Category: #ToryCluelessness

#ToryCluelessness

Boris Johnson’s unused water cannon sold for scrap at £300,000 loss

From The Guardian: Three unusable water cannon bought by Boris Johnson when he was mayor of London have been sold for scrap, at a net loss of more than £300,000.

Johnson bought the crowd-control vehicles from the German police in 2014, in anticipation of social unrest, without checking whether they could be used on London’s streets. In one of his most humiliating episodes as mayor the then home secretary Theresa May banned them from use anywhere in England and Wales. It left the capital’s taxpayers with three expensive white elephants.

The current mayor, Sadiq Khan, pledged to claw back as much money as possible on the redundant vehicles by selling them. But after almost two years the mayor’s office admitted defeat in its attempt to find a reputable buyer.

It announced on Monday that it has agreed to sell the vehicles for just £11,025. The fee recoups 3.4% of the £322,834.71 spent on the vehicles since 2014.

The 25-year-old vehicles cost £85,022 in 2014, but they were found to be riddled with faults and required expensive modification to make them road worthy. This included £32,000 to comply with the city’s low emission zone, and almost £1,000 on new stereos.

All at sea: Raab’s ignorance of Dover-Calais stuns critics

From the Guardian: Opposition parties and pro-remain groups have criticised the Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, after he admitted that until recently he did not fully appreciate the importance of the Dover-Calais crossing for UK trade.

Speaking at an event on Brexit and the tech industry, Raab said that consumers would lose out if new rules create delays at the border.

In comments reported by the Politico website, he said: “I hadn’t quite understood the full extent of this, but if you look at the UK and look at how we trade in goods, we are particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing.

“And that is one of the reasons why we have wanted to make sure we have a specific and very proximate relationship with the EU, to ensure frictionless trade at the border … I don’t think it is a question so much of the risk of major shortages, but I think probably the average consumer might not be aware of the full extent to which the choice of goods that we have in the stores are dependent on one or two very specific trade routes.”

Politicians and campaigners, including the scientist and broadcaster Brian Cox, reacted to his words with surprise and alarm: “How could it possibly come as a suprise to Dominic Raab that our most important trade gateway is that which is closest geographically to our most important market?”

[Read full article on Guardian website…]

Karen Bradley admits she didn’t know anything about Northern Irish politics before she became secretary of state for NI

From iNews: Karen Bradley, secretary of state for Northern Ireland, has said that she didn’t understand the country’s political system until she took on her job.

“I didn’t understand things like when elections are fought, for example, in Northern Ireland – people who are nationalists don’t vote for unionist parties and vice versa. So, the parties fight for election within their own community.”

[Read article on iNews website…]

“Ignore Boris Johnson”, Foreign Office officials tell Irish government

From Sky News: Boris Johnson is being actively undermined by officials within his own department over Brexit negotiations, it can be revealed.

Sky News has learnt that Foreign Office officials told Ireland’s Government “not to listen to whatever he had to say” ahead of Mr Johnson’s visit to Dublin a few weeks ago.

Extraordinarily, officials in Whitehall were very open with their counterparts in the Irish capital to “ignore the public utterances” of Britain’s chief diplomat.

Ahead of the visit, Irish officials were told “not to mind a word of what he says” – implying the Foreign Secretary was not speaking on behalf of the UK Government.

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The joke’s over – how Boris Johnson is damaging Britain’s global stature

From New Statesman: A former British ambassador, requesting anonymity, called Boris Johnson “the least deserving and least qualified foreign secretary of modern times, who has successfully lived down to all expectations”. A senior European diplomat based in London concurred, saying that Johnson was “not taken seriously as a foreign policy actor” and was damaging British interests. He reckoned that three-fifths of the 27 EU ambassadors in London quite like Johnson but consider him ill-suited to the job, while the remaining two-fifths “positively dislike him”.

[Read full column on New Statesman website…]

Tory Brexit Secretary boasts about knowledge of EU countries then talks about “Czechoslovakia”

david davis czechoslovakiaFrom Pride’s Purge: “David Davis, the man who is supposed to be in charge of Britain’s disastrous Brexit negotiations, is so incompetent he hasn’t noticed Czechoslovakia has not existed since 1993: ‘We’ve got a pretty good idea of what the economic interests are of every single member state. Germany, Austria, Holland and Czechoslovakia are all without governments at the moment.’

“To make matters worse, the embarrassing error came while bungling Davis was boasting about how he and his team ‘have a good knowledge of what European countries want’ from Brexit.

“And yes – the Czechs, Slovaks and other European countries have noticed what a blundering idiot our chief negotiator is – and they are openly laughing at us.”

[Read full post on Pride’s Purge…]

Key line of Theresa May’s conference speech stolen from TV programme

Sky News presented video evidence that a key line of Theresa May‘s comedy act – sorry, party conference speech – was nicked off TV show The West Wing.

#ToryPlagiarism #ToryCluelessness: Video evidence that a key line of #TheresaMay's comedy act – sorry, conference speech – was nicked off TV show The West Wing.

Posted by Stop The Tories Channel on Thursday, October 5, 2017

 

Journalist of the year: “Our foreign secretary is an international joke”

Rachel Sylvester, the Political Studies Association’s 2016 Journalist of the Year, writes in the Times: “According to diplomatic sources, even officials at the Trump White House ‘don’t want to go anywhere near Boris Johnson because they think he’s a joke’. If that seems ironic, one minister says: ‘It’s worse in Europe. There is not a single foreign minister there who takes him seriously. They think he’s a clown who can never resist a gag.’

[Link to full article in The Times…] (paywalled, but registration allows two free articles per month)

Journalists destroy Theresa May over Dementia Tax

This video footage from a Theresa May press conference has been viewed over 3 million times on Facebook.

Theresa May destroyed over dementia tax

Posted by The Independent on Monday, May 22, 2017

 

Conservatives admit they don’t know how much school breakfasts pledge will cost

From The Independent: The Conservative Party has reportedly admitted it has no idea how much money it will cost to provide free school breakfasts to every primary school pupil in England. In her manifesto last week, Theresa May announced plans to replace universal lunchtime meals for infants with free breakfasts for every pupil up to the age of 11.

[Read article on Independent website…]

Boris Johnson talks about alcohol in Sikh temple

From the Guardian: Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson caused a “livid” reaction from a worshipper in a Sikh temple by discussing his enthusiasm for a boost in the whisky trade. Alcohol is forbidden under some Sikh teachings.

Boris said to the crowd in the temple: “I hope I’m not embarrassing anybody here by saying that when we go to India, we have to bring ‘clinky’ in our luggage. We have to bring Johnnie Walker.”

“There is a duty of 150% in India on imports of Scottish whisky. So we have to bring it in for our relatives duty free. Imagine what we could do with a trade deal with India, which there will be, because then the tariffs would go.”

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