Boris Johnson's Blog, page 5

Boris Johnson’s dad bets £20 on his son becoming the next prime minister

Ed Miliband is favourite to become the next prime minister according to bookies followed by the London Mayor. Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, is third while Theresa May, the Home Secretary, is fourth.

Stanley Johnson has frequently spoken in favour of his son’s apparent desire to take over the Tory leadership when it becomes available.

He has previously bemoaned the fact that only MPs can challenge for the leadership – which would currently rule the London Mayor out of the race, though he is standing for a seat in this election – and called for reform.

“It does seem to me to be odd that the universe from which future leaders of the Conservative party can be selected is strictly limited to serving members of the House of Commons,” Stanley Johnson said.

He added: “I can't think of another democracy in the world which has so restricted a view of the eligible candidates for the highest office.”

Sign me up to fight Islamic State’s demolition of the past

Whatever you may say about the appalling modern history of Iraq, the territory itself is the cradle of civilisation. This is where human beings first learnt to live in cities; this is where they came up with fired bricks, and paved streets. This is the civilisation that gave us the first types of writing. Here is not just the story of the Middle East; this is the story of the entire human race. The friezes of the Assyrians are astonishing in their intricacy and beauty – lion hunts, battles, massacres, farming, weddings. With their arrangements of horses in profile, they are the direct and obvious ancestors of the Greek bas-reliefs that launched our own Western artistic tradition.

Of course it is a disaster for the long-term future of Iraq and Syria – with their huge potential, in peacetime, for tourism – that they should suffer the destruction of these potential visitor attractions. But these artefacts and ruins do not belong to the people who happen now to claim sovereignty over these currently wretched deserts. They are the property of all mankind. What is the point of having a United Nations – what is the point of having any ability to project force overseas – if we do not come up with a way to safeguard our common heritage?

These statues were later revealed to be fakes, but much else has been destroyed (Pixel8)

We are struggling at the moment to stop brainwashed young Britons from going out to fight for Isil, or to become “jihadi brides”. On Sunday the Turks succeeded in intercepting three deluded souls from the London area, and they will now come back to face the music. They will almost certainly be charged with preparing acts of terrorism – and rightly. But it has emerged in the past few days that a young Kurdish woman has also been charged with similar offences, even though she intended to go off and help the Peshmerga – the sworn opponents of Isil.

We can all see the difficulty here. We need to deter young people from going off to this hellish conflict, even if it means that the prohibition falls equally on those who have become radicalised jihadis, and on those who want to combat their mania. But I refuse to accept that there is a moral equivalence between the two sides. On the contrary: the Kurds more or less share our objectives, while Isil are nihilistic and barbarian and cruel beyond belief. Of course we are nervous of any more British involvement, other than the current air strikes and behind-the-scenes training. But then what are we doing to stop the destruction of the monuments? We need a strategy, and fast.

The potential for calamity is enormous – imagine what these people – Isil – could do to the great Roman ruins of Libya. The world may be on the verge of losing Leptis Magna. It makes me weep with fury even to think of it. I don’t care how we do it – whether we set up a UN Cultural Protection Force, or whether we now team up with the Americans, the French and every other nation that cares about the past. We cannot allow these people to smash our history, our common story. They must be defeated.

In the meantime let us give thanks again for the British Museum, and the extraordinary efforts of Austen Henry Layard in the 19th century. It was Layard who moved those lamassus – the huge bearded statues – from Nimrud to London, where they can be seen and enjoyed to this day. They are one of the glories of the museum, and if they hadn’t come to London they would now be smashed to smithereens by deranged Islamist ideologues. Think of that, next time you hear some Lefty complain that the Museum is full of stolen treasures. Britain saved those masterpieces, just as Elgin saved the marbles from the Ottoman lime kiln. Now we have to save the ancient cities from the greatest threat since the 13th-century Mongol hordes.

For their sake, immigrants must speak the language of Shakespeare

There is, however, one way that he could secure the right to install the device. According to the letter from the council, they might show mercy if he could demonstrate that he had “social needs”. And what, he has asked the council, do they mean by “social needs”? Well, he has been told, he might need to watch programmes in a foreign language. He might be at risk of “social exclusion” unless he is able to watch a regular diet of Bangladeshi soaps or Turkish cookery shows or Blind Date in Serbo-Croat.

You mean to say, I asked my friend, that if you can prove that you have a “social need” to watch programmes in any language other than English, then you can go ahead and whack up the dish; and yet if you want to watch the Ashes, in English, you may not? That, said my friend, was about the size of it. And at this point I am afraid I saw red.

London is perhaps the most cosmopolitan city on earth; there are 300 languages spoken on the streets, and the recent waves of immigration have unquestionably added to the cultural and commercial dynamism of the capital. Of the 8.6 million people in London (and growing fast) 38 per cent were born abroad – probably the highest proportion since Roman times.

That is, I suppose, a tribute to London’s attractiveness as a place to live, and to the success of an economy that now contributes about a quarter of UK GDP. The question is: what sort of society do we want – a society that is integrated, or one that is balkanised? Do we let people live and work in mutually segregated sub-cultures? Or do we insist on the primacy of the English language?

My instinctive answer is clear. I think we should insist absolutely on English as the common language – though I can see that this immediately raises some ideological difficulties; and it was this conundrum that was causing my brain to race last night.

If you are a classical free-market liberal, you think that the state on the whole should butt out of things. You believe that people have a right to live their own lives, within the law. You think – along with J S Mill and others – that provided people are doing nothing to harm anyone else, they should be able to eat whatever food they like, wear whatever clothes they like, and speak whatever language they choose. Why should government go around telling people what language to speak? What business is it of the state?

A true free-marketeer might hold that individuals should be left to make their own choices, on the grounds that they are likely to be the best judges of their own interests. And when it comes to imposing a common language, we English-firsters must accept that there are inconsistencies in our approach. From Shanghai to Mumbai to Dubai, there are vast communities of British expats around the world – with large numbers unable to string together a sentence of Chinese or Hindi or Arabic.

How would they feel if they were told, in a finger-wagging way, that they had to speak the local language? They would say it was tyrannical, and bossy, and that they could manage very well with a few pidgin phrases. So what gives us, in Britain, the right to insist on the primacy of this country’s language, when Brits overseas face no such moral imperative?

That is the dilemma I wrestled with – and yet there are several reasons why I reject the libertarian approach. The first is that I feel – passionately and perhaps obscurely – that if people are going to benefit from this country’s lavish welfare state, they should at least make an effort to speak the national language.

With the help of an interpreter I was talking recently to a nice Turkish chap who wanted a different council house – his current one had too many stairs, he complained. He had been here for 15 years, it turned out. Fifteen years! English is not an especially difficult language. If he wants us to pay for his blooming house, he should at least get a grip on the lingo.

The next reason is of course that in many communities there are people – especially women – who are not able to take part in the economy because they simply don’t speak English well enough. That is why we have put more money into teaching English in London for “speakers of other languages”. Helping people to speak English is not so much an act of cultural imperialism as of economic liberation.

But the final reason why I think we should insist on English is unashamedly emotional, atavistic, and culturally conservative. This is our language, the language of Shakespeare, the King James Bible, the language that has been spoken in London for centuries; and in the face of the vast migratory influx we have seen, we must insist on English if we are to have any hope of eupeptic absorption and assimilation.

The Holy Bible, published in 1611 known as the King James' version. Title page reads: 'The Holy Bible, Conteyning the Old Testament.' (Alamy)

And it is therefore utterly insane that councils pursue television aerial policies that discriminate against those who want to watch programmes in English, and in favour of those who can now live in a foreign-language bubble. They should scrap that bias now.

Boris Johnson interprets fourth plinth like no other

Mr Johnson said: "As Hans Haacke's take on the equestrian statue trots into Trafalgar Square, it brings another reason for Londoners and tourists to visit this cultural landmark. Gift Horse is a startlingly original comment on the relationship between...

Young British Muslims should realise that extremists like Jihadi John are not honouring Islam

It was one of the most vomit-making TV interviews I have ever seen, and at first I simply dismissed it. Surely no one would believe such rubbish; and then I reflected – and of course I saw that Cage and other apologists are by no means idiotic. You and I can see through their lies, but there are thousands, if not millions, who are more suggestible and who are willing to see things that way. The Cage people are pandering to a section of the audience that is frighteningly large, and growing. We need collectively to demolish their myths; and to do it fast.

We need a proper security response. We need to be able to monitor these vipers nursed at the breast of the British state: their movements, their communications, and sometimes we need to be able to separate them from others who could aid and abet their plans. In so far as the Lib Dems are still being obstructive, they must be overwhelmed.

Then I am afraid that we must accept that Isil still has the charisma that goes with military victory. They have money, oil, huge tracts of land – flats and material comforts with which to bait the deluded girls from Bethnal Green, who think they are going out to meet a religious and gun-toting version of Brad Pitt. We need to come up with a way of beating them – and given the understandable public revulsion at the thought of British boots on the ground, we need to work harder at backing the Kurdish Peshmerga, and persuading the Sunni military that it is in their interests not to collaborate with the terrorists, but to drive them out.

Yet none of these solutions will be any use unless we also change the way these people are sometimes viewed, and especially by young Muslims growing up in this country, whether in London schools or anywhere else. We need to debunk these jihadists and their phoney ideology. There is nothing pure or honourable in their barbaric subculture – of rape camps, throwing gays off cliffs and burning people alive in cages.

They are not even religious: many are said to have a very sketchy knowledge of the Koran. They are hopeless hypocrites who claim to despise the West but who pathetically wear Nike trainers and daub their temples with expensive Chanel cologne (Egoiste, appropriately, the preferred aroma). Many of them are losers: twits, twerps and misfits who are hopelessly caught up in a mobile-assisted pornography of violence.

Above all, we must stop this fateful elision – encouraged by the likes of Cage – between this jihadism and Islam. The other day I pointed out that many of these young men are – according to the security services – heavy users of porn. I was astounded to be denounced, on the front page of The Guardian, by the Muslim Council of Britain. A spokeswoman said that I was somehow attacking Muslims as a whole. Why on earth would she say that? Why is the MCB effectively claiming these porn freak jihadists for mainstream Islam?

I believe – and I certainly want to believe – that this jihadi madness is rejected by the overwhelming majority of Muslims; and yes, I was dismayed by the recent BBC poll in which 27 per cent said they had “some sympathy with the motives behind” the Charlie Hebdo shootings. But, then, there was no control sample of the rest of the non-Muslim population, and I am afraid that there are plenty of non-Muslims who found the cartoons offensive, and plenty of readers of this paper who object (rather more than I would, perhaps) to needless insults to religion.

I seem to remember that Pope Francis himself was asked what he thought of the motives behind the shootings, and said: “If you swear at my mother, expect a punch.” That would put him pretty firmly, I think, in the 27 per cent. The point is that neither he, nor Telegraph readers who disliked the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, nor the overwhelming majority of Muslims would want to see that emotion – taking offence – translated into violence of any kind.

That is why it is vital to insist, time and again, on the difference between this sick jihadism and Islam; and that is why, conversely, we must do everything we can to stop the likes of Cage – and indeed the MCB – from eliding anti-jihadism with Islamophobia. You can loathe jihadists, in other words, and be perfectly sympathetic to Muslims.

It is obscene, looking at their defence of Emwazi, to think that Cage have been taking money from charities such as the Anita Roddick Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. They should stop apologising for terror, and start apologising to the victims.

Boris Johnson: London is still the eighth emirate of the world

"The investment we're seeing in Canary Wharf, the Olympic village, developments across the city are being financed by Middle Eastern investment in such a way as to allow us to build homes for ordinary Londoners and meet the single biggest economic pro...

Happy birthday, Mr Mugabe, with special love from Labour

The whole exercise is utterly nauseating – and my only question, as I say, is who on earth would want to be there?

Who is going to be toasting Mugabe in champagne and Tusker lager? Who is going to feature in the photo spread in the Zimbabwean equivalent of Hello! or OK!? I doubt that Britain will be represented at all – but by rights there is one man who damn well should be there, one man who should be down on the dance floor with Mugabe’s buxom assistants, and flashing his familiar glistering smile at the gathering.

If there were any justice in the world, that man would break off from giving advice to sundry other dubious regimes and help old Bob with the job of blowing out his candles. And that man, naturally, is Tony Blair.

Mugabe with Blair in 1997

Zimbabwe is now the second poorest nation on earth – beaten only by Congo for overall grimness. The people are so badly malnourished that one in three children is physically stunted, according to the UN. If you go there you see the ravages of HIV, the emaciated figures standing listlessly on street corners. Companies are constantly going to the wall.

But it is vital to recognise that Zimbabwe was not always like this, and did not have to be like this. This Mugabe tyranny is no accident – and Britain played a shameful part in the disaster. Readers will remember the 1979 Lancaster House Agreement, by which Margaret Thatcher granted independence to Rhodesia. At that time the country was a breadbasket, a flourishing agricultural producer, with about 6,000 commercial farmers. The only trouble with those farmers was that the most successful of them were white – and Mugabe’s long reign has been characterised by one overwhelming objective: to exterminate the last vestiges of white power, whether political or economic.

Mugabe at a press conference in Salisbury following his victory in 1980

As he has said: “The white man is here as a second citizen. The only man you can trust is a dead white man.” So it was crucial that the Lancaster House Agreement protected the interests of these white farmers. They could, of course, be bought out, but their land could not be simply seized. There had to be a “willing buyer, willing seller”. The British government agreed to fund the arrangement, compensating the former colonial farmers for land that they gave up. Under that arrangement the white farmers were able to survive – more or less; Zimbabwe remained economically viable – more or less.

And then in 1997, along came Tony Blair and New Labour, and in a fit of avowed anti-colonialist fervour they unilaterally scrapped the arrangement. The overseas development minister, Clare Short, made it clear that neither she nor Blair gave a stuff about the former colonial farmers. As she put it at the time: “I should make it clear that we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new government from diverse backgrounds, without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and, as you know, we were colonised not colonisers.”

May 1982: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her husband Denis say goodbye to Robert Mugabe at Downing Street

It was that betrayal of Lancaster House that gave Mugabe his pretext to launch his pogroms against the whites. I remember going to a place called Mazowe, not far from Harare, where Mugabe now has one of his vast personal ranches. I met an old ex-Rhodesian couple whose family came from near London, whose kitchen dresser bore the medals their relatives had won fighting for this country. I remember them physically trembling with fear of the Zanu-PF thugs who were waiting at the gate to their farm; and it wasn’t long before they were gone – driven out by sheer intimidation. They died not long afterwards.

The Labour government enlisted this country in all sorts of wars around the world, some more disastrous than others. British soldiers went to fight and die in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Balkans. Here we had people with close relatives in our own country – yes, our own kith and kin – and we did absolutely nothing. We turned our backs on the very people who were actually indispensable to the economic well-being of Zimbabwe, and Labour essentially allowed Mugabe to launch a racist tyranny.

It was Labour’s betrayal of the Lancaster House Agreement – driven by political correctness and cowardice – that gave Mugabe the pretext for the despotic confiscations by which he has rewarded his supporters. And that is why Blair should be there: to mark Labour’s special contribution to the tyrant’s longevity in office.

London to create world-class concert hall

Mr Osborne said a concert hall could give “significant artistic, educational and economic benefits” to London, while Mr Johnson declared that it would cement the capital as “a world city for culture”.

Some hope that a new hall will tempt Sir Simon to return to Britain and take over the London Symphony Orchestra.

"London is a world-class city with many fantastic cultural assets,” Mr Osborne told the Evening Standard.

“I want to make it even better, so I am delighted we are looking at this with the Mayor as part of our long-term economic plan for London.”

He added: “Speaking to the likes of Sir Simon Rattle has impressed on me the significant artistic, educational and economic benefits that a modern concert hall would bring not just London but the whole country.”

The concert hall would also be cutting-edge digital and educational facilities to spread the benefits and the venue would have to complement rather than compete with London’s existing facilities.

Mr Johnson said: “We have heard the clarion call from Sir Simon Rattle and many others who wish to see a brand-new and world-class centre for music in London.

“The feasibility study being confirmed today will enable us to understand fully the potential to build that centre and help to cement our position as a world city for culture.”

If we want to be taken seriously, we have to defend ourselves

We are still the fourth biggest military power in the world, we have the best special forces, and we have just invested £6 billion in two colossal new aircraft carriers. We are the one ally that has been with America – in spite of all our doubts and public protest – throughout the long and bitter engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, and whatever else you may say about this country, you could not accuse us of lacking a historic martial spirit. It is not necessarily something to brag about, but it is nonetheless a fact that of the roughly 200 countries in the world today, Britain has at one time or other invaded or conquered 178 of them. The only people to escape are places like Luxembourg.

There is no other country that comes close to that record of belligerence; not the Americans, not the French, not even the Romans. These days, of course, we have not the slightest intention of invading or conquering anyone – not least after the unhappy experience of the Iraq war. All we want is to do our very considerable best to help keep the world safe; and our American friends are, of course, right to think that our defence budgets – like those around Europe – are under strain.

We face the increasing “juridification” of conflicts, with the MoD coughing up untold millions in ludicrous “compensation” to the many hundreds of jihadis who are using UK taxpayers’ money to sue the British Army for alleged breaches of their human rights.

The MoD must shoulder ever-growing costs in manpower, and defence budgets are by no means protected, or “ring-fenced”, like those of the NHS. All these problems are trivial, however, in comparison with the risk of a Labour government, and one led by the most left-wing leader since Michael Foot. For all his faults, Tony Blair correctly took the view that Britain is a great power, a moral force for good in the world, and one that must be ultimately capable of protecting those values by force. Ed Miliband has junked that tenet, along with the rest of Blairism.

It is now clear that if he were to govern at all – a prospect that seems less and less likely, but which cannot be dismissed – he would be kept in office by the votes of the SNP. Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, has made it plain that her support is entirely conditional on one thing: that Labour gets rid of Trident. There would be no modernisation of our nuclear deterrent in 2016. Under Labour and the SNP, Britain would be denuding itself of its most important weapon; at the very moment when Putin is increasing his defence spending by 35 per cent, and building huge new drones capable of long-range bombing. How are we supposed, in those circumstances, to help the Americans face him down?

If a Labour-SNP coalition were to junk Trident, Britain would be vulnerable to nuclear blackmail; but it is worse than that. We would suffer a public and visible diminution of global authority; we would be sending a signal that we no longer wished to be taken seriously; that we were perfectly happy to abandon our seat on the UN Security Council to some suit from Brussels; that we were becoming a kind of military capon. Yes, the nukes are expensive – but so is all defence spending, these days.

The only way to fund the forces we need is to have a government that understands business, and produces sustained economic growth – and that cannot be Miliband. Our Armed Forces are not a luxury. They are indispensable to our lives. I remember how they rescued the position in the Olympic and Paralympic games – cheerfully helping with the security at the last minute. I have seen them stop London houses from being flooded, quickly and efficiently building sandbag fortifications.

But their role is much more important than that. As our American friends instinctively understand, it is the existence of strong and well-resourced British Armed Forces that gives this country the ability to express and affirm our values overseas: of freedom, democracy, tolerance, pluralism. David Cameron gets that. Ed Miliband would put it all at risk, and in the process he would make Britain weaker and less safe.

Boris Johnson calls for EU referendum to be brought forward

Mr Johnson was responding to a call from John Longworth, the head of the British Chambers of Commerce, to hold the in-out referendum next year in order to end uncertainty for businesses.

The Mayor of London told LBC Radio: “That’s not a bad idea by the way. Let’s get it done and knock it on the head and do it for the good of Europe. This problem is not going away. The whole Eurozone is mired in low growth, low productivity, they have a very anti-competitive environment there, a terrible system of regulation coming from Brussels.

“We have huge support in Britain for a Conservative-led campaign to reform the EU and get some change.”

Mr Johnson said that he believes voters in the UK “will vote to stay in a reformed Europe”.

“What we don’t want to see is an endless period of delay in which we don’t get the changes we need in Europe,” Mr Johnson said. “This is not just a narrow, British nationalistic tub-thumping point. We are campaigning for reform in Europe in the interests of everyone in the community. We have a lot of support from people around the table in Brussels.”

During a G20 finance ministers summit in Turkey, George Osborne, the Chancellor, hinted that the date could be brought forward, confirming that the Prime Minister would be "delighted" if he can complete renegotiation of the UK's EU membership earlier.