Dream of Rome Book
And here is the book
THE DREAM OF ROME
by Boris Johnson
Pub date: 6/2/06
Price £18.99
Format: Hardback
234x153mm
288pp
ISBN: 0-00-722441-9
Labour’s Law and Order
Labour has changed the law, and free-born Englishmen and women can no longer walk a few hundred paces down the Queen’s pavement to Downing Street to protest at the closure of their local hospitals.
This government seems to suffer from a kind of schizophrenia in its approach to the Criminal Justice System
I want them to worry about the whereabouts of these thugs and creeps, and on that matter they showed a profound indifference
Labour’s law – just squawk loudly and take no action
It was when the policeman coughed quietly at my shoulder and said that I was breaking the law that I knew the game was up. When you get to my stage in life, you cease to get that thrill out of being arrested. I had to turn and face the throng, who were trying to march with me from College Green, Westminster, to Downing Street. Sorry, folks, I was forced to announce.
About turn! Labour has changed the law, and free-born Englishmen and women can no longer walk a few hundred paces down the Queen’s pavement to Downing Street to protest at the closure of their local hospitals.
CHINA
Boris returns from China to find that roaring capitalism has stirred no interest in democracy in a country wedded to authority for four millennia.
BORIS ON CHINA
It was towards the end of my trip to China that the tall, beautiful communist-party girl turned and asked the killer question. ‘So, Mr Boris Johnson,’ she said, ‘have you changed your mind about anything?’ And I was forced to reply that, yes, I had. Darned right I had. I had completely changed my mind about the chances of democracy in China. Before flying to Beijing I had naively presumed that the place was not just exhibiting hysterical economic growth, but was about to enter a ferment of political change. I had assumed that Tony Blair was right when, in 2005, he went there and announced that the 1.3 billion Chinese were on an ‘unstoppable march’ towards multi-party politics.
I now know that he was talking twaddle, and, what is more, that his Foreign Office advisers knew it. Like most reporters of my generation I spent a certain amount of the 1980s in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and we all remember that sense of suppressed mutiny, how easy it was to find people willing to prophesy over late-night vodka or slivovitz that one day the lid would blow off the cooker and Western-style democracy would be ushered in.
Peugeot workers and market forces
…when we are gone the waters close over our heads without so much as a gurgle
the capitalist system [is] the best available protection for the interests of the working man, since it is this very flexibility of labour, and mobility of capital, that allows new jobs to be created and all the joy and excitement of industrial innovation
these labour-market conditions .. make the future job prospects of these car workers so much better than on the Continent
thanks to the vibrancy of the industry, and the flexibility of the labour market, your columnist will happily find employment writing headlines for Poultry Breeders Weekly
Ryton workers have a better future than French brothers
It is no consolation to the workers of Ryton and their families who face the misery of a factory closure that one day this column must, with Darwinian inevitability, face the same extinction.
I do not wish to diminish the gravity of events at the Peugeot plant when I say that there will also come a time when the forces of international capital will decree that there is no longer any economic justification for this space to be filled by the manual labour of this particular semi-skilled artisan.
The ancient word-plant will be shut. The gerundive turning-sheds will fall silent. The lathes will cease to hone the metaphors, and no sound will be heard in the vast grammatical assembly lines save the drip-drip-drip from the cracked skylight and the scuttling of rats in the stock of unused similes.
Italian Elections
Piece written for an Italian paper about the elections…
Il Sole 24 Ore, a financial paper
Boris says:
“Why not bung it on the blog to show I am alive?
Yesterday we all climbed Vesuvius!”
[Ed: With our apologies as we have now been asked to remove this piece from the site]
