To think Boris Johnson should be be thrown out of Tory party?

[crunchymint]

He is clearly racist. He should be thrown out of the Conservative party.

You have several posters who seem to think any criticism of Johnson is an erosion of free speech- one even thinks free speech in the U.K. is on a par with Zimbabwe.

Oh I agree, the fuckwit who made the Zimbabwe comparison should be ignored, just the same as those who tried to insinuate that any push back is feeded by coded racism

Why would champions of free speech get so upset about Johnson being called a twat? I don’t get i

Because you are obviously treating it as a left right issue, considering he has support by many polls on not apologising nor being wrong or apologising it is not the proponents of free speech trying to report him to the police.

claiming anyone who thinks Johnson’s comments were out of order is a gerbola eater or sending postcards from another planet is quite an odd way to conduct a debate too- I dunno what kind of tactic it is, but it comes across quite stupid (am I not allowed to say that?!)

It makes no sense, probably same as my posts, but however you spin it Boris's comments has not only sparked debate but is tapping into a mindset that helped the rise of trump, you can ignore it and give out the memes of turkeys voting for christmas/uneducated being led by muh right wing media etc etc

Blaming the right is absolving many contributing factors

Back to the OP, no Boris was not racist

sweet

It is a very new phenomenon

I grew up in brum and none of my Muslim girl friends did anything other than cover their legs.

1970/80. None had ever seen a burkha

I agree Cuppa - it's a very recent phenomenon & I hate the fact that it is being normalised.

Justanotherlurker
Linkinging to laughable publications such as vox and try and invent a term of coded racism diminishes your appeal to authority.

I'm flattered to be termed 'woke', with my decidedly moderate, middle-of-centre political background I'm unlikely to be accorded such an accolade irl. I used Vox because it is an accessible source, and a short article which contained specific examples, however if you require a more nuanced discussion I would recommend:

Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class
Ian Haney López (Oxford University Press, 2014) 277 pages with notes and index

You might also look up articles on rhetoric and rhetorical strategies, such as the use of negative collocation. Or read a basic introduction to linguistics and language use.

Boris Johnson would be more than familiar with rhetorical devices and how to deploy them, it would have been part and parcel of his education.

I agree Cuppa - it's a very recent phenomenon & I hate the fact that it is being normalised

It's worn by less than 1% of UK Muslim women.

I just realised it's not flattering, it could just mean you are so far to the right that anyone moderate seems far left.

I just realised it's not flattering, it could just mean you are so far to the right that anyone moderate seems far left.

And you would be wrong, I am firmly centre left. When you personally try and place yourself into the victim narrative with making comments about hoodies and scarves, then the term woke perfectly sums you up.

I'm also well aware of dog whistle racism, being on the receiving end of it quite a lot over the years, and yet I can still see the majority of your posts have been about attacking the man not the ball.

It's being normalised because Saudi has been pumping vast amounts of cash into whabbism mosques to make it normalised.

It wasn't common in Iran in the 70s either, nor kabul. How anyone can see photos of those places in 70s, women free, laughing.. Happy to now, walking round totally enshrouded.

Imagine changing the word woman to black..

Black person /people.

BTW, two public schools have been in the papers after horrific abuse has been un covered.

Downside and Ampleforth. Catholic. If you read the testimony from the boys.. Who didn't want to speak out agaisnt these good priests, one thought his abuse was special because it must be because the monk was godlike.. And god is good.

Rowan Atkinson has defended Boris... I think he is right. Abuse, cohesion thrives on secrecy and shrouded in cloak of you can't touch us we are above everything even ridicule.

That's how Catholic priests have been able to abuse for so very long. Open everything up, debate...

That true MrsA

But I also think it’s become Political for younger Muslims

We shall practise our religion how we feel we want to and be proud to and no one can mistake what religion you are if you are wearing a niqab

But the influence as to why is from w
a very restrictive, conservative and puritanical version of Islam

Wahhabism has no place in a modern society which in essence goes against having freedom but it has been allowed to expand with Saudi money while governments across Europe turned away

They have woken up now.

*I've lived in Zimbabwe and have close connections there whose family members were taken in the night by armed men, never to be seen again. Some of the family are living in exile in different countries, some separated from their children. Some have been awarded political asylum in the UK even under our strict asylum laws.

Over the years, I've seen various tits in the UK love to co-opt the sufferings of Zimbabweans for their hyperbole. Frankly in the UK we can be grateful that itishyperbole.

I'd never recommend complacency about freedom of speech in any country, but trying to pretend the UK is like Zim... Eugh.*

An emotive point, and had I drawn reference to repressive violence, rapes, stealing of land and so on, it would be fair enough, but those are separate issues. I didn't do that at all - I've made no reference to those things, didn't attempt to "co-opt" suffering of which I am well aware.

I want to be crystal clear, here, it is not hyperbole or something at the end of an imagined slippery slope we are talking about. Right now in the UK you can be taken by the police and imprisoned for expressing opinions, or making jokes, about things the state has decided you cannot express, quite apart from its already existing and legitimate panoply of provisions against inciting violence and other crimes etc. We live in a state that has dispensed completely, with the Investigatory Powers Act the most recent, with the need to provide any reason or authorisation or investigation to surveil its citizens in every intrusive way at its disposal, including law abiding citizens. The situation we find ourselves in now, not in some hypothetical scenario, is that we do not have basic human rights in a real, protected sense. Which I expect is all fine when it's someone else making a bad joke you find objectionable, perhaps if we let that fly for long enough it will be us raising safeguarding concerns about the concept of the cotton ceiling or women's spaces - something that can very easily be categorized as hate speech.

These are red lines we have in the past criticised the USSR, Communist China and yes, Zimbabwe for crossing, and we're over them. The laws are made, the policies rolled out, and the arrests are happening now (about once every 2 or 3 hours in the UK if I recall correctly).

Wow. Throwing off the top of a at all building? Isn't that one way isis kills people?

@Ghost - I did not ignore your points, I think you raise some interesting ones that deserve a longer response, which I'll do when circumstances permit.

Don’t you think it’s worrying women in Iran in the 70’s had so much freedom and now they are forced to wear the burqa. Do you think the more the burqa is accepted in the UK this could happen here one day?

Gin96 I don’t like the burqa and I don’t think women should have to dress ‘modestly’.
I also don’t like heavy make up or very sexualised clothes and high heels either because they are another form of restriction.
If women want to wear either of their own free will it isn’t my place to chastise them for it though.
I’m happy to debate either position but I’m not happy to compel people to comply with my beliefs.
I can’t see how Iran mandating the wearing of Islamic dress is any different from the UK banning the wearing of Islamic dress.

The difference is that these countries are enforcing different rules of dress for men and women. I think the UK - being an equal society - should enforce one rule for all.

mirialis we enforce different rules of dress for men and women in this country too just not by law. For consistency and equality we shouldn’t mandate the wearing or not wearing of Islamic dress by law either.

Open everything up, debate...

Debate is fine, but pillarboxes and bank robbers is disrespectful and nasty. He could easily have made the same points he did without bringing any of that up.

I have a lot of feelings about mandatory religious dress because my mother, who was abusive and controlling, used the idea of religious morality to justify dressing me in clothes that were either ridiculously too young for me or more fitting to someone from a conservative religious sect than a bog standard Scottish vaguely Christian teenager. I can imagine (and I sort of know, through a Muslim friend) that abusive narcissistic parents who are Muslim probably insist on conservative dress and control a whole load of other things their kids do, using their religion as the justification and using exclusion from the family as a threat for non-compliance. I wonder what that feels like, if in order to escape abuse you're going to be shunned in your own community, while you've never really experienced what it was like to live outside it. And I have wondered whether Muslim girls in that situation would be as grateful for mandatory school uniform as I was - just the feeling of not being apart from the majority culture that you're growing up in. Sadly I think that this argument, which was a hard one to make at any time, is out the window now for another whole generation thanks to arseholes attacking grown women for wearing it and politicising everything to the point where you either have to stand up for the rights of Muslim women to wear what the fuck they want, or you're in with the racist nutters. Boris Johnson among them. Remember his job before he became an MP was writing utter mince about the EU, polarising opinion about it and lowering the debate to the level of bendy fucking bananas. He's just doing the same now but with Islam.

mirialis we enforce different rules of dress for men and women in this country too just not by law. For consistency and equality we shouldn’t mandate the wearing or not wearing of Islamic dress by law either

It is the question of law that is relevant here. We don't need to "mandate the wearing/not wearing of Islamic dress" - we need to say no face covering in schools and civic buildings and that employers and businesses have the freedom to enforce this rule too. What people want to do in personal time and spaces is up to them.

Yes poor women in Iraq. No choice.

I think it’s a little bit of British privilege for British born Muslim women insisting that they want to wear the burka.

I think it might be a much better idea if they didn’t wear their burkas for a week in support of their sisters across the Muslim world who have no choice and very little rights.

I wonder what all these enlightened husbands and fathers and brothers in the UK would think of that.

Interesting to see if all these women who apparently choose to wear this could choose to discard it for a week.