araucaria
26th June 2022, 19:07
As to responsibility for all this, I could be persuaded to glance in the direction of a certain well-known henchman Boris appointed to his No. 10 office...
A thought from last summer: Dominic Cummings, from a mining family of Durham, famous for explaining how the Tories couldn’t give a toss for people like himself, is clearly a traitor to his own and his own integrity. Notice how for people like this, Boris Johnson has previous: Leo Boland, another “son of a County Durham pitman” was his chief executive at London City Hall from 2009-11. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jan/05/boris-london-boland
What happened is that this civil servant, who built his reputation by making other people redundant, made himself redundant on the basis that he was doing Johnson’s job, and so gave himself a nice golden handshake at 58, thereby saving the taxpayer not a penny on his two-year early retirement!
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/boris-johnsons-city-hall-chief-makes-himself-redundant-with-300k-pay-off-6565805.html
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/jan/22/greater-london-authority-chief-executive
In view of recent developments this fetish for Durham miners’ sons takes on some importance. Here is a video presentation which I confess made me cringe: pretty dreadful from someone on that sort of salary.
https://vimeo.com/15684975
More interestingly, there is the going ahead with electronic vote-counting despite possible fraud: “Leo Boland takes decision to e-count in London 2012”
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2009/leo-boland-takes-decision-to-e-count-in-london-2012
A major reason for my much lower profile on Avalon these last few years has been frustration with the tendency – starting of course with my own – to sound off on all sorts of subjects and make huge mistakes while doing so. This has nothing to do with fake news or gullibility in that regard. I have a decent brain, certainly of the kind that should help democracy work ; and for all that, there is too much noise to make the right call on just about anything. Let me explain why I have chosen this thread to make this statement.
With the hindsight of the last three years, I owe this Leo Boland a thousand apologies. Anyone who, to quote my above post, ‘made himself redundant on the basis that he was doing Johnson’s job’ now turns out to deserve universal applause. If they had a hundred Leo Bolands in Westminster,
then maybe the UK could extricate itself from the situation created by this king of narcissists, because as we know the only way to deal with such people is to walk away. Here the fact of self-preservation as the only possible way out I have placed behind the appearance of self-serving.
What we now see here is, somewhat unexpectedly, self-interest coinciding with the general good. In my earlier post, I focussed on the former. Today, focussing on the latter, I see we need to cut today’s dissidents a little slack.
The above leads to a very concrete position. Anyone escaping Johnsonism in 2022 is derided for their previous performance as a useless sycophant. Whether or not this is true is beside the point : this is an emergency : when you rescue people from a blazing building, you don’t check their credentials first, political or otherwise.
A thought from last summer: Dominic Cummings, from a mining family of Durham, famous for explaining how the Tories couldn’t give a toss for people like himself, is clearly a traitor to his own and his own integrity. Notice how for people like this, Boris Johnson has previous: Leo Boland, another “son of a County Durham pitman” was his chief executive at London City Hall from 2009-11. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jan/05/boris-london-boland
What happened is that this civil servant, who built his reputation by making other people redundant, made himself redundant on the basis that he was doing Johnson’s job, and so gave himself a nice golden handshake at 58, thereby saving the taxpayer not a penny on his two-year early retirement!
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/boris-johnsons-city-hall-chief-makes-himself-redundant-with-300k-pay-off-6565805.html
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/jan/22/greater-london-authority-chief-executive
In view of recent developments this fetish for Durham miners’ sons takes on some importance. Here is a video presentation which I confess made me cringe: pretty dreadful from someone on that sort of salary.
https://vimeo.com/15684975
More interestingly, there is the going ahead with electronic vote-counting despite possible fraud: “Leo Boland takes decision to e-count in London 2012”
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2009/leo-boland-takes-decision-to-e-count-in-london-2012
A major reason for my much lower profile on Avalon these last few years has been frustration with the tendency – starting of course with my own – to sound off on all sorts of subjects and make huge mistakes while doing so. This has nothing to do with fake news or gullibility in that regard. I have a decent brain, certainly of the kind that should help democracy work ; and for all that, there is too much noise to make the right call on just about anything. Let me explain why I have chosen this thread to make this statement.
With the hindsight of the last three years, I owe this Leo Boland a thousand apologies. Anyone who, to quote my above post, ‘made himself redundant on the basis that he was doing Johnson’s job’ now turns out to deserve universal applause. If they had a hundred Leo Bolands in Westminster,
then maybe the UK could extricate itself from the situation created by this king of narcissists, because as we know the only way to deal with such people is to walk away. Here the fact of self-preservation as the only possible way out I have placed behind the appearance of self-serving.
What we now see here is, somewhat unexpectedly, self-interest coinciding with the general good. In my earlier post, I focussed on the former. Today, focussing on the latter, I see we need to cut today’s dissidents a little slack.
The above leads to a very concrete position. Anyone escaping Johnsonism in 2022 is derided for their previous performance as a useless sycophant. Whether or not this is true is beside the point : this is an emergency : when you rescue people from a blazing building, you don’t check their credentials first, political or otherwise.