Deconstructing Boris Johnson: a challenge
Mr Johnson is a very clever man, classically trained and a highly skilled rhetorician.
But then so was Enoch Powell. In the 1960s, my (politically Liberal Party) English teacher had us précis and critique the latter’s “Rivers of blood” speech and when coldly analysed it could be seen for the meretricious, tendentious and inflammatory propaganda that it was.
Public speaking is not at all the same as logical argument. It is about persuasion rather than a path to the truth. Socrates criticised the rhetoric-teacher Gorgias for that reason, saying, as Wikipedia puts it, “Morality is not inherent in rhetoric and that without philosophy, rhetoric is simply used to persuade for personal gain.”
Clearly the speech of a couple of days ago was yet another stab at demonstrating why Boris should be the Conservative Party’s leader in due course, and it is not impossible that some of what he said was more a twitch of the skirt to his audience than a platform in which every plank would remain should this promotion come to pass; but this is all the more reason to examine his publicly espoused ideology.
Whether you are for or against capitalism, inequality, globalism, Mrs Thatcher or Mr Johnson himself, I invite you to study BoJo’s argument, extract the relevant logical points and assertions of fact, and see for yourself what principles it proposes and whether, when drily dissected, it stands to reason.
(The text is from the Daily Telegraph of 28 November 2013.)
“The amazing thing about the funeral of Baroness Thatcher was the size of the crowds, and the next amazing thing was that they were so relatively well behaved. The BBC had done its best to foment an uprising.
As her cortege wound its way from St Brides to St Paul’s there were a few people so stupid that they heckled the mortal remains of an 87 year old woman. A few turned their backs. Some wore twerpish Guy Fawkes masks or carried signs saying“Boo”. But the mass of humanity was on her side, and when the dissenters erupted they were swiftly drowned by cries of shhh or calculated volleys of applause.
But there were also people from all over London, immigrants of every race and colour – people that the BBC might not have marked down, perhaps, as natural Thatcherites – and yet who had come to pay their respects to a woman who spoke to them and spoke for them as no other politician has done.
She interviewed two students, from UCL, who had plainly come hoping for a bit of the old G20-type argy-bargy. “We are pretty surprised at the lack of protesting,” said one of them.
“And,” the second one admitted, “we’re a bit disappointed.”
“The industrial disputes of the 1980s were primarily the result of Mrs Thatcher’s desire to destroy the power of the trade unions.” (45 marks).
“Margaret Thatcher’s achievements as Prime Minister in the years 1979 to 1990 were limited” (45 marks). And so on.
All they have to go on is Russell Brand and the BBC and what their teachers tell them. They weren’t around in the 1970s. I was, and I remember what it was like and how this country was seen. Our food was boiled and our teeth were awful and our cars wouldn’t work and our politicians were so hopeless that they couldn’t even keep the lights on because the coal miners were constantly out on strike, as were the train drivers and the grave-diggers, and the man who was really in charge seemed to be called Jack Jones.
I even did a painting to express my feelings about this country. It is modelled on the old advertisements you used to find at Taunton station – “Welcome to Taunton, home of Van Heusen shirts”. My landscape was a bleak and uninviting vista of the white cliffs of Dover, in the rain, with a few runty-looking gulls.
Four years later things were even worse as Red Robbo paralyzed what was left of our car industry and the country went into an ecstasy of uselessness called the winter of discontent: women were forced to give birth by candle-light, Prime Minister’s Questions was lit by paraffin lamp and Blue Peter was all about how to put newspaper in blankets for extra insulation.
“Today we are not only no longer a world power, but we are in the first rank even as a European one.” Two months later Margaret Thatcher had won her first majority, and began the process of reversing that view of Britain, in this country and around the world. In 1981 she took on the expert opinion of 364 economists who wrote a pompous letter to the Times, calling for a U-turn on her budgetary policies; and she routed them by delivering a supply-side revolution in Britain whose benefits we enjoy to this day.
In 1983 she took on Neil Kinnock and gave Labour an epic drubbing. In 1984 she squared up to the miners all right – but she didn’t provoke the confrontation, to answer the A level question. She was facing a challenge from a Marxist demagogue who had no real interest in the welfare of his miners and who had refused even to call a ballot before a strike whose avowed purpose was to bring down the elected government of the country.
By the time she was eventually felled by her own MPs – cravenly hoping that they would save their own seats – her achievements were not limited; they were colossal, and they were in many cases irreversible. She had introduced millions of people to the satisfaction of owning their own home; she had widened share ownership immensely; she had tamed the power of the unions and she had given back to management the power to manage.
Of the 193 present members of the UN, we have conquered or at least invaded 171 – that is 90 per cent. The only countries that seem to have escaped were places like Andorra and the Vatican City. In the period 1750 to 1865 we were by far the most politically and economically powerful country on earth.
The Victorians were so vain as to believe that because they had managed to extend their dominions so far, and because the map was pink from east to west, that this must somehow reflect the reality of divine providence: that God saw a special virtue in the British people, and appointed them to rule the waves.
Thatcher changed all that. She put a stop to the talk of decline and she made it possible for people to speak without complete embarrassment of putting the “great” back into Britain. And she gave us a new idea – or revived an old one: that Britain was or could be an enterprising and free-booting sort of culture, with the salt breeze ruffling our hair; a buccaneering environment where there was no shame – quite the reverse – in getting rich.
The other night I was sitting next to the great director and producer Stephen Daldry, who did such an imaginative job with the Olympic ceremonies, and so helped with the most amazing global advertisement this country has ever seen.
It is this same Daldry, after all, who was responsible for giving British kids their most vivid and terrifying image of Margaret Thatcher – the evil termagant from Billy Elliott. It was the cast of Billy Elliott the musical who had decided to keep singing one of their biggest hits – in which everyone prays for the death of Margaret Thatcher – on the very day she was laid to rest.
We forget how far London had shrunk by the time she became prime minister – down from 9m in 1911 to 6.9 m by 1981. It is now back up to 8.2 m – up 600,000 since I have been mayor. It was Margaret Thatcher – who put in the fixed link to Paris, who pioneered Canary Wharf, who greenlighted the Jubilee Line extension, who turbocharged the city, who cut personal taxation from 83 to 40 per cent, and laid the foundations for modern London’s success.
Gerard Lyons, my economic adviser, thinks we could be looking at growth of 4 per cent next year; and so I hope that in many ways it is NOT like the 1980s all over again. I don’t imagine that there will be a return of teddy bear braces and young men and women driving Porsches and bawling into brick sized mobiles. But I also hope that there is no return to that spirit of Loadsamoney heartlessness – figuratively riffling banknotes under the noses of the homeless; and I hope that this time the Gordon Gekkos of London are conspicuous not just for their greed – valid motivator thought greed may be for economic progress – as for what they give and do for the rest of the population, many of whom have experienced real falls in their incomes over the last five years.
But it was Mrs Thatcher who made the essential point about charity, in her famous analysis of the parable of the Good Samaritan. He wouldn’t have been much use to the chap who fell among thieves, she noted, if he had not been rich enough to help; and what has been really striking about the last five or six years is that no one on the left – no one from Paul Krugman to Joe Stiglitz to Will Hutton, let alone Ed Miliband – has come up with any other way for an economy to operate except by capitalism.
Ding dong! Marx is dead. Ding dong! communism’s dead. Ding dong! socialism’s dead! Ding dong! Clause Four is dead, and it is not coming back.
No one can ignore the harshness of that competition, or the inequality that it inevitably accentuates; and I am afraid that violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth.
And for one reason or another – boardroom greed or, as I am assured, the natural and god-given talent of boardroom inhabitants – the income gap between the top cornflakes and the bottom cornflakes is getting wider than ever. I stress: I don’t believe that economic equality is possible; indeed, some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.
When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 they faced a top marginal tax rate of 98 per cent, and the top one per cent of earners contributed 11 per cent of the government’s total revenues from income tax. Today, when taxes have been cut substantially, the top one per cent contributes almost 30 per cent of income tax; and indeed the top 0.1 per cent – just 29,000 people – contribute fully 14 per cent of all taxation.
I proposed that we should fete them and decorate them and inaugurate a new class of tax hero, with automatic knighthoods for the top ten per cent. Well, my friends, I am proud to say I have often been accused of being out of touch, but hardly ever have I produced so frenzied and hate-filled a response.
The other day I was stopped in the street by a woman who was sobbing with anger, and there were two aspects to her complaint. The first was pay disparity: she worked in accounts in a large UK firm, and over the last 20 years she had seen how salaries at the top end had been pulling away from everyone else. The next was her belief – which I believe is ill-founded, or at least only partly correct – that the London property market is dominated by rich foreigners, and that they had so driven up house prices as to make it impossible for her daughter even to hope of finding somewhere to live in London.
I think, in the end, I won her round, and I think she could see the logic of some of what I was saying. But sometimes in politics you have to recognise that you are dealing with feeling, not reason. After five years of recession people are feeling this inequality –much greater, after all, than it was in the 1980s – and rightly or wrongly they care about it.
To get back to my cornflake packet, I worry that there are too many cornflakes who aren’t being given a good enough chance to rustle and hustle their way to the top. We gave the packet a good shake in the 1960s; and Mrs Thatcher gave it another good shake in the 1980s with the sale of the council houses.
There are many explanations for this decline in social mobility, this apparent freezing of the canals of opportunity. Some put it down to assortative mating –the process by which the massive expansion of the female population in higher education has meant an intensification of marriages and partnerships between university-educated couples, and an increase in their economic advantages.
Indeed, she closed more grammar schools than Tony Crosland. But the question I am asking today is not what did Maggie do then, but WHAT WOULD MAGGIE DO NOW?, because I think she would have taken the question of social mobility very seriously indeed.
I think she would have instantly brought back the assisted places scheme, that helped 75,000 pupils find excellent education in the fee-paying sector. She might not have flooded the place with grammar schools, not under that name, because that would have been a U-turn, and we know what she thought of U-turns; but I hope that she would have found some way of making far wider use of that most powerful utensil of academic improvement – and that is academic competition between children themselves.
I might be wrong, but I hope she would find a way to use that device, to help bright children everywhere to overcome their background; and even if I am wrong, I feel sure that she would direct a beam of maternal and terrifying devotion upon Michael Gove and everything he does.
I think Mrs Thatcher would approve of this spirit of rivalrous emulation, as a means of driving up standards, just as she would approve of apprenticeships and every other means of giving young people the cunning and confidence to succeed in a place of work. She would have understood that the best hope of social mobility is an open and flexible labour market where people can move from one career to the next, as they do in America, and where business is always creating new jobs.
I don’t think it much matters, because the three are likely to turn out to be one and the same.
What would Maggie do on housing? She would recognise the squeeze on her core voters, their desperate shortage of homes; she would revive her great mission of a property-owning democracy and encourage the creation of hundreds of thousands of new homes in which people had at least a share of the equity themselves; and she would remember the lessons of Baldwin and Macmillan and Thatcher – that Tories are most successful when they help middle Britain to find the housing they need.
She would certainly want to upgrade the roads but we are talking here of the Thatcher who gave Britain its first and only High speed rail, not to mention the DLR. I think she would understand the capacity argument for HS2, though she might get it cheaper and get a bigger contribution from business. As for our aviation capacity, let me remind you of what Nico Henderson said in that valedictory letter I have already cited, on the eve of her accession.
Does anyone doubt that she would have the cojones to rectify that second mistake, and give this country the 24 hour hub airport, with four runways, that it needs? When she was in power there were flights from Heathrow to more destinations than from any other European airport.
What would Maggie do about the rest of the country; what about regional policy? I think she would now be fighting like a lioness for the union, and that she would comfortably see off Salmond, as she saw off so many smart alecs, because she would have instinctively identified the heart of the matter: that this isn’t about whether or not the Scots will be £800 per year worse off per head.
She would win the case for the union; but she would also recognise that England has been so far short-changed by devolution. So I like to think that she would look at what is happening in the great cities of England, where the population is also rising and changing, and a London effect is noticeable as people flee the high costs of the capital and start dynamic new businesses in tech and other sectors.
What, finally, amigos, would she do about Europe? Last year we heard Charles Moore tell us that she had decided to pull out, and since Charles has papal infallibility, I accept that – though it is obviously one of those things that is a bit easier to say to your trusty biographer when you are out of office and you aren’t immediately besieged by a panic-stricken foreign office and CBI and nervous international investors and the White House on line one saying you are out of your mind, lady.
At the moment we are claiming to have capped immigration by having a 60 per cent reduction in New Zealanders, when we can do nothing to stop the entire population of Transylvania – charming though most of them may be – from trying to pitch camp at Marble Arch.
First they make us pay in our taxes for Greek olive groves, many of which probably don’t exist. Then they say we can’t dip our bread in olive oil in restaurants. We didn’t join the Common Market – betraying the New Zealanders and their butter – in order to be told when, where and how we must eat the olive oil we have been forced to subsidise. Talk about giving us the pip, folks.
But at the back of her mind, during the negotiations, would be this comforting truth: that the stakes are lower than they were. The EU has shrunk to only 19 per cent of the global economy, compared to 29 per cent when she was in power. The big growth markets lie elsewhere, and there is a paradox in our relations with the EU. We joined in the early 1970s in what I have described as a mood of weakness and defeatism, and since then things have changed.
By 2050 Britain will be the second biggest country in the EU, and by 2060 – when I fully intend to be alive – we will have more people than Germany. And yes, I can see you gulp, and no, I don’t know exactly where they will all go either; though when I drive through the cities of the north I see plenty of depopulated space.
As for London, it will have lengthened its lead as the financial, artistic and cultural capital of the world, with more banks than New York, with more Michelin starred restaurants than Paris, less rainfall than Rome, more green space than any other European city – all true now, as it happens. We will have Crossrail two linking Hackney and Chelsea and Crossrail three taking you out to Margaret Thatcher international airport in the estuary.
But one thing will have gone forever – and that is the myth of British decline. Here in London we already lead in law, in universities, we have the largest tech sector and biotech sector in Europe, we export TV shows around the world. Five of the last 6 best-selling music albums were made in London and we have exported Piers Morgan to America.
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.
Source: http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2013/11/deconstructing-boris-johnson-challenge.html
Anyone can join.
Anyone can contribute.
Anyone can become informed about their world.
"United We Stand" Click Here To Create Your Personal Citizen Journalist Account Today, Be Sure To Invite Your Friends.
Please Help Support BeforeitsNews by trying our Natural Health Products below!
Order by Phone at 888-809-8385 or online at https://mitocopper.com M - F 9am to 5pm EST
Order by Phone at 866-388-7003 or online at https://www.herbanomic.com M - F 9am to 5pm EST
Order by Phone at 866-388-7003 or online at https://www.herbanomics.com M - F 9am to 5pm EST
Humic & Fulvic Trace Minerals Complex - Nature's most important supplement! Vivid Dreams again!
HNEX HydroNano EXtracellular Water - Improve immune system health and reduce inflammation.
Ultimate Clinical Potency Curcumin - Natural pain relief, reduce inflammation and so much more.
MitoCopper - Bioavailable Copper destroys pathogens and gives you more energy. (See Blood Video)
Oxy Powder - Natural Colon Cleanser! Cleans out toxic buildup with oxygen!
Nascent Iodine - Promotes detoxification, mental focus and thyroid health.
Smart Meter Cover - Reduces Smart Meter radiation by 96%! (See Video).