• Contact
  • About
  • Authors
DONATE
NEWSLETTER SIGN UP
  • Login
Yorkshire Bylines
  • Home
  • News
    • All
    • Brexit
    • Education
    • Environment
    • Health
    • Home Affairs
    • Transport
    • World
    Prime minister PMQ prep

    Brexit isn’t working – something we can all agree on

    The small number of trees shows that even the high uplands of the Dales was a woodland environment. Much has been nibbled down to the ground by heavy populations of sheep. Photo by Andy Brown

    Government policies destroying upland Yorkshire farming with no regard for the land or our health

    schools bill

    Johnson’s education power grab: from ‘liberation’ to dictatorship in one generation

    Emmanuel Macron

    French parliamentary elections 2022: shockwaves across the Channel

    Rail strikes

    Millions affected by biggest rail strike action in 30 years

    cost of living march london

    Trade union movement marches to demand better

    European Union

    After the seismic shocks of Brexit and Covid, what next for the European Union?

    Eurovision 2022 stage - photo by Michael Doherty on Wikimedia Commons licensed by CC BY-SA 4.0

    What does Ukraine’s Eurovision win tell us about the politics of solidarity?

    Refugee Week

    Refugee week: a chance to celebrate refugees

    Trending Tags

    • Johnson
    • Coronavirus
    • Labour
    • Starmer
    • NI Protocol
    • Brexit
    • Culture
    • Education
    • Environment
    • Home Affairs
    • Transport
    • World
  • Politics
  • Opinion
  • Lifestyle
    • All
    • Culture
    • Dance
    • Food
    • Music
    • Poetry
    • Recipes
    • Sport
    Nostell Priory, Wakefield

    Glastonbury? What’s Glastonbury? When the music world came to Wakefield

    Headingley Cricket Stadium

    A view from the Roses match: is everything ‘rosey’ in English cricket?

    Bettys' Fat Rascals

    Scallywags, scoundrels and rascals abound in Yorkshire (we do like our scones)

    'Woke' beliefs

    Woke and proud: Compassion must never be allowed to go out of fashion

    Eurovision 2022 stage - photo by Michael Doherty on Wikimedia Commons licensed by CC BY-SA 4.0

    What does Ukraine’s Eurovision win tell us about the politics of solidarity?

    Red Ladder

    Climbing the Red Ladder – bringing theatre to the community

    Kaiser Chiefs in Doncaster

    Kaiser Chiefs never miss a beat in Doncaster

    Bradford Council leader Councillor Susan Hinchcliffe, second from right, is joined by Keighley Creative representatives, from left, Georgina Webster, Jan Smithies and Gemma Hobbs.

    Bradford announced as City of Culture 2025

    Queen cakes fit for a Queen

    Queen Cakes fit for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee

    • Food
    • Music
    • Poetry
    • Sport
  • Business
    • All
    • Economy
    • Technology
    • Trade
    Freya Osment from Northern Gas Networks

    International Women in Engineering Day 2022

    Rail strikes

    Millions affected by biggest rail strike action in 30 years

    conservative party

    The Conservative Party: fiscally irresponsible and ideologically incapable of addressing the current crises

    Yorkshire cows

    British farmers are being offered a lump sum payment to leave the industry – but at what cost to agriculture?

    cost-of-living-crisis-in-voluntary-sector

    Cost-of-living crisis looming for the voluntary sector

    Money on the floor - £20 notes

    The huge cost of Brexit is being seriously understated

    Financial problems

    Surge in bad debt and late payments indicate mounting business distress in Yorkshire

    An evening photo tour of Drax power station near Selby, North Yorkshire, with excellent light towards sunset.

    Winter blackouts and rationing for six million homes as government plans for disruption to energy supply

    Jar with money cascading out of it

    Boosterism doesn’t put food on the table

    Trending Tags

      • Economy
      • Technology
      • Trade
    • Region
    No Result
    View All Result
    • Home
    • News
      • All
      • Brexit
      • Education
      • Environment
      • Health
      • Home Affairs
      • Transport
      • World
      Prime minister PMQ prep

      Brexit isn’t working – something we can all agree on

      The small number of trees shows that even the high uplands of the Dales was a woodland environment. Much has been nibbled down to the ground by heavy populations of sheep. Photo by Andy Brown

      Government policies destroying upland Yorkshire farming with no regard for the land or our health

      schools bill

      Johnson’s education power grab: from ‘liberation’ to dictatorship in one generation

      Emmanuel Macron

      French parliamentary elections 2022: shockwaves across the Channel

      Rail strikes

      Millions affected by biggest rail strike action in 30 years

      cost of living march london

      Trade union movement marches to demand better

      European Union

      After the seismic shocks of Brexit and Covid, what next for the European Union?

      Eurovision 2022 stage - photo by Michael Doherty on Wikimedia Commons licensed by CC BY-SA 4.0

      What does Ukraine’s Eurovision win tell us about the politics of solidarity?

      Refugee Week

      Refugee week: a chance to celebrate refugees

      Trending Tags

      • Johnson
      • Coronavirus
      • Labour
      • Starmer
      • NI Protocol
      • Brexit
      • Culture
      • Education
      • Environment
      • Home Affairs
      • Transport
      • World
    • Politics
    • Opinion
    • Lifestyle
      • All
      • Culture
      • Dance
      • Food
      • Music
      • Poetry
      • Recipes
      • Sport
      Nostell Priory, Wakefield

      Glastonbury? What’s Glastonbury? When the music world came to Wakefield

      Headingley Cricket Stadium

      A view from the Roses match: is everything ‘rosey’ in English cricket?

      Bettys' Fat Rascals

      Scallywags, scoundrels and rascals abound in Yorkshire (we do like our scones)

      'Woke' beliefs

      Woke and proud: Compassion must never be allowed to go out of fashion

      Eurovision 2022 stage - photo by Michael Doherty on Wikimedia Commons licensed by CC BY-SA 4.0

      What does Ukraine’s Eurovision win tell us about the politics of solidarity?

      Red Ladder

      Climbing the Red Ladder – bringing theatre to the community

      Kaiser Chiefs in Doncaster

      Kaiser Chiefs never miss a beat in Doncaster

      Bradford Council leader Councillor Susan Hinchcliffe, second from right, is joined by Keighley Creative representatives, from left, Georgina Webster, Jan Smithies and Gemma Hobbs.

      Bradford announced as City of Culture 2025

      Queen cakes fit for a Queen

      Queen Cakes fit for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee

      • Food
      • Music
      • Poetry
      • Sport
    • Business
      • All
      • Economy
      • Technology
      • Trade
      Freya Osment from Northern Gas Networks

      International Women in Engineering Day 2022

      Rail strikes

      Millions affected by biggest rail strike action in 30 years

      conservative party

      The Conservative Party: fiscally irresponsible and ideologically incapable of addressing the current crises

      Yorkshire cows

      British farmers are being offered a lump sum payment to leave the industry – but at what cost to agriculture?

      cost-of-living-crisis-in-voluntary-sector

      Cost-of-living crisis looming for the voluntary sector

      Money on the floor - £20 notes

      The huge cost of Brexit is being seriously understated

      Financial problems

      Surge in bad debt and late payments indicate mounting business distress in Yorkshire

      An evening photo tour of Drax power station near Selby, North Yorkshire, with excellent light towards sunset.

      Winter blackouts and rationing for six million homes as government plans for disruption to energy supply

      Jar with money cascading out of it

      Boosterism doesn’t put food on the table

      Trending Tags

        • Economy
        • Technology
        • Trade
      • Region
      No Result
      View All Result
      Yorkshire Bylines
      No Result
      View All Result
      Home News Brexit

      Macron calls Johnson a clown who regrets Brexit

      The French are fed up of Johnson's antics, so much so that Macron called Johnson a clown who regrets Brexit.

      Ann MoodybyAnn Moody
      03-12-2021 11:58
      in Brexit, Politics, World
      A photo of a mural which portrays Johnson as a clown

      Our Broken Politics. Photo by Matt Brown CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

      5.5k
      VIEWS
      Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
      ADVERTISEMENT

      The last time I saw so many Union Jacks on public display in Britain, they were worn by Gerri Halliwell or painted onto Noel Gallagher’s guitar. It was basically a marketing technique to sell the new, younger-looking UK to the world, and though it was short lived, for those of us in our twenty-somethings in the 90s, we could see through the packaging and recognised the playful irony behind the hype.

      The strange death of Cool Britannia

      On the political front, a young Tony Blair won a landslide victory for Labour and became the natural political face of the movement, promising an ethical foreign policy abroad, and at home an end to the sleaze into which John Major’s Conservative administration had sunk.

      Outsiders looking in saw a country in a phase of regeneration. Britain looked good.

      George Bush had not yet been elected and Blair’s catastrophic support of US action in Iraq had yet to overshadow his legacy. This legacy included doubling foreign aid and successfully intervening to end conflicts in Kosovo (to the extent that ‘Tonibler’ became a popular boys name there), in Sierra Leone and of course Ireland, with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.

      And so we come full circle – this last achievement is now under serious threat and sleaze has once again reared its ugly head.

      Johnson alone at PMQs, Cartoon by Stan
      Politics

      Johnson’s “disciplined and deluded collection of stooges” is turning on him

      byAnthony Robinson
      18 November 2021

      It’s all about the ‘B’ word

      The Union Jacks are back, but this time with no tongue-in-cheek. We used to leave all that flag stuff to other nations; we just didn’t need it. Those days are gone.

      As writer Anthony Barnett says (quoted in the New Statesman), “Brexit has rendered us a country run by a government of the old, by the old, for the old”.

      There is even talk of returning to imperial measures and putting crown signs on pint glasses.

      The omertà surrounding the ‘B’ word (even the prime minister banned his own ministers from saying it) is slowly being lifted and as the negative consequences of that decision, economic and political, are inevitably revealed, the harder it will be to blame covid, global shortages and of course, the EU, for our problems.

      Macron calls Johnson a clown

      In the meantime, it’s all our government can do. So once more, instead of engaging with the EU and indeed the wider world in a serious manner to resolve what is now a humanitarian crisis that cannot be wished away and will only get worse, Johnson very publicly tweets a bizarre letter to Macron, totally unreflective of the telephone conversation they had the night before in which they agreed to work together to prevent further human tragedies such as that which occurred this month in which nearly 30 lives were lost.

      My letter to President Macron. pic.twitter.com/vXH0jpxzPo

      — Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) November 25, 2021

      The French government reaction was swift. Macron declared that Johnson can’t be taken seriously. According to Le Canard Echainé, the French equivalent of Private Eye, he described Johnson as a clown. Furious about this latest episode, he is quoted as saying, “It’s sad to see a major country with which we could do huge numbers of things being led by a clown”.

      Further souring the UK’s relationship with France

      Home Secretary Priti Patel’s swift disinvitation to Sunday’s meeting was the result of a growing exasperation at this government’s tactics.

      The early AstraZeneca supply problems, and Johnson’s dithering over blocking airport arrivals from India, led to Britain being seen abroad as hogging the vaccine whilst simultaneously exporting the Delta variant (known in France as the English Variant at the time) which led to the third wave of the coronavirus in Europe.

      The matter of the issuing of licenses to French fishermen is still unresolved. It is considered as evidence of a country refusing to abide by its agreements and pointlessly punishing some poor small boat owners to satisfy a minority at home who have given fishing a mythical status and risking a full on trade war over a financially negligible industry which is being decimated by Britain’s own device.

      And now we have the migrant crisis.

      Reputational damage

      Having borrowed votes not only from the Labour Party in 2019, but also from Farage’s Brexit Party, the government has to keep this element of his support satisfied.

      France looks on in amazement as the Home Secretary proposes armoured jet-ski patrols forcing asylum seekers to return to France in dangerous manœuvres that our own customs officers refuse to entertain. This was before the magical wave machine idea, at which point the French desperately reached for the Ricard.

      It’s understood that this government posturing doesn’t reflect the views of most British people, but the optics are not good. And worryingly, the government seems to be disproportionately courting a certain type of voter.

      Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron outside 10 Downing Street - licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
      Brexit

      That French letter and cross-Channel Brexit tension over fishing licences

      byAnn Moody
      8 November 2021

      The French are fed up

      In July of this year, Britain agreed to contribute €62.7m to the costs of clamping down on the trafficking of migrants to the UK. Patel is rumoured to have instructed that the payment be withheld until the French comply with her demands to return dinghies at sea, which being against international maritime law, would be illegal.

      Payment in full has not yet been made.

      The French are exasperated at what they describe as this government’s ‘double talk’. An Élysée spokesperson, Gabriel Attal, in a furious reaction to Johnson’s tweet this week said in an interview on BFM TV that surely the British prime minister regrets Brexit, because far from taking back control, he keeps asking France to solve his problems, from fish to asylum seekers.

      Attal despaired at how the British refused to send customs and immigration agents to process applications in France, as is usual practice.

      Xavier Bertrand, a presidential candidate for the conservative Républicains suggested the French provide ferries to transport the migrants safely to the UK and let Britain deal with its asylum seekers itself.

      Johnson caught in his own trap

      France sees that Johnson is forced into constant conflict with them, and the rest of the EU, to keep his home fires burning. He needs to keep the animosity alive so that the EU, and especially France, can be blamed for the Brexit failures ahead, not least the Northern Ireland protocol.

      Le Canard Echainé reports that Macron allegedly said:

      “Brexit is the starting point of the Johnson circus. Very quickly he realised that the situation was catastrophic for the British.”  

      Macron told his advisers that Johnson even apologises in private for his behaviour but says he has to consider public opinion over everything else. In Johnson’s game plan, France has to be the scapegoat for now. But it’s not a game anyone else wants to play.

      No nation is perfect, France included. The treatment of refugees by the French police at Calais has often been shameful. But when shameful behaviour becomes the flagship policy of the Home Office, then there is a real problem.

      We now have Union Jacks by the bucketload behind every minister on TV, but from the outside looking in, there is little reason to wave them. And despite Michael Gove’s best efforts in provincial discos, we’re just not cool anymore.

      Tags: ImmigrationJohnson
      ADVERTISEMENT
      Previous Post

      Advent Calendar 3: Craig Ulliott

      Next Post

      Two pints of lager and a covid contract please

      Ann Moody

      Ann Moody

      A politics graduate, Ann worked as an intern and then Newsdesk assistant for the ABC News London office. She had a brief career in countertrade before returning to the world of media as the CEO of the Directors Guild of Great Britain. There she stayed until she had her first child and decided to move abroad. She now lives in France with her French husband Pierre, two cats and a dog. She has two grown up children Anastasia and Sam.

      Related Posts

      boris johnson clown poster
      Politics

      Johnson, Nixon and dangerous duplicity: half a century of ‘gate’ scandals

      byDr Pam Jarvis
      28 June 2022
      Prime minister PMQ prep
      Brexit

      Brexit isn’t working – something we can all agree on

      byAnthony Robinson
      28 June 2022
      Conservative Party Meeting
      Politics

      Hypocrisy, desperation and excuses: Conservative Party clutch at straws over by-election losses

      bySue Wilson MBE
      27 June 2022
      10/05/2022 Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the House of Commons. Picture by Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street
      Politics

      The country needs more than just ‘Booting Boris out of Downing Street’

      byDr Stella Perrott
      26 June 2022
      Emmanuel Macron
      Politics

      French parliamentary elections 2022: shockwaves across the Channel

      byAnn Moody
      25 June 2022
      Next Post
      Cartoon showing Hancock digging a big hole!

      Two pints of lager and a covid contract please

      Want to support us?

      Can you help Yorkshire Bylines to grow and become more sustainable with a regular donation, no matter how small?  

      DONATE

      Sign up to our newsletter

      If you would like to receive the Yorkshire Bylines regular newsletter, straight talking direct to your inbox, click the button below.

      NEWSLETTER

      LATEST

      boris johnson clown poster

      Johnson, Nixon and dangerous duplicity: half a century of ‘gate’ scandals

      28 June 2022
      Prime minister PMQ prep

      Brexit isn’t working – something we can all agree on

      28 June 2022
      The small number of trees shows that even the high uplands of the Dales was a woodland environment. Much has been nibbled down to the ground by heavy populations of sheep. Photo by Andy Brown

      Government policies destroying upland Yorkshire farming with no regard for the land or our health

      27 June 2022
      schools bill

      Johnson’s education power grab: from ‘liberation’ to dictatorship in one generation

      27 June 2022

      MOST READ

      schools bill

      Johnson’s education power grab: from ‘liberation’ to dictatorship in one generation

      27 June 2022
      Prime minister PMQ prep

      Brexit isn’t working – something we can all agree on

      28 June 2022
      10/05/2022 Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the House of Commons. Picture by Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street

      The country needs more than just ‘Booting Boris out of Downing Street’

      26 June 2022
      Conservative Party Meeting

      Hypocrisy, desperation and excuses: Conservative Party clutch at straws over by-election losses

      27 June 2022

      BROWSE BY TAGS

      antivaxxers Charity climate change Coronavirus Cost of living Creative industries Crime Cummings Democracy Devolution education Equality Farming Fishing hgv History Immigration Johnson Journalism Labour Local Democracy Mental Health mining money NHS NI Protocol omicron Pies pollution poverty PPE Public Health Review shortage social media Starmer tax travel Ukraine Yorkshire
      Yorkshire Bylines

      Yorkshire Bylines is a regional online newspaper that supports citizen journalism. Our aim is to publish well-written, fact-based articles and opinion pieces on subjects that are of interest to people in Yorkshire and beyond.

      Learn more about us

      No Result
      View All Result
      • Contact
      • About
      • Letters
      • Donate
      • Privacy
      • Bylines network
      • Shop

      © 2022 Yorkshire Bylines. Citizen Journalism | Local & Internationalist

      No Result
      View All Result
      • Home
      • News
        • Brexit
        • Education
        • Environment
        • Health
        • Home Affairs
        • Transport
        • World
      • Politics
      • Opinion
      • Lifestyle
        • Culture
        • Dance
        • Food
        • Music
        • Poetry
        • Recipes
        • Sport
      • Business
        • Economy
        • Technology
        • Trade
      • Donate
      • The Compendium of Cabinet Codebreakers
      • The Davis Downside Dossier
      • The Digby Jones Index
      • Newsletter sign up
      • Cartoons by Stan
      • Authors

      © 2022 Yorkshire Bylines. Citizen Journalism | Local & Internationalist

      Welcome Back!

      Login to your account below

      Forgotten Password?

      Retrieve your password

      Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

      Log In