Day: July 17, 2020

 

 

 

 

Boris Johnson – Mayor of London – 2008 to 2016

His success in gaining the position of mayor was not unsurprising since the campaign came right at the start of the banking crisis which was part-attributed to mishandling the economy by the financial sector and the Labour Party and orchestrated “right-wing” attacks by the Tory dominated media on the integrity of the incumbent Mayor Ken Livingstone.

A campaign dominated by dirty tricks, smears and innuendo atypical of Johnson.

True to form Johnson stuffed his team with “can-do” decision-makers allowing him the luxury of removing himself from direct involvement in anything that went wrong while brazenly claiming maximum media coverage for himself on any success. His title of  “the Lovejoy” of British politics was well earned.

Jonson views politics as a game and his mastery of misinformation was confirmed by his claims of many unsubstantiated successes while in office. But the reverse is true.

He was an abject failure who failed the London electorate, frittering away well over £1.5billion on vanity schemes. Some but not all:

The Garden Bridge. Write off £50m.

Feasibility study for his “Island in the Stream” project for a new £100m London airport. Write off £6m.

Routemaster buses. Ovens on wheels, heavily polluting, useless. Purchase £300M (double that of a normal double-decker) Discontinued.

Water cannons. Riot control measures for subduing protestors. Banned by the government. Never used. Bought for £350K. Sold for £10K

The Olympic Stadium. Boris decided to convert it for uses other than athletics., Projected cost £190M. The actual cost of conversion was £325M. An overrun of £135M. Adding insult to injury the taxpayer has to meet the £20M annual running costs.

 

 

 

The Royal Albert Dock tender that never was

Johnson set up an agency, London and Partners, within his administration with a remit to attract foreign investment to London.

In 2011, the agency established an office in Beijing and shared the cost of the lease and working space, (70/30) with a major Chinese company, Advanced Business Park, (APB).

And there’s more!! Tongbo Liu, departed the agency early 2012, to work for ABP.

What’s the problem?

She was the head of London and Partners and Johnson’s personal representative in China.

Even more!!!

Between 2010 and 2012 Xuelin Black an Anglo-Chinese businesswoman gave donations totalling around £162,000 to the Conservative Party.

Donations that dried up after APB was awarded the contract.

The lady is married to the then Tory, Home office minister, Lord (Michael) Bates.

And she was also instrumental in putting a business arrangement in place with her suggestion of a bid for the Royal Dock site development to Xu Weiping, the head of APB.

She even registered a company called ABP London (China) and acted as an adviser, to help push the project forward.

In May 2013 the Greater London Authority granted Advanced Business Park (APB) the tender to develop the publicly-owned 35-acre site at the Royal Albert Dock, a derelict site opposite London’s City Airport.

The project is to include 3.2 million square feet of office space, leisure facilities, and 845 residential flats. China’s largest property investment, over £1bn, in the UK.

Critics say that his effort to attract significant foreign investment to London was praiseworthy but the closeness of his management team and the Tory Party with ABP suggested that the entire tendering procedure was not conducted on a level playing field, and as such, it was grossly unfair on the dozen or more bidders many of whom were British.

Sir Alistair Graham, former chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, suggested that there should be an independent investigation into the tendering process for the development. He said: “If, in fact, somebody is going through a sham process to ensure that someone they want to be successful in the process, but it’s not a level playing field for UK companies, and there have been some financial transactions of an intimate nature then that smells to me of a semi corrupt arrangement.”

The development of the massive derelict dockland site in the centre of the city is/was a blatant abuse of public office. It was a classic Tory Party fiddle ensuring, regardless of due process, the award of a major building contract to a favoured contractor.

View the video: (https://www.channel4.com/news/boris-johnson-london-propery-deal-china-albert-dock)

 

 

 

 

 

Entryism – The RCP flexes its political Muscle

“Entryism is a political strategy in which an organization or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger, the organization in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program. If the organization being “entered” is hostile to entrism, the entrists may engage in a degree of subterfuge and subversion to hide the fact that they are an organization in their own right.” (Wikipedia)

 

 

 

Policy Exchange

“Policy Exchange” was formed in 2002 by Michael Gove and others of the same ilk.

Its purpose was to “seek local, volunteer and free-market solutions to the public policy problem”.

It succeeded in its mission shifting Conservative Party thinking towards progressive policies through the creation of the “Big Society”.

And the UK public was sold on the big idea of a liberal society free of New Labours” centralizing control of anything that moved.

And who most espoused libertarianism? The ever happy go lucky Boris Johnson, journalist, and TV personality and Mayor of London, no less.

Not long after taking the office of Mayor, Johnson, appointed from “Policy Exchange” a number of untried free-thinking RCP individuals to key positions within his administration.

His successful campaign for office had been masterminded by Dan Ritterband, former director of “Policy Exchange”.

Immediately after taking office, Johnson appointed Nick Boles, the founder of “Policy Exchange”, to be his Chief of Staff.

Boles primary task was to find the right staff for the administration.

Of note is that under his editorship of “The Spectator” Boris routinely gave extensive print space to RCP writers and true to form his first senior appointments as London Mayor included Anthony Browne, “Policy Director” and Munira Mirza, (ex RCP) as “Cultural Adviser”.

 

 

 

 

 

The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) – an ideas goldmine driving the Johnson government

The Party was formed in the late 1970s by the academic Frank Furedi, who from the early 1960s had flirted with similar “International Socialist” and “Trotskyist” groups.

Throughout the ’80s, in universities in the south of England, membership blossomed as the Party, through its magazine “living Marxism” which espoused freedom from the controls of imperialism, took positions contrary to the government in just about all matters of political doctrine.

An example of their approach was the Aids epidemic which the group insisted was a state conspiracy designed to instal fear among the plebs of society, in so doing the government would be able to monitor and shape the sexual behaviour of workers.

The demise of the Party towards the end of the 1980s was partially attributed to the editorial policies of “Living Marxism” which published articles denying that ethnic cleansing was happening in Serbia supporting the “Black Propaganda of the John Major government.

Its response to a Channel 4 report on a concentration Camp in Trnopolje was that was no such thing because it did not have a gas chamber!!!

Frank and many of his disciples became disillusioned and following their departure the Party folded.

But that was not the end of their political activism. Though without a formalised structure the core membership comprising Frank’s closest confidants and followers continued to exchange views and political dogma through their media outlet, the “Spiked” website.

More details here: (https://brockley.blogspot.com/2010/09/triangulating-bobism-2-furedi-cult.html)

 

 

 

The Conservative Party and the RCP

Supposedly non-existent yet fully functioning RCP intellectuals gave serious attention to infiltrating the Conservative Party which had struggled to find an identity acceptable to the UK public after “Thatcher”.

Their political views were backed by many conservatives who supported a free market economy and right-wing organisations, namely “the British Institute of Economic Affairs” and “The Cato Institute”.

The political jingoism of the Conservative Party became heavily influenced by the RCP and Party policy was increasingly strident in its opposition to public demonstrations, including the Poll Tax, Anti-Apartheid and public spending cuts.

Political observers were moved to comment that the RCP and the Conservative Party were indistinctly separate.