5 ms·

British PM fined for parties during national lockdown

46 points by rob_c 5y ago

sorokod 5y ago
Boris Johnson is squeezing the war in Ukraine for all it's worth.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  One of the more disappointing aspects of politics is how leaders popularity increases at the first hint of a military conflict.
  - sorokod 5y ago
    Never let a good crisis go to waste and all that.
yanbianhobo 5y ago
I can’t fathom how in a year of a pandemic, worldwide economic instability and now a war that this continues to be a headline news saga.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Because the prime minister was telling everyone to make huge sacrifices whilst he was doing the opposite. People don’t like hypocrites.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    There's also an unusually personal dimension. I expect a majority of people in the UK have either lost relatives or friends during the pandemic, and have had to follow rules regarding hospital visits and funerals that were pretty hard.
    - pydry 5y ago
      "The people" dont decide what front page news is though and the media played this one up for sure. They (Barclay brothers/Murdoch/Rothermere) either decided Boris's days were numbered or that he needed knocking down a few pegs. This is in contrast to two years ago when he was golden and they couldnt sing his praises hard enough. At the time the government was deliberately sending infected elderly patients back to care homes where they caused thousands of dead bodies to pile up - a story that got a disproportionately low level of coverage despite mattering orders of magnitude more.
      - pasabagi 5y ago
        Well, the point about the party story is that it's incontrovertible. With the handling of the pandemic itself, the media could spin, smoosh and soft-pedal the facts to make Boris look 'Churchillian'. Since they're completely spineless, that's what they did. Going to a party while a sizeable chunk of people have traumatic memories of doing hospital visits through zoom will make those people hate you, and it's not very easy to smoosh, spin, or soft-pedal. It's just infuriating, and because the trauma of the pandemic was fairly evenly distributed, it has infuriated a very broad scatter of people. Presumably, some of them work in the news. Some of them are in the conservative party, even. I can sort of feel the fire in my belly over this one because I didn't get to visit my grandad before he died, nor a close family friend. My grandad had no funeral, and I missed the family friend's because of a positive covid test. I'm not a fan of Boris's politics, but the party thing definitely cuts in a different place. I expect there are a lot of people out there who will remember some genuinely hard moments, remember what Boris was doing at the same time, and feel deeply angry.
        pydry 5y ago
        >and it's not very easy to smoosh, spin, or soft-pedal. It's easy enough. Call it a work meeting. If the media believes it the people will too. It almost worked. If 50,000 grandmas dying needlessly can be successfully downplayed and spun as a minor whoops then cheese and wine in no. 10 ought to be a doddle.
  - nly 5y ago
    Hypocrites like the Chancellor of the Exchequer putting up income taxes while his wife has non-domicile tax status on her 8 figure annual income rumored to be structured through the Cayman Islands, I guess? I'm unsure whether we don't like hypocrites, or we like to promote them to office.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      Well his popularity has plummeted according to the polls.
  - yanbianhobo 5y ago
    I do get that, I simply don’t get how it was/is the most important thing happening in the country. I remember having to scroll past all this on the bbc app to get at the Omicron news.
    - viraptor 5y ago
      In a purely functional way, that makes sense. You already knew you're coming for omicron news and that you'll find them there - so you can scroll past the actual novel articles. More surprising or urgent things will be higher.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dTal 5y ago
  Tory party infighting. No other reason. If it were actually a question of scandal, there are much larger ones that could be receiving media attention, like the enormous quantities of money embezzled from the government (read: taxpayer) under cover of the pandemic, or the deep connections between Tory party / Brexit campaign funding and very dirty Russian money. But those would reflect badly on the entire party in power, not just Boris. So we don't hear about those. This is a nice, neat, Boris-only scandal. Perfect fodder for the periodic ritual cleansing of sins.
anamax 5y ago
Johnson is just following the scientist (Neil Ferguson).
mrlonglong 5y ago
Knives in the Tory party are out as the ambitious scent an opportunity to move up the greasy pole at the expense of one Boris Johnson, and no, I expect nobody will be sorry to see the back of him. Sadly those who would step into his shoes are just as bad as he was (or is!)
- illwrks 5y ago
  Excellent description. I also suspect any support and justification of the parties may suggest they did the same or worse.
  - mrlonglong 5y ago
    Why, thank you.
simne 5y ago
I respect Boris Johnson. His appearance in Kiev was fantastic; war is too far from end and this was really risky. And behavior of his opponents, remembers me favorite Russian "talking about filament in opponent's eye, when you have log there". I think, need something more serious, for really large penalty, which demands those people. Behavior of police is absolutely right, they have done their work. If opponents think this is too much evil, they should appeal.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  In the UK, his actions regarding Ukraine (which I also found surprisingly brave) are generally viewed as a cynical way of using your suffering to boost his poll numbers. If I was Ukrainian, I probably wouldn't care that much (since it comes with real advantages - weapons etc), but from a UK perspective, it does turn the stomach a bit to see the PM dodge question after question about his criminal behavior by awkwardly changing the subject to Ukraine. This is largely informed by how he has generally acted throughout his career. He's largely understood, even by his allies, as somebody without any real integrity.
  - simne 5y ago
    Yes, you are right, that we, Ukrainians, sure on some extent using advantages of what happen. But don't say this to other Ukrainians, because we pay very high payment for these things happening now. I already accepted Jefferson's: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants", while others are not yet. But I accent, for you may be blurred difference of crime from offense, but for developing countries these differences are huge important. Because you live in country with developed justice system, but we lived in totalitarian country, where justice system constantly used for persecution of people with different from official see. So we looking very carefully, where officials (police) could consider light offense (with light penalty). And we sure avoid, what could been considered crime with serious punishment.
    - pasabagi 5y ago
      Yeah, can totally see how it might come across as an incidence of 'lawfare'. However, the UK system doesn't work like that. It's very very strongly biased to protect people like Boris Johnson from any kind of prosecution. That is perhaps why Boris Johnson is the first sitting prime minister to be fined for a criminal offense. It's also not something that just came out of the blue. Details about the parties in his office have been being leaked to the press for months now. First, Boris denied any rules had been broken. Then, when videos surfaced, he fired people, gave speeches about how shocked and disappointed he was, and said he had no knowledge. Then, when an inquiry into it started, he said he couldn't comment on further leaks, because he wanted to wait for the results. Then, when a police investigation started, he said he couldn't comment because he didn't want to 'prejudice the investigation'. Then when he actually gets convicted, he makes out that it's not a big deal anyway. People feel like they are being laughed at: even if the crime itself is not totally awful (although any public official would normally lose their job over it), the principle of being able to trust elected officials to have basic, table-stakes truthfulness, integrity, and honour is under threat. Since the UK has no constitution, the democratic system is heavily reliant on politicians behaving with a reasonable degree of honesty and integrity. It's not a system with hard guarantees to protect citizens from bad actors. It's heavily reliant on politicians following conventions that protect the rights and liberties of UK citizens. A PM that follows neither convention, nor civil law, nor criminal law, is a very dangerous precedent in that system.

46 points by rob_c 5y ago

sorokod 5y ago

Boris Johnson is squeezing the war in Ukraine for all it's worth.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
One of the more disappointing aspects of politics is how leaders popularity increases at the first hint of a military conflict.
- sorokod 5y ago
  Never let a good crisis go to waste and all that.

yanbianhobo 5y ago

I can’t fathom how in a year of a pandemic, worldwide economic instability and now a war that this continues to be a headline news saga.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
Because the prime minister was telling everyone to make huge sacrifices whilst he was doing the opposite. People don’t like hypocrites.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  There's also an unusually personal dimension. I expect a majority of people in the UK have either lost relatives or friends during the pandemic, and have had to follow rules regarding hospital visits and funerals that were pretty hard.
  - pydry 5y ago
    "The people" dont decide what front page news is though and the media played this one up for sure. They (Barclay brothers/Murdoch/Rothermere) either decided Boris's days were numbered or that he needed knocking down a few pegs. This is in contrast to two years ago when he was golden and they couldnt sing his praises hard enough. At the time the government was deliberately sending infected elderly patients back to care homes where they caused thousands of dead bodies to pile up - a story that got a disproportionately low level of coverage despite mattering orders of magnitude more.
    - pasabagi 5y ago
      Well, the point about the party story is that it's incontrovertible. With the handling of the pandemic itself, the media could spin, smoosh and soft-pedal the facts to make Boris look 'Churchillian'. Since they're completely spineless, that's what they did. Going to a party while a sizeable chunk of people have traumatic memories of doing hospital visits through zoom will make those people hate you, and it's not very easy to smoosh, spin, or soft-pedal. It's just infuriating, and because the trauma of the pandemic was fairly evenly distributed, it has infuriated a very broad scatter of people. Presumably, some of them work in the news. Some of them are in the conservative party, even. I can sort of feel the fire in my belly over this one because I didn't get to visit my grandad before he died, nor a close family friend. My grandad had no funeral, and I missed the family friend's because of a positive covid test. I'm not a fan of Boris's politics, but the party thing definitely cuts in a different place. I expect there are a lot of people out there who will remember some genuinely hard moments, remember what Boris was doing at the same time, and feel deeply angry.
      - pydry 5y ago
        >and it's not very easy to smoosh, spin, or soft-pedal. It's easy enough. Call it a work meeting. If the media believes it the people will too. It almost worked. If 50,000 grandmas dying needlessly can be successfully downplayed and spun as a minor whoops then cheese and wine in no. 10 ought to be a doddle.
- nly 5y ago
  Hypocrites like the Chancellor of the Exchequer putting up income taxes while his wife has non-domicile tax status on her 8 figure annual income rumored to be structured through the Cayman Islands, I guess? I'm unsure whether we don't like hypocrites, or we like to promote them to office.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Well his popularity has plummeted according to the polls.
- yanbianhobo 5y ago
  I do get that, I simply don’t get how it was/is the most important thing happening in the country. I remember having to scroll past all this on the bbc app to get at the Omicron news.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    In a purely functional way, that makes sense. You already knew you're coming for omicron news and that you'll find them there - so you can scroll past the actual novel articles. More surprising or urgent things will be higher.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dTal 5y ago
Tory party infighting. No other reason. If it were actually a question of scandal, there are much larger ones that could be receiving media attention, like the enormous quantities of money embezzled from the government (read: taxpayer) under cover of the pandemic, or the deep connections between Tory party / Brexit campaign funding and very dirty Russian money. But those would reflect badly on the entire party in power, not just Boris. So we don't hear about those. This is a nice, neat, Boris-only scandal. Perfect fodder for the periodic ritual cleansing of sins.

anamax 5y ago

Johnson is just following the scientist (Neil Ferguson).

mrlonglong 5y ago

Knives in the Tory party are out as the ambitious scent an opportunity to move up the greasy pole at the expense of one Boris Johnson, and no, I expect nobody will be sorry to see the back of him. Sadly those who would step into his shoes are just as bad as he was (or is!)

illwrks 5y ago
Excellent description. I also suspect any support and justification of the parties may suggest they did the same or worse.
- mrlonglong 5y ago
  Why, thank you.

simne 5y ago

I respect Boris Johnson. His appearance in Kiev was fantastic; war is too far from end and this was really risky. And behavior of his opponents, remembers me favorite Russian "talking about filament in opponent's eye, when you have log there". I think, need something more serious, for really large penalty, which demands those people. Behavior of police is absolutely right, they have done their work. If opponents think this is too much evil, they should appeal.

pasabagi 5y ago
In the UK, his actions regarding Ukraine (which I also found surprisingly brave) are generally viewed as a cynical way of using your suffering to boost his poll numbers. If I was Ukrainian, I probably wouldn't care that much (since it comes with real advantages - weapons etc), but from a UK perspective, it does turn the stomach a bit to see the PM dodge question after question about his criminal behavior by awkwardly changing the subject to Ukraine. This is largely informed by how he has generally acted throughout his career. He's largely understood, even by his allies, as somebody without any real integrity.
- simne 5y ago
  Yes, you are right, that we, Ukrainians, sure on some extent using advantages of what happen. But don't say this to other Ukrainians, because we pay very high payment for these things happening now. I already accepted Jefferson's: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants", while others are not yet. But I accent, for you may be blurred difference of crime from offense, but for developing countries these differences are huge important. Because you live in country with developed justice system, but we lived in totalitarian country, where justice system constantly used for persecution of people with different from official see. So we looking very carefully, where officials (police) could consider light offense (with light penalty). And we sure avoid, what could been considered crime with serious punishment.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    Yeah, can totally see how it might come across as an incidence of 'lawfare'. However, the UK system doesn't work like that. It's very very strongly biased to protect people like Boris Johnson from any kind of prosecution. That is perhaps why Boris Johnson is the first sitting prime minister to be fined for a criminal offense. It's also not something that just came out of the blue. Details about the parties in his office have been being leaked to the press for months now. First, Boris denied any rules had been broken. Then, when videos surfaced, he fired people, gave speeches about how shocked and disappointed he was, and said he had no knowledge. Then, when an inquiry into it started, he said he couldn't comment on further leaks, because he wanted to wait for the results. Then, when a police investigation started, he said he couldn't comment because he didn't want to 'prejudice the investigation'. Then when he actually gets convicted, he makes out that it's not a big deal anyway. People feel like they are being laughed at: even if the crime itself is not totally awful (although any public official would normally lose their job over it), the principle of being able to trust elected officials to have basic, table-stakes truthfulness, integrity, and honour is under threat. Since the UK has no constitution, the democratic system is heavily reliant on politicians behaving with a reasonable degree of honesty and integrity. It's not a system with hard guarantees to protect citizens from bad actors. It's heavily reliant on politicians following conventions that protect the rights and liberties of UK citizens. A PM that follows neither convention, nor civil law, nor criminal law, is a very dangerous precedent in that system.