Tim Farron has strongly condemned Boris Johnson’s extraordinary comparison of the EU with Hitler.
Tim said:
Under Hitler, Europeans were killing each other, now they are arguing over Eurovision.
The European Union is what happens when countries seek to learn from the past and work together. Boris Johnson’s latest intervention is what happens when people refuse to learn the lessons of the past and seek to spread discord by inventing conspiracies.
The EU has helped secure peace; Hitler destroyed peace and killed millions of innocent people. It is extraordinary that anyone even needs to point this out to him.
Paddy Ashdown also backed Tim:
People are fed up with yet another tuppeny tin-pot imitation Churchill promising to ‘fight them on the beaches’ while weakening our defences and wrecking our economy.
Johnson has been standing by his remarks, in the face of anger and ridicule, claiming it was all a tweetstorm.
* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
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9 Comments
These comments and others show that Boris Johnson would be a bad Prime Minister. If we always say the Prime Minister has to be the leader of the largest party then we could very well be heading for Prime Minister Boris or Prime Minister Corbyn.
Why can’t anyone in the Commons put themselves forward to be Prime Minister? Settle it via a vote in the Commons when Cameron stands down.
As long as the contender comes from the Commons and can demonstrate strong support it should be fine.
Well Eddie, effectively what a party at its most basic is, is a group of MPs who agree to back a particular person / group of people for high office, usually PM.
Once MPs from one party are backing different candidates for PM, then what you have is a split.
But I totally agree the Pm ought to be elected by MPs by a formal vote.
interesting that they didn’t have the confidence in our collective european identity to maintain the nation specific scoring system.
they kept it for the expert scoring, but homoginised the result of the public scoring.
why? the naked geopolitics of the spectacle a little embarrassing perhaps…
@Jedibeeftrix – the national televote results are fully available and tabulated on the eurovision website: http://www.eurovision.tv/page/history/by-year/contest?event=2113#Scoreboard
You will need to click on the “full results” tab to get the detailed televote results for each country.
As someone who has regularly attended Eurovision for many years it came as absolutely no surprise that (for example) the Latvian televote gave 12 points to Russia and 10 points to Ukraine. When we were there in Riga for the 2003 Eurovision the Russian minority were using the presence of the international media to very loudly air their grievances about what they said were official plans to suppress use of Russian in Latvian schools. But this was in response to what the Latvian speakers claimed was decades of suppression of Latvian in schools during the Soviet era. The obvious lesson is that two wrongs don’t make a right.
Equally it came as no surprise that the UK gave 10 points to the very poor Polish entry while the UK jury rated in 24th out of 26. Many proudly patriotic Poles live in the UK and will vote for Poland no matter what they entered.
My own view is that the public voting system needs further overhaul. It dates from an era when people lived in their nations of birth – hence the prohibition on voting for the country from which you call – but in an age of free movement of people it is woefully out of date. Eurovision needs to abandon the senatorial system where San Marino has the same weight as Germany and move to a system based on total votes cast across all the contesting nations.
Douze points , the Liberal Democrat entry , nil points , the Conservative one here !
Boris and Trump share bad hair, bad populist politics and will both be a disaster if they ever get to lead their respective parties.
Of course it nearly always is a mistake to bring Nazism into a political discussion.
But, the underlying point that Boris Johnson was making is that the EU, as it is now, is profoundly undemocratic. Many of us on the left had, ten years or so, come to terms with the idea that the UK should be a part of the EU. That started to change back to a more sceptical EU stance after the GFC. There were then disturbing reports that the Irish government weren’t just advised what their policy should be as regards their failed banks, they were actually told and threatened in no uncertain terms as to what would happen if they didn’t comply.
The change was complete for me when the people of Greece voted, in 2015, for economic change and against economic austerity. Yet the powers that be in the EU insisted on even more austerity. When the Greek finance minister Prof Yanis Varoufakis explained why even more austerity would not work when the previous austerity program had failed, he was ridiculed for not wearing a tie and not playing by their rules.
So, excuse me for defending Boris. He could have made his point better but he certainly has a very valid point.
And of course this Greek pensioner and the 50% of Greek young people with no jobs aren’t so concerned about the Eurovision song contest which, incidentally, isn’t an EU organisation.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/914720/crying-greek-pensioner-the-story-behind-the-poignant-photo/
Michael Heseltine is a former MP for Henley.
Boris Johnson is a former MP for Henley.
They do not always agree.