‘Bizarre to be lectured by Americans’: Boris Johnson trashes Obama ‘hypocrisy’ over Brexit
London Mayor Boris Johnson believes any US support for the anti-Brexit campaign would be “bizarre” and hypocritical, given the US “wouldn’t dream” of diluting their own authority.
It is expected that US president Barack Obama will use his April 21 visit to Downing Street to recommend the UK stay within the European bloc.
However, Conservative MP and Brexit campaigner Johnson has criticized the suggestion, saying that Obama advocating an anti-Brexit vote in the June 23 referendum would be “hypocrisy.”
“I just find it absolutely bizarre that we are being lectured by the Americans about giving up our sovereignty and giving up control, when the Americans won’t even sign up to the international convention on the law of the seas, let alone the International criminal court,” he told the BBC.
Tory MP Johnson broke away from Prime Minister David Cameron’s stance on Europe to join the Brexit movement earlier this year. He said the only “real risk” was “Bremaining” within the European Union.
“There is one unanswerable point,” Johnson added, “which is that if you want to take back control of huge sums of money that this country is sending to Brussels… take back control of our politics and our democracy then you got to vote leave.
“I think staying is the real risk. I think that what you need to focus on is the risk of ‘Bremaining’.
“Everyone goes on about the risk of Brexit, but what about the risk of ‘Bremaining’ in this system that is, in my view, marginally corrupt or borderline corrupt in many, many ways.”
In a major sideswipe at the EU legislature, he said the current system was “pork barrel” politics and “anti-democratic” since “it takes away from ordinary people the ability to dismiss at elections the people who make crucial decisions about their lives.”
Johnson also condemned any US intervention on the Brexit referendum in a newspaper column last month.
Referring to the US as “Uncle Sam,” he called an Obama intervention in the debate “a piece of outrageous and exorbitant hypocrisy” since America defends its own sovereignty with “hysterical vigilance.”
