The reference here, of course, is to the announced intention of Mr Johnsons’s government to increase the number of the country’s jails, already very high and yet short staffed, so that even more people can be imprisoned and people jailed for certain crimes can serve their full sentences. This despite finding after finding that jail is both an expensive, damaging, and ineffective form of punishment.
And in the meantime, the nation’s leadership leads the way in matters of deceit and fraud and general loutishness.
The UK’s Supreme Court has just finished hearing the Government’s appeal against the Scottish High Court’s finding that Johnson misled the Queen as to his reasons for closing down the Parliament. It was not a matter of creating more time to prepare the Queen’s Speech. Instead it was to stop parliamentary scrutiny of his Brexit activities. Now we are again waiting to hear whether or not politics and the nation’s executive, and above all Mr Johnson, are above the law.
But what we can be sure of is that, in the past, Mr Johnson, our present Prime Minister, had been sacked twice for lying. No employer in his/her senses would employ a person with that record. Yet somehow or other, a lying toad has become a nation’s leader. And he has chosen a “cabinet” composed of toadstools. And the court kept hearing this week that the toad just keeps lying. Whereas the law of perjury operates in a law-court, it seems not to operate in Parliament or in the public street or in the TV studio.
When this was written, Mr Johnson had just come back from a meeting with some EU representatives, who had the unenviable task of being adult to his juvenile. Before going, he gave a jolly (though pernicious) description of himself as the “Incredible Hulk,” a character from the world of comics. And then off he greenly flew to terrorise the EU, but seems to have been terrorised himself, instead, absenting himself from a press conference that had been arranged. It was all hollow theatrics. The use of the word Flotsam in the title comes from a phrase I coined much earlier in this long series of stanzas – “Flotsam Johnson and Jetsam Gove.” At that time, the pair of them had just floated into view, thrown up by the raging tide. Now, these dreadful months later, they were riding yet higher.
Here is a second reference to the picture above, which shows Mr Johnson, the lying toad now leading and representing this country, bowing humbly and treacherously to the UK Head of State and symbol of the UK Constitution, another of our representatives across the world. The picture becomes more and more potent a symbol of the dire nature our nation’s state of health.
Our chaos, outside and inside, whirls about so fast that I forget what day it was more stuff happened. Maybe it was two days ago that we heard that Prime Minister Johnson’s advice to the Queen, that parliament should be closed down for several weeks, has been deemed illegal by the Scottish High Court. They found that he lied to the Queen concerning his reasons for the closure, the same careless lie he gave the country (it seems that we are all equal under The Lie). Mr Johnson and his hoodlum gang have of course appealed.
The Parrot has joined the circus, remember. He’s still there and in the stanza above, he’s reporting back from a conference of clowns he heard today.
All familiar shapes are now in question. In the UK, Brexit alone has been causing a great number of them to buckle. Democracy is one. What is democracy, after all ? The word keeps being thrown about, with so many conflicting claims on it. Today, Wednesday September 11th, when the UK Prime Minister was found in court to have lied to the Queen, Stephen Kinnock, MP, published an article in the Guardian in which he seems to imply that the 2016 EU referendum was “democratic” and the result should be “respected.” https://www.theguardian.com/…/lib-dems-revoke-article-50-un… The stanza above was written in opposition to that view-point.
This stanza was written on the morning of the day in September 2019 on which the UK parliament was shut down for several crucial weeks, at the behest of Mr Johnson and his streamlined cohorts. Johnson’s excuse for abusing the constitution in this fashion was yet another of his lazily blatant lies, into which – in this case – he dragged the nation’s Head of State, Queen Elizabeth. In doing so, he took Great Britain yet closer to the wire and far beyond disgrace. It was the act of a hoodlum, on behalf of hoodlums.
Events are taking place at a speed even more bewildering than “usual.” The references in this latest stanza, uploaded Sunday 8th September, already feel bit old as I write this, even though the events they refer to took place only days ago. Johnson began this last week as if starting a general election campaign. Then, on Thursday, his brother Jo resigned. In the meantime, his election plan has been frustrated in Parliament and he has ended the week being told that he would be found in contempt and jailed if he now goes ahead with No Deal. During the week, Johnson made a speech in front of ranks of police cadets assembled for a Toad election propaganda backdrop. The speech did not go down well, nor did Mr Johnson’s use of the police as political prop.
The word “Blob” was apparently coined either by Michael Gove or Dominic Cummings. I suspect the latter, for what it’s worth. These two worked together in the Education department at some point. “The blob” was how they described the teachers who resisted the crushingly exam-dominated changes Gove was to introduce to schools across the country, during his tenure as Secretary for Education (Cameron later demoted him). Yesterday evening, the Tory Minister Amber Rudd announced her resignation.
