Boris Johnson's Ukraine jaunt and what it says about Britain

By John Wight

Your average British prime minister likes nothing more than a war abroad to cynically try and improve his credibility and popularity at home.

Margaret Thatcher - the so-called ‘Iron Lady’ - used the popularity she gained on the back of the 1982 Falklands War to declare war on Britain’s miners and their union, the NUM, two years later.

Prior to the war to take back control of the Falklands (Los Malvinas) from Argentina, which had taken back control of the islands by force, Thatcher was so unpopular in the UK she was facing the very real prospect of a challenge to her leadership from within her own party. The political capital she gained from the war to take back the Falklands saw her approval ratings soar and enabled her to get to work on her long held ambition to set about the structural adjustment of the British economy along free market lines. The miners were the main pole of resistance to this process, to the point where Thatcher infamously described them as the ‘enemy within’ in contrast to the Argentinean ‘enemy without.’

Tony Blair reveled in his decision to lend British support to NATO’s bombing campaign in the former Yugoslavia in 1999. As it neared completion, Blair visited Kosovo like a latter day divinity, lapping up the adoration of a people whom he’d  just liberated at the cost of around 1,500 dead Serbs, military and civilian. We saw the same phenomenon when it came to NATO’s military intervention in Libya in 2011, during which British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy descended on Benghazi like two colonial overlords languishing in the gratitude bestowed on them by a large crowd of people for whom hell not democracy awaited as a result.

Fast forward to today and the conflict in Ukraine has been so cynically exploited by Britain’s Boris Johnson (Bojo to his friends), that you get the distinct impression he would love nothing more than for it to continue for the next ten years. On his recent visit to Kiev, he took himself on a walkabout of the Ukrainian capital in the company of his Ukrainian counterpart, President Zelensky, basking, you could tell, in the opportunity to emulate his political hero Winston Churchill.

There he was, striding around the deserted city amid a phalanx of photographers and assault weapon-toting bodyguards, resplendent in suit and tie alongside the permanently khaki-attired Zelensky, bursting with pride at being more Catholic than the Pope in providing Ukraine with more and more military aid by which to defend this put-upon outpost of Western civilization against Putin’s barbarian horde, which had mercilessly fallen on their small and innocent neighbor with rape and slaughter in mind.

Predictably, and sadly, this is precisely the narrative that has colonized the mainstream media in the UK, and likewise predictably Johnson received near universal acclaim for his ‘courageous decision’ to visit the Ukrainian capital in the midst of a war. It was of course no coincidence that Boris Johnson’s visit to Kiev took place just before the Metropolitan Police in London issued him with a fine for unlawfully breaking the very Covid lockdown rules his government introduced in 2020 at the height of the pandemic.

This makes Boris Johnson the only prime minister in UK political history be fined for breaking the law while in office, a fact which in normal times would have seen him immediately tender his resignation to Her Majesty the Queen - in line with the country’s feudalistic protocol - and stand disgraced forevermore.

In this ill-begotten of northern Europe, however, these are not normal times. On the contrary, this is a time of deceit, corruption, racism and injustice wrapped in the Union Jack and served up to the British people as the best of all possible worlds.

Consider the latest wheeze of a Tory UK government that has proved happily impervious to the multiple scandals that have bedeviled it since coming to office in 2019. Fueled by a Brexit from the EU which has unleashed the carnival of the racism warned by its detractors rather than the freedom promised by its proponents, just unveiled has been the decision to send poor and desperate refugees, crossing the English Channel from northern France in all manner of sea unworthy dinghies and other vessels - victims many of them of UK foreign policy in various parts of the world - to Rwanda in Africa to be ‘processed’ and thereafter dumped.

It is the very acme of racism in our time, a decision taken in the full knowledge that it will meet with the fulsome support of the country’s Brexit heartlands in the deindustrialized north and midlands of England, which today are the equivalent in Britain of America’s Deep South. In other words, we’re talking banjo country.

Boris Johnson is their guy and he can do no wrong. That he is permanently disheveled in appearance, lies with abandon, is ruthless, likes a drink and is a womanizer, this only makes him more relatable to this particular demographic at a time when Britain’s political and national culture has never been more debased and degenerate.

Make no mistake about it, the war in Ukraine has been weaponized by the Johnson regime for political gain at home, evidenced in his attempt to make turn Ukraine into some holy cause that will, if it continues along the present trajectory, take Britain and by extension NATO perilously close to direct military confrontation with Russia.

As the Russians get ready to unleash their major offensive in the Donbass, expect an uptick in atrocity propaganda: claims of the use of chemical weapons such as have already been made with regard to the Battle of Mariupol recently. And as the pressure grows on Johnson to resign over breaking lockdown rules to attend a drinks party in Downing Street, expect evermore bellicose rhetoric and war talk to issue from his lips with regard to Russia.

‘Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets,’ once said Napoleon Bonaparte. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is currently being led by an unscrupulous rogue perfectly willing to deploy a thousand bayonets to Kiev in order to maintain the support of newspapers in London.

It really doesn’t get any worse than that.

John Wight is an author and political commentator based in Scotland.

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)

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