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Johnson made Britain stupid

Tobias Stone
3 min readMar 23, 2020

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Photo by Jannes Van den wouwer on Unsplash

After five years of telling the British people to ignore experts, Johnson just fell foul of his own propaganda.

Michael Gove famously said, during the Brexit debate, that the British public were getting tired of experts. Johnson and many of his colleagues regularly rubbished professors, economists, scientists, and sector experts to pursue both Brexit and political office.

When most of the scientific community in the UK came together to warn them about the risks of Brexit, they were ignored and rubbished. When business leaders warned of damage to business, they were laughed at and belittled. When doctors warned about the state of the NHS, they were brushed off.

Ten years underfunding the NHS, cutting corners, making do, and now the government has had to write an open cheque to keep healthcare working. Yes, this is an unprecedented crisis, but the healthcare system was already facing its own unprecedented crisis before this crisis unfolded. It might just have been cheaper to have funded it properly for the last decade.

And after 10 years of rail being run by an incompetent minister, with underfunding and failed structures, the government overnight has effectively had to nationalise the entire rail system for 6 months to keep it working. And as they…

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Tobias Stone
Tobias Stone

Written by Tobias Stone

Writing about politics, history, and society. Also at www.tswriting.substack.com, www.tswriting.co, @ts_writing

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