Another humiliation for Johnson – this time over claim life expectancy gap is narrowing
Boris Johnson: The blond lummox is humiliated again.
How many times does Boris Johnson have to make a fool of himself before we can do something about it?
Let me answer that: We’re 44 days into his new Parliament, meaning there are a potential 1,783 days of humiliation to come.
And it’s always possible that he’ll manage to make himself look a berk more than once per day.
Conclusion: It’s going to be a long five years.
The current humiliation concerns his claim that the gap in life expectancy between the rich and the poor is narrowing; it isn’t.
Here’s The Independent:
The prime minister raised eyebrows when he told MPs the gap “is a disgrace”, then added: “None the less, it is coming down, and it will come down.”
In fact, official statistics last March showed women in the poorest parts of England are living three months fewer – while the average life span of women in the wealthiest areas is rising by almost as much.
The discrepancy between men in the richest and poorest areas has also widened by about three months, driven by a faster rise in life expectancy for the wealthy.
Alarmingly, decade-on-decade improvements in life expectancy began to tail off in 2011 – a shock change blamed by some experts on the government’s harsh austerity programme.
Alex Cunningham, the Labour MP who raised the issue, said: “The prime minister is renowned for making things up” – and there wasn’t much that BoJob could say in response.
And Ed Davey, the acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, said: “If the prime minister really wants to unite the country, he has to learn how to tell the truth.”
If we believe that, then the country will never be united because there’s no chance of Boris Johnson ever learning to tell the truth!
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Like you, I foresee an endless series of such “blunders” by BoJob over the next 5 years.
But there will be hardly any notice taken of this by the mainstream media. So the impact will be slight.
This has been one of the Left’s weaknesses. We just don’t have the kind of everyday voice that the Tories enjoy with the newspapers and TV.
The last election showed how we struggled to “cut through” with our message.
Johnson can continue to take a leaf from the Trump playbook by making ridiculously inaccurate statements -like the idea that the Life Expectancy Gap is narrowing- and the media just give him a free pass.
Many of the Labour, and, certainly the Lib Dem MPs are infected with what Lenin(I think) called “Parliamentary cretinism”. They think that, as they are in Parliament, if they say anything useful, that is all that is needed, and that the people will have heard.
A complete illusion. Their comments will be ignored and will remain unreported.
With his 80-seat majority, Johnson can just blunder on and still look as if he knows what he is doing.
Long term, I am not despondent, but I think we need to realise that we need to bypass the “normal” Parliamentary channels” with the cosy relationships with the media if we want to “cut through” to the actual people of the country.
As your blog does, Mike.
The truth of the issue is that Johnson and the Tory party do not feel humiliated, in fact they either ignore the issues or just tell more lies – and the press all9ws them carte blanche to do so