Boris Johnson can’t reinvent himself as an anti-racist – not with his record

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Johnson has made a big scene out of his attendance at the recent march against antisemitism (AFP via Getty)

The disgraced former prime minister Boris Johnson has made a big scene out of his attendance at the recent march against antisemitism, touring all the studios of mainstream media afterwards in an attempt to reinvent himself as an anti-racist.

Let us not forget this is the same Boris Johnson who wrote an article arguing that Muslim women wearing the niqab looked like “letterboxes” and “bank robbers”.

The same Boris Johnson who wrote articles ascribing “watermelon smiles” to Black people and referring to Black children as “piccaninnies”.

The same Johnson who also called gay men “tank-topped bum boys” and said working-class men were “likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless”.

The same man who denounced working-class single mothers for producing a generation of “ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate children”.

And only last week he was criticising net migration numbers as “way too big”.

Given his long and vile record of racism, bigotry and intolerance, has anyone got less credibility than Boris Johnson when it comes to denouncing antisemitism?

Sasha Simic

London

A club that would have them as a member

I could not agree more with Sunday’s article by Ben Judah. Not long after the EU referendum I wrote to The Independent suggesting that if Europe was run by the likes of Marine Le Pen, Victor Orban and Geert Wilders then the Brexit campaign would not have existed, bar on a superficial basis. It was never about bendy bananas or even sovereignty, it was about aligning with similar-minded people. The EU leadership was and remains very differently aligned from those of the Brexit brigade. Maybe they’ll warm to the new rising leaders on Europe’s right wing.

Robert Boston

Kent

Death of a health service

I am sure I am not alone in my belief that the Tory party would like to see the end of the NHS as a publicly funded body. How often I have heard friends and sadly also relatives, with private health insurance, decry our health service with comments like “I would never use the state sector.”

Having underfunded the NHS for years, and allowed or encouraged privatisation in many parts of the service, we now have the likes of Robert Jenrick deciding that we need to have only UK nationals working in the service. Who on earth does he think has been running the NHS for the last 70 years? Or is he, by trying to ban overseas workers, attempting to further nobble this wonderful institution?

Geoff Forward

Stirling

Jetting off scot-free

If the Covid crisis brought us one benefit, it was that SNP ministers were not, for its duration, able to go on the foreign jaunts they so enjoyed. Angus Robertson must have missed out on a whole raft of air miles, and from what I have seen has been making up for it since. It remains a mystery to me why he has needed to go on his recent visit to China. Did lockdown not reveal the ease of use and benefits of Zoom and other remote “visits”?

Now we have Humza Yousaf and a minister, Mairi McAllan, travelling to Dubai for the climate conference at which they are not official delegates. The SNP leader of Glasgow City Council, Susan Aitken, will be there, too. We have even had Nadia El-Nakla, Humza Yousaf’s wife, appearing at a “first ladies’ press conference” in Istanbul, with an SNP press officer in tow.

I realise that this, and other, activity is to try to portray Scotland as an independent polity with its own identity on the world stage. But UK ministers and others are already attending overseas events and Scotland remains an integral part of the UK.

In cases where these visits are paid for by the Scottish taxpayer, hard questions need to be asked about their utility at a time when we are about to hear from the Scottish finance minister that a number of public servants will be losing their jobs because of a shortage of funds.

Jill Stephenson

Edinburgh