BORIS Johnson scuttling out of Bute House like the Cowardly Lion from Wizard of Oz to avoid protesters was an embarrassing sight. This preposterous, buffoonish jester heads the most right-wing government in UK history. His turbo-charged no-deal Brexit “plan” will cost jobs, devalue the pound, bankrupt business and wreck the economy.
READ MORE: Johnson accused of ‘running feart’ from voters in Scotland after visit
Johnson is rightly despised by millions of Scots. This Eton-educated Hooray Henry can barley conceal his contempt for the “lower orders”, and his fiesta of empire nostalgia has almost zero significance. It appeals only to those Orange Order bigots and other half-crazed Union Jack-waving knuckle-draggers who can rightly be branded credulous morons. Their only pleasure is to gloat at the idea of Scotland suffering the same fate as the rest of the UK as a result of a no-deal Brexit.
READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon challenges Boris Johnson to indyref2 TV debate
Britain plunges towards a no-deal exit under conditions in which one study said that the economy may already be in a recession, with forecasts of a 10% collapse in the value of the pound and an increase in inflation to above 4%.
Boris Johnson’s visit to Scotland was very much in the role of Emperor Caligula visiting one of Rome’s rebellious provinces.
The only positive from Boris Johnson’s visit was that it nailed the lies that 1) Ruth Davidson has any influence whatsoever over UK Government policy and 2) the Tories’ Scottish branch has been detoxified. The “Scottish” Tories are still a vipers’ nest of racists, bigots, Orange sympathisers and sexists who are motived only by greed and war.
Alan Hinnrichs
Dundee
IT is exquisitely appropriate that Boris Johnson, with no democratic mandate, should visit Faslane when venturing into darkest Jockistan on his mission to preach the glories of our Precious Union.
This vile place is the Holy of Holies of Britishness. Here we guard our sacrosanct talisman, our Ark of the Covenant, Trident, the sacred symbol of our divine right to possess the world’s most powerful machine for the mass killing of human beings, a privilege denied to lesser breeds.
READ MORE: Johnson doesn't rule out indyref2 during Scotland visit
In the bad old days they put people into cattle trucks and trundled them off to be burnt in ovens. Nowadays, thanks to wonderful advances in science, we can incinerate them while they are sleeping, having lunch, or watching telly. We operate a kind of home delivery system for obliteration, and Faslane is our Belsen sur-le-Clyde.
Human malevolence can conceive of no more wicked an object. Trident is the worst thing in the world. Since global suicide does not constitute a rational defence policy, it is also clinically insane. This obscenity is supported by all the Unionist parties, but rejected on principle by all who support independence.
With the best will in the world, I simply cannot understand why any thinking person should choose Trident and Unionism over independence and no Trident. Can somebody – anybody – please explain to me how someone can hate independence more than they hate Trident?
Brian Quail
Glasgow
BORIS Johnson refusing to allow indyref2 and then sneaking out of the back door of Bute House to avoid demonstrators is only to be expected; the man has no backbone. How can he best the 27 members of the EU when he doesn’t have the nerve to engage the independence movement of wee Scotland? That he lacked the courage of David Cameron shall be his sorry epitaph.
Iain Simpson
Edinburgh
RATHER than telling Boris that 62% of Scots voted to stay in Europe, it would be more helpful to ask him “whatever happened to the George Cunningham threshold of ‘40% of the electorate’ when it came to referenda?” Why did it not apply south of the Border, and why was it only 37.5% which is certainly NOT a majority?
To make it even more plain to him we must repeat the fact ad nauseam that 62.5% of the electorate of the UK did NOT vote to leave Europe.
Only in this way can the lying propaganda of the Brexiteers be countered. We could also point out to him that if he wants to unite the country then he should have another referendum with 66.7% as the threshold for a leave decision, so that we wouldn’t have a repeat of 2016, where 2% of the voters overturned the will of 48% , causing all the trouble that ensued.
Henryk Belda
Penicuik
ON Monday’s ITV news at 6.30pm Dominic Raab said the government had been “very flexible” in dealing with the EU.
Asked to give examples he couldn’t, and when pressed he briefly blustered and waffled and said “this government has only been in power for a week”. That was disingenuous at best. In News at Ten later on Monday night most of the interview was cut, and we only heard Raab say the UK Government had been “very flexible”. I wonder who took the decision to edit the clip, and why.
John McArthur
Glasgow
WITH Dominic Raab making the news I thought the name “raab” deserved further investigation. I searched through my copy of the Dictionary of the Scottish Language and found the word, or slight variations, have been used to describe incoherent babbling of nonsense or a jumbled fall of rock, crashing down a cliff face. Both definitions are acceptable as a literal or metaphoric description of recent years.
Nick Aitken
Seattle, USA
OH dear, reader Thomas L Inglis (Letters, July 30) has fallen for an old trick. The “balancing the budget” words he quotes as being from Cicero were in fact written in 1965 by historical fiction writer Taylor Caldwell in her novel A Pillar of Iron. She made up the words and put them into her Cicero’s mouth to give authenticity to her own neo-liberal views. Arguably, SHE is now more often quoted than Cicero!
Jack Foley
Hamilton
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