The former cabinet heavyweight lashed out at Mr Johnson’s disregard for “constitutional constraints”, calling his party “more nationalist than at any time in my lifetime”.
“He gets angry if the courts or parliament try to interfere. As the elected prime minister, he thinks he should not be impeded in these ways,” Lord Clarke said.
“We are now getting dangerously close to the ‘elected dictatorship’ that Lord Hailsham, the former lord chancellor, warned us about half a century ago.”
In an interview with The New European, the veteran Tory warned the failures of Mr Johnson’s Brexit deal were now being exposed, with a forecast slump in GDP and the loss of security cooperation.
On the row over the Northern Ireland Protocol, he also said: “There is a serious danger of the Good Friday Agreement and power-sharing collapsing and heading back to direct rule.”
“I considered myself to be in the mainstream of the party and am not pleased that people who think like me – internationalist, outward-looking, progressive – have been marginalised,” he said.
“The party is now more right wing and nationalist than at any time in my lifetime.”
He ridiculed the “global Britain” promise as “a slogan, an excuse for spending money on a royal yacht and flying the flag in odd places”. “We have to get used to our reduced role in the world,” the peer said.
Fucking idiot of the highest proportionsSo our reluctant hero thought it was a good idea to publish his letter to Macron setting out the steps he wanted to try and prevent migrants crossing the channel, specifically with a requirement that the UK return all migrants that cross successfully to France. All of this a few days before Priti Vacant was due to attend a summit of ministers from all channel countries to try and make things better.
Macron is now pissed off and has banned Priti Vacant from attending the summit.
Is there nothing this imbecile cannot fuck up?
Boris is trying to set France up as the bad guys and whilst it will appeal to those with the same mentality as Farage most reasonable people will see France are doing exactly what the Farage types would. It really is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.The media are spinning it as France being awkward, this will only galvanise those on the right with their siege mentality mantra.
This in-depth, evidence-based assessment has concluded that cutting-edge, twenty-first century civil engineering technology would make it possible to construct either a bridge or a tunnel between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. A bridge crossing, however, would be the longest span bridge built to date. A tunnel would be the longest undersea tunnel ever built given the limited gradients on which trains can operate, the route it would need to take and the depths it would need to reach. In addition, based on today’s technology and safety considerations, a tunnel crossing could only be constructed for railway use ...
The consequence of these parameters for either a tunnel or a bridge is that they are expensive. The indicative cost estimate for the full route, including optimism bias (at P95), is £335bn for a bridge crossing and £209bn for a tunnel crossing. The bridge or tunnel, and the associated very significant works on either side for a railway and possibly for roads would take a very long time. Planning, design, parliamentary and legal processes, and construction would take nearly 30 years before the crossing could become operational, even given a smooth passage of funding and authority to proceed.
Whilst the economic and social effects would be transformational, the costs would be impossible to justify, given the government’s already very significant commitment to long term transport infrastructure improvement for levelling up, and the further likely significant expenditure which would result from the further studies I am suggesting in my main UCR report.
That only became the narrative once it was pointed out that if you really needed to be in London 15 minutes quicker catch an earlier train!HS2 is required to add the extra capacity to the network, allowing faster local services and increased freight.
Capacity was always the objective, all the talk around improved times was a terribly misguided marketing campaign. The time benefit was purely a by product of replacing victorian technology with a modern 21st century railway.That only became the narrative once it was pointed out that if you really needed to be in London 15 minutes quicker catch an earlier train!
Capacity was always the objective, all the talk around improved times was a terribly misguided marketing campaign. The time benefit was purely a by product of replacing victorian technology with a modern 21st century railway.