported that the money was needed for a credit line for its state-backed banks, which have lost $69 billion as the Irish economy has tanked and its deficit has soared to 32 percent of its gross domestic product - ten times the amount allowed in the Eurozone. The Irish economy - not too long ago the envy of Europe - is strugling in the aftermath of the global recession and the Irish government's own decision to insure its banks against all losses. The Iberian countries - Spain and Portugal - may be next, due to their heavy borrowing costs on bond markets.

In what also amounts to a cosmic joke, several British banks are also lending money to Ireland in an effort to protect their own investments in Irish banks. This amounts to the Irish taking a helping hand from their stepmother country, a country that oppressed the Irish people for nine hundred years. Hmm, I wonder what the interest rates are on a loan like that?

Ireland hopes to get its books in order by 2014 with a program of severe budget cuts and tax increases. The prospect of being at the mercy of bankers from the United Kingdom should give them some incentive to get it done sooner.

Savage Ban

I've always wanted to go to the United Kingdom. I've always hoped to see the White Cliffs of Dover, travel through the Midlands countryside, eat fish and chips, enjoy the sun and sand at Paignton, explore London and Glasgow, and yes, make a pilgrimage to Abbey Road Studios, birthplace of rock albums that changed my life. The bad news is I can't do that, because I lack the time and the money to do so.

The good news is, that jerk Michael Savage can't go either.

Savage, a right-wing talk radio host known for incendiary propaganda, has been banned from the U.K. for his hateful rhetoric. Among others banned from Britain are Samir Kantar, a Lebanese man once jailed for murdering four Israelis, and Russian gangsters Artur Ryno and Pavel Skachevsky, who were sentenced to ten years in a Russian jail for their role in racially motivated killings of 19 people.

Savage complained about the band imposed on him by the Office of the Home Secretary in London, and says he's considering legal action. Of Home Secretary Jaqcui Smith's action, he said, "She's linking me with mass murderers who are in prison for killing Jewish children on buses? For my speech? The country where the Magna Carta was created?"

Gee, why could Savage possibly be banned? Maybe because it's because he called the Koran a "book of hate" and dismissed autistic children with autism by saying in "a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out" in most cases.

Flying on British Airways across the Atlantic suddenly seems less scary knowing I wouldn't have to sit next to Savage on the plane.