Boris Johnson - liar, fraud and just plain stupid

We have already contributed sometime ago.
It is about time he got his comeuppance.

I’m a legal nincompoop but I can’t imagine on what possible grounds Johnson could be convicted for lying in public office.

Surely the defence, the judge or the jury would have it that ‘caveat emptor’ would enfeeble the case against him on the basis that the Man on the Clapham Omnibus would know, or should well know, that stretching the truth and glossing the implausible is the stock-in-trade of any politician, and if you buy a pig in a poke you are most likely to end up with a flea-ridden dog with a terminal cough.

Some people have money to burn.

If you had read either the solicitor’s or the barrister’s opinions then you might have some idea.

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Some people take the appalling political situation seriously and the lies told by the Leavers should be dealt with appropriately.
I don’t have money to burn, but consider joining in on this prosecution money well spent.

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Well, " Misconduct in Public Office" is certainly an offence occasioned when:

• a public officer acting as such
• wilfully neglects to perform his duty and/or wilfully misconducts himself
• to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder
• without reasonable excuse or justification.

I’m not sure his performance gets as far as “neglects to perform his duty” - even though he got pretty bloody close in some aspects of his time at the FO so I assume they would want to go with wilful misconduct using the false claims regarding the £350 million.

I’m not sure you could actually demonstrate that and even if you could show that his behaviour met the bar for wilful misconduct I think you’d trip up at “to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder” because I think it would be extremely hard to show that his claims during the campaign amounted to an abuse of trust in either of his official posts - Mayor of London (from which he stepped down in 2016 anyway) and MP for for Uxbridge and South Ruislip - because they were in a clearly separate sphere.

I’ll be interested to see how it pans out but, honestly, I don’t think this one has legs.

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Well thanks for that, Paul, very interesting and as I said I’m a nincompoop and only adding my ten penn’orth to the discussion.

I guess any brief worth his salt and with an eye on the half a million of readies in the purse could knock up an opening case, and plead it till it ran out of dosh. :zipper_mouth_face:

I reckon he will enjoy the attention and the publicity he craves, like Trump, and will turn it to his advantage in whipping up the surly mob in his favour. But he does need to rethatch his head, that new coiffe spoils his Dennis the Menace ‘charisma’, which is more than half the political edge he has over Moggie.

Personally I’m all for putting him in No 10 anyway - I think that would complete the destruction of the Tories faster and more convincingly than just about anything else.

Ironically, while she is on office the Tories are, at least, united in hating her.

Finding him guilty and sentencing him to life imprisonment will not change the Brexit result, did the Remain campaign also not make false claims about the immediate disastrous effect of a Leave win?

You don’t burn your house down just to get rid of a wasps’ nest.

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No the Remain campaign made some claims about the effect of leaving the EU - since we haven’t actually left it is hard to know whether those claims will turn out to be true when we do.

However the very act of leaving is demonstrably doing harm to the UK so it is quite likely that they will turn out to be fairly accurate - especially as the Brexiteers are pushing more and more for “no deal” in the delusion that Britain still commands an empire.

Normally, no, but when the nest pervades the fabric of the house and where the wasps have eaten through all the supporting structures and timbers it might be the only option.

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Sorry Paul but George Osborne and others stated that simply voting to Leave would result in a loss of 500k jobs and a big cut in GDP, the opposite has happened.

The claim was a 500k hit on Jobs and a fall in GDP if we left, not just for the act of voting to leave.

It is clear however that the act of voting to leave has done harm to our economy, even though unemployment does appear to be down overall some 250k jobs have been lost because of Brexit GDP growth has been stunted and we have gone from the high end of G7 performance to the low end, investment generally is flat and inward foreign investment has plummeted.

Some data for you.

GDP

And while unemployment is down we are not better off - far from it as inflation has been higher and wages hit in real terms

With the result that household borrowing has hit all time highs

Business investment is flat

And finally the FTSE 250 is performing poorly compared with world indices (the 250 is a better index for UK performance - the 100 is full of international giants).

Source ($$) https://www.ft.com/content/cf51e840-7147-11e7-93ff-99f383b09ff9

It’s not looking so rosy is it? :rage:

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That’s not what Project Fear said Paul during the campaign, the effects of voting Leave would be felt BEFORE the UK actually left, this is from the same source that you used on another thread -

So which bit of 2-3% GDP loss and 250k fewer jobs compared to where we would have been is not harm done to the economy even before we leave?

Come on Paul, you know that the useless Remain campaign forecast immediate ‘armageddon’ rather than eschew the positive benefits of EU membership.

Ah, Tim, you’re changing the subject now :slight_smile:

Actually I’ll run with it - pausing only to note that just about no-one, not even Brexiteers are claiming much in the way of economic benefit any more.

Yes, the Remain campaign was awful - Leave was able to focus on a fairly simple, upbeat message and the “Project Fear” label was very effective against legitimate concerns as to how our economy would fare post Brexit.

Ultimately Leave vs Remain is heart vs head - Farage understands this with his don’t worry about the details, just feel the emotion campaign.

What has started to worry me in the last few days is that it is not impossible you could see a GE with the Brexit Party on low 30% of the vote and Labour & Tory stuck in the mid 20’s - FPTP could then see him sweep to power which might well be an extremely unpleasant experience1.

I’m not so worried about him storming home in the EU elections per-se, he’ll just displace UKIP MEPs.

1] I hesitate to get close to Goodwin's law but, you know, Germany, Italy and Spain in the 1930's were all theatres where the far right parties swept to power and the outcome wasn't good.
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Not changing the subject at all, Remain whilst perhaps not telling porkies like Boris were guilty of using stats and forecasts to scare people into voting a certain way, some of these of so-called forecasts have now been shown to be way off. No more to be said.

We are discussing the claim of 500k jobs and 3.6% of GDP lost

The analysis is 250k jobs lost and 3% GDP shrinkage compared with where we would have been

That doesn’t sound like “way off” to me.

Anyway, as I said, not even the Brexiteers are still claiming we will be better off.

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According to you.
A lot more to be said by the many people who want to remain and those who have changed their mind and those youn g people who were too young to vote and want the same educational chances as those that have gone before, with the right to study in European Universities.

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