News that Boris Johnson is likely to be named as the Tory candidate in the upcoming London mayoral elections has been warmly greeted by many within the political class. Johnson is widely seen as a major asset to British politics on the grounds that, whatever you think of his politics, he’s certainly a “character” and, we’re told, politics needs “characters”.
It was this same off-hand, middlebrow assessment of what matters in politics that engendered the equally underserved popularity of the endlessly loathsome Alan Clark. Clark - a casual racist who, as a Tory Defence Minister, helped arm Saddam Hussein and other odious regimes - enjoyed cult-hero status in the political world on the basis of his playboy lifestyle. He may have called Africa “bongo-bongo land” and armed mass murderers, but these were inconvenient details to be put to one side. The main thing was that Clark was a bit of a rascal, and his sort of rakish behaviour livens up politics no end.
It is of course, easy for some to see politics as occuring entirely in the realm of the abstract, with no costs or implications attached to the behaviour of the various actors - at least none worth detaining ourselves with. Easy for some, and harder for others.
Now, another Tory mediocrity stands ready to bask in the same dubious form of adulation. Johnson’s claims to fame – the quotes, the anecdotes etc - are too tedious to recount. Suffice to say that his Wikipedia entry describes him as “a self deprecating, straw-haired eccentric, disorganised and scatty”. And whilst all this is no doubt the last word in entertainment (at least for people who look to politics for their entertainment) the image rather glosses over aspects of Johnson’s career and his views that are altogether less amusing.
Take Johnson’s own “bongo-bongo land” episode: his recent comment that “we in the Tory Party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing” which elicited an understandably brusque rejoinder from the Papua New Guinean High Commissioner. Johnson’s reply was that he would gladly add the insulted nation to his "global itinerary of apology", racked up from past gaffs, and that he “meant no insult to the people of Papua New Guinea, who I'm sure lead lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity”. Johnson’s half-suppressed smirk was palpable. It was plain that Papua New Guinea might as well have been Narnia as far as he was concerned. His feeble explanation that his remarks had been inspired by “relatively recent” photos in a Time Life book, which he was “fairly certain” depicted Papua New Guinean cannibalism, hardly helped matters.
But more revealing still was Johnson’s approach to Spectator columnist Taki while Johnson was editor of that magazine from 1999 to 2005. Taki’s racism is of the decidedly non-casual variety. In his Spectator columns New York Puerto Ricans have been described as "a bunch of semi-savages ... fat, squat, ugly, dusky, dirty", Kenya (with echoes of Clark) as "bongo-bongo land", and black people referred to as “Sambo”. After Charlene Ellis, 18, and Latisha Shakespeare, 17, were shot dead in Birmingham in 2003, Taki blamed "black thugs, sons of black thugs and grandsons of black thugs," adding for good measure that "West Indians were allowed to immigrate after the war, multiply like flies and then the great state apparatus took over the care of their multiplications".
In response to this latter outburst by his employee, Johnson mumbled something about the column being “terrible”, but there was no apology and Taki remained in his job. Over six years, Taki’s racist bile enjoyed a home on Johnson’s Spectator magazine. Here, playing the bumbling eccentric toff, ruffling one’s unruly hair and burbling “cripes” or some such, simply doesn’t wash. Taki’s poisonous bigotry was conveyed to the world by the magazine Johnson was in charge of at the time, making Johnson as responsible as Taki.
Declaring his intention to stand for Mayor, Johnson said “I am convinced that in 100 years we will look back at the racism of our age and wonder, ‘what the hell was that all about?"’ Rarely more so, surely, then when considering the racism that Johnson blithely indulged at the Spectator.
Is Johnson a racist himself? Probably not. More likely the victims of Taki’s malice and his own infelicities of expression are people that he simply does not consider until he finds himself having to apologise to them. But this unthinking attitude is more than a personality trait (Johnson is entitled to those) - it goes to the core of his political outlook.
Johnson is what is often referred to as a “Libertarian”, once the name of a proud philosophical tradition but which has sadly now come to describe little more than the articulation of self-entitlement on the part of the privileged. The Libertarians of today’s Western political class mount strong principled arguments in defence of their own rights whilst exhibiting little concern or even appreciation of the existence of the rights of others. For the modern Libertarian, rights are not equal. His own rights are absolute, and if his exercising of those rights results in the rights of others being circumscribed then mere mention of this, let alone any attempt to ensure that conflicting rights are equitably reconciled, constitutes an unconscionable form of tyranny.
On climate change for example, Johnson muses that “People ... want the sweet moralistic feeling of telling someone to stop doing something ... the moralising mumbo jumbo becomes more important than the scientific reality”. For Johnson, the actual “scientific reality” of man-made climate change ushering in disastrous consequences for global society in the not-to-distant future is but an abstraction compared to the more pressing concern that averting the crisis may involve him having to “stop doing something”.
The right of Johnson to do as he pleases is central. By contrast, the right of humanity not to suffer what former World Bank economist Nicholas Stern warned could be “major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th Century” is something for Johnson to explain away. According to the development charity Christian Aid, climate change will create 150 million environmental refugees, cause acute water shortages for 1-3 billion people and trigger an agricultural recession that will result in 30 million more people going hungry. Johnson the Libertarian apparently has nothing to say on the rights of these people not to endure such suffering, or on the freedoms they will be denied by the consequences of climate change. For the Libertarian, rights and freedoms are for me, but not for thee.
If the climate change warnings are correct, Johnson opines, then “there is not a lot we can do, and we might as well enjoy our beautiful planet while we can”. Stern’s view is that the cost of dealing with the crisis would be around one per cent of global GDP by 2050. But plainly this is too onerous a price for Johnson if he is being asked pay any part of it, so what he wistfully calls “our beautiful planet” will just have to wither away, with all the associated consequences … for other people.
There is something slightly pitiable about Johnson’s self-absorbed moral-absenteeism, and his distasteful attempts to dress up his blasé sense of entitlement in the language of rights and freedom. When children are first born their focus, necessarily, is on their own needs. The essence of our development and growth into adulthood is our becoming aware of the needs, wants and rights of others, as we take on the responsibilities of family and society as a whole. The maladjusted Libertarianism that Johnson espouses is the political equivalent of arrested development – a permanent intellectual pre-adolescence where whatever intelligence and knowledge gained is placed entirely in the service of an effort to explain why one should have one’s own way at all costs. Children are more or less entitled to behave in this fashion. Adults, politicians and editors of political magazines, rather less so.
Johnson, however, merely embodies an accentuated version of broader trends working at different levels in politics. The veneration of the Clarks and the Johnsons by the political class on the grounds that they provide us with entertainment, irrespective of the less palatable words and actions of these individuals, indicates an indifference to the fact that, in the real world, politics has consequences.
Beyond this, the central philosophical creed of the capitalist West – Liberalism – has since the industrial revolution operated as the religion of bourgeois privilege rather than as the principled expression of human equality and freedom that it was originally conceived as. Domestically and internationally, the prescriptions of liberty, democracy and the free market have been applied in highly selective fashion by those in power. Johnson-style Libertarianism is simply a more obvious manifestation of this. The limits of his politics and of his valuation of liberty are an expression of similar limitations that run throughout our political discourse. In this sense, and contrary to his image, Johnson is no maverick. He is firmly embedded in a long established political culture and tradition.
In 2008, London may find itself, as a city comprising hundreds of ethnic groups and nationalities, run by a Mayor who displays, at best, an unthinking attitude to race relations. It may find itself, as a city which will both effect and suffer from the effects of climate change to a serious extent, run by a Mayor who fails to grasp environmental issues at even the most basic level. It may find itself, as a city of over 7 million people, run by a Mayor whose stunted view of politics contains little room for the legitimate rights and needs of others. At that point, Johnson the Libertarian, Johnson the character, may, for some at least, lose a good deal of his entertainment value.
David Wearing is a frequent contributor to UK Watch, and blogs at The Democrat's Diary.
News that Boris Johnson is likely to be named as the Tory candidate in the upcoming London mayoral elections has been warmly greeted by many within the political class. Johnson is widely seen as a major asset to British politics on the grounds that, whatever you think of his politics, he’s certainly a “character” and, we’re told, politics needs “characters”.
It was this same off-hand, middlebrow assessment of what matters in politics that engendered the equally underserved popularity of the endlessly loathsome Alan Clark. Clark - a casual racist who, as a Tory Defence Minister, helped arm Saddam Hussein and other odious regimes - enjoyed cult-hero status in the political world on the basis of his playboy lifestyle. He may have called Africa “bongo-bongo land” and armed mass murderers, but these were inconvenient details to be put to one side. The main thing was that Clark was a bit of a rascal, and his sort of rakish behaviour livens up politics no end.
It is of course, easy for some to see politics as occuring entirely in the realm of the abstract, with no costs or implications attached to the behaviour of the various actors - at least none worth detaining ourselves with. Easy for some, and harder for others.
Now, another Tory mediocrity stands ready to bask in the same dubious form of adulation. Johnson’s claims to fame – the quotes, the anecdotes etc - are too tedious to recount. Suffice to say that his Wikipedia entry describes him as “a self deprecating, straw-haired eccentric, disorganised and scatty”. And whilst all this is no doubt the last word in entertainment (at least for people who look to politics for their entertainment) the image rather glosses over aspects of Johnson’s career and his views that are altogether less amusing.
Take Johnson’s own “bongo-bongo land” episode: his recent comment that “we in the Tory Party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing” which elicited an understandably brusque rejoinder from the Papua New Guinean High Commissioner. Johnson’s reply was that he would gladly add the insulted nation to his "global itinerary of apology", racked up from past gaffs, and that he “meant no insult to the people of Papua New Guinea, who I'm sure lead lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity”. Johnson’s half-suppressed smirk was palpable. It was plain that Papua New Guinea might as well have been Narnia as far as he was concerned. His feeble explanation that his remarks had been inspired by “relatively recent” photos in a Time Life book, which he was “fairly certain” depicted Papua New Guinean cannibalism, hardly helped matters.
But more revealing still was Johnson’s approach to Spectator columnist Taki while Johnson was editor of that magazine from 1999 to 2005. Taki’s racism is of the decidedly non-casual variety. In his Spectator columns New York Puerto Ricans have been described as "a bunch of semi-savages ... fat, squat, ugly, dusky, dirty", Kenya (with echoes of Clark) as "bongo-bongo land", and black people referred to as “Sambo”. After Charlene Ellis, 18, and Latisha Shakespeare, 17, were shot dead in Birmingham in 2003, Taki blamed "black thugs, sons of black thugs and grandsons of black thugs," adding for good measure that "West Indians were allowed to immigrate after the war, multiply like flies and then the great state apparatus took over the care of their multiplications".
In response to this latter outburst by his employee, Johnson mumbled something about the column being “terrible”, but there was no apology and Taki remained in his job. Over six years, Taki’s racist bile enjoyed a home on Johnson’s Spectator magazine. Here, playing the bumbling eccentric toff, ruffling one’s unruly hair and burbling “cripes” or some such, simply doesn’t wash. Taki’s poisonous bigotry was conveyed to the world by the magazine Johnson was in charge of at the time, making Johnson as responsible as Taki.
Declaring his intention to stand for Mayor, Johnson said “I am convinced that in 100 years we will look back at the racism of our age and wonder, ‘what the hell was that all about?"’ Rarely more so, surely, then when considering the racism that Johnson blithely indulged at the Spectator.
Is Johnson a racist himself? Probably not. More likely the victims of Taki’s malice and his own infelicities of expression are people that he simply does not consider until he finds himself having to apologise to them. But this unthinking attitude is more than a personality trait (Johnson is entitled to those) - it goes to the core of his political outlook.
Johnson is what is often referred to as a “Libertarian”, once the name of a proud philosophical tradition but which has sadly now come to describe little more than the articulation of self-entitlement on the part of the privileged. The Libertarians of today’s Western political class mount strong principled arguments in defence of their own rights whilst exhibiting little concern or even appreciation of the existence of the rights of others. For the modern Libertarian, rights are not equal. His own rights are absolute, and if his exercising of those rights results in the rights of others being circumscribed then mere mention of this, let alone any attempt to ensure that conflicting rights are equitably reconciled, constitutes an unconscionable form of tyranny.
On climate change for example, Johnson muses that “People ... want the sweet moralistic feeling of telling someone to stop doing something ... the moralising mumbo jumbo becomes more important than the scientific reality”. For Johnson, the actual “scientific reality” of man-made climate change ushering in disastrous consequences for global society in the not-to-distant future is but an abstraction compared to the more pressing concern that averting the crisis may involve him having to “stop doing something”.
The right of Johnson to do as he pleases is central. By contrast, the right of humanity not to suffer what former World Bank economist Nicholas Stern warned could be “major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th Century” is something for Johnson to explain away. According to the development charity Christian Aid, climate change will create 150 million environmental refugees, cause acute water shortages for 1-3 billion people and trigger an agricultural recession that will result in 30 million more people going hungry. Johnson the Libertarian apparently has nothing to say on the rights of these people not to endure such suffering, or on the freedoms they will be denied by the consequences of climate change. For the Libertarian, rights and freedoms are for me, but not for thee.
If the climate change warnings are correct, Johnson opines, then “there is not a lot we can do, and we might as well enjoy our beautiful planet while we can”. Stern’s view is that the cost of dealing with the crisis would be around one per cent of global GDP by 2050. But plainly this is too onerous a price for Johnson if he is being asked pay any part of it, so what he wistfully calls “our beautiful planet” will just have to wither away, with all the associated consequences … for other people.
There is something slightly pitiable about Johnson’s self-absorbed moral-absenteeism, and his distasteful attempts to dress up his blasé sense of entitlement in the language of rights and freedom. When children are first born their focus, necessarily, is on their own needs. The essence of our development and growth into adulthood is our becoming aware of the needs, wants and rights of others, as we take on the responsibilities of family and society as a whole. The maladjusted Libertarianism that Johnson espouses is the political equivalent of arrested development – a permanent intellectual pre-adolescence where whatever intelligence and knowledge gained is placed entirely in the service of an effort to explain why one should have one’s own way at all costs. Children are more or less entitled to behave in this fashion. Adults, politicians and editors of political magazines, rather less so.
Johnson, however, merely embodies an accentuated version of broader trends working at different levels in politics. The veneration of the Clarks and the Johnsons by the political class on the grounds that they provide us with entertainment, irrespective of the less palatable words and actions of these individuals, indicates an indifference to the fact that, in the real world, politics has consequences.
Beyond this, the central philosophical creed of the capitalist West – Liberalism – has since the industrial revolution operated as the religion of bourgeois privilege rather than as the principled expression of human equality and freedom that it was originally conceived as. Domestically and internationally, the prescriptions of liberty, democracy and the free market have been applied in highly selective fashion by those in power. Johnson-style Libertarianism is simply a more obvious manifestation of this. The limits of his politics and of his valuation of liberty are an expression of similar limitations that run throughout our political discourse. In this sense, and contrary to his image, Johnson is no maverick. He is firmly embedded in a long established political culture and tradition.
In 2008, London may find itself, as a city comprising hundreds of ethnic groups and nationalities, run by a Mayor who displays, at best, an unthinking attitude to race relations. It may find itself, as a city which will both effect and suffer from the effects of climate change to a serious extent, run by a Mayor who fails to grasp environmental issues at even the most basic level. It may find itself, as a city of over 7 million people, run by a Mayor whose stunted view of politics contains little room for the legitimate rights and needs of others. At that point, Johnson the Libertarian, Johnson the character, may, for some at least, lose a good deal of his entertainment value.
David Wearing is a frequent contributor to UK Watch, and blogs at The Democrat's Diary.