Quote:
Originally Posted by Hoopie1
Imagine wanting a job so badly all your life and then being so **** at it?
Johnson supposedly models himself on Churchill. Churchill at 36 was Home Secretary and felt that our prison population was too high, which it was, and he didn't like people being sent to jail, so he brought in the rule that the courts had to give people time to pay fines. This was 1910 and there were nearly 40,000 people in jail for not paying fines because they hadn't got the money. By 1914, only just over 2,000 people were in jail for not paying fines. Churchill also brought in suspended sentences for minor offences. Again, the prison population dropped off a cliff.
Churchill was also part of the great Liberal government that brought in the old-age pension, the Parliament Act 1911 (which struck out the Lords' power of veto over the Commons, one of the great constitutional measures) and the National Insurance Act 1911 which put an end to the workhouse and implemented the beginnings of the Welfare State.
In 1911 Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, where he commissioned the Queen Elizabeth class of fast battleships. They were the best battleships in the world at that time, and the most famous of the class, HMS Warspite, fought well at Jutland in 1916 and also gave devastating fire support to the Allied landings in Normandy in 1944.
The idea that Johnson models himself on Churchill is sad. He's no Churchill. He's nobody at all.