Tag Archives: burqa

Defence of Johnson amounts to a charter for the oppression of a vulnerable minority

By Paul Walter | Sat 11th August 2018 - 10:15 am

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In defence of Boris Johnson’s remarks about the wearing of the burqa and the niqab, his supporters have replied: “You need to read the full article to see the context”. I have now read Johnson’s full article. That is ten minutes of my life I won’t get back. It is remarkable that he gets paid a King’s ransom for such tosh. More galling, he has been doing it (certainly up to 26th July, three weeks after he resigned from the government) at our expense from 1 Carlton Gardens.

David Yelland, who was Editor of the Sun from 1998 to 2003, has tweeted:

I can attest, as a former tabloid editor, that Boris Johnson knew precisely what he was doing in his nasty, appalling column. He knows. The editors know. We all know. He is not fit to be PM.

— David Yelland (@davidyelland) August 8, 2018

Shrouded amidst a rather generalised and vaguely creepy paeon of praise to Denmark, cloaked in criticism of their Burqa ban, was some very nasty and unnecessary verbiage. I quote here his whole passage with the particularly egregious words in bold, so that I can’t be accused of quoting Johnson out of context: