This Video of London’s Mayor Bulldozing a Child Into the Ground Is Essentially One Big Metaphor for the UK Government

Here's what happened when — Sky News (@SkyNews)October 15, 2015

Here's a video of the Mayor of London crashing his huge clumsy body into the face, neck, and shoulders of a slight Japanese boy while on a trade mission to Tokyo. There's something almost soothing about a man who looks like a pale boiled egg rolled in chicken fluff just monstering a ten-year-old into some astroturf. Have you ever, really, seen someone get shoulder barged so hard that the cap they are wearing loses all anchorage in the universal laws of physics and somehow ends up around their neck? No, you haven't. Until now.

There's a lot to enjoy about the video of Boris Johnson just destroying a cheery young boy: "Come meet the prince buffoon of London!" the boy's teacher probably said to him. "Come play touch-rugby in front of photographers with this large pale man," and he would have been so full of hope, the boy, Japanese officials descending on the school a day ahead of time to do a security check, handing out oversized rugby shirts, and caps to the boys chosen to face innocently off against this colossus, the excitement building to a buzz, the boy barely sleeping the night before, tucked all up beneath a thin little blanket. I shall be so happy, tomorrow, he is thinking, to play Boris Johnson at rugby, and then six seconds into the game he is essentially assaulted by him, brutally. My favorite bit is the failed body feint: he throws his right arm to the right, which fools the naïve doomed boy, and then charges left, a near-perfect feint, and then—in the cortex of Boris Johnson's mind that is marked "do crazy shit," which is especially large—he charges right again, shoulder-first into the face, neck, and shoulders of the tiny child.

I mean, first up: Is there really any need to do a body feint to beat a ten-year-old at rugby? Boris Johnson is a bear who woke up confused, shaved himself nude, and then put his head alternately in a bucket of hair and a bucket of straw. He could have six or seven Japanese ten-year-olds pulling at his legs and he'd still be able to beast them. And then you consider that this was a trade mission to celebrate Japan hosting the 2019 rugby World Cup—and not, as you might rightly assume from the footage of BoJo crumpling a boy to death with his shoulder, a genuinely competitive match—and the whole pace-and-charge seems all the more baffling. Like, I would understand doing that to the boy if the boy were armed with a gun and threatening to shoot the Queen in the head unless he was given a billion pounds converted over into yen, but I don't quite see the need when he is just cheerfully trying to catch a rugby ball that you are holding as a joke.

But this is the trick with Johnson: he does all this suspending from wires and tasty tackles and public child murder to make us forget that he is a Tory, and so, by extension, essentially evil. And then if you zoom out and think about it, this whole mauling of a ten-year-old is just one big visual metaphor for the Conservatives trampling the youth of Britain.

Example: In July, Iain Duncan Smith realized child poverty figures were too high, so moved to redefine the concept of poverty based on a number of different vectors, which in a way sounds good—separating the truly destitute from those who are just bobbing under the living wage line, as though being poor is a competition you can win—but also does slim to fuck all to attack the root cause of child poverty, which is, fundamentally, income.

Example: In the 2015 second budget—the Conservatives, of course, doing a second, more Tory budget after being voted in completely and without the Lib Dems—announced plans to scrap the university maintenance grants from September 2016, meaning students in low- to middle-income families who were previously entitled to £3,387 [$5,245] annual grants will now not get that because it is "unaffordable" while tuition fees—currently at £9,000 [$14,000]—are expected to rise in line with inflation. So, I mean, I'm not exactly sure how a flattened ten-year-old from a family earning less than £25,000 [$38,718] per year is meant to ever go to university.

Example: I mean, say that ten-year-old boy has two brothers, eight and six, and their parents require child tax credits, only they can't get them, really, because from 2017 they will be phased down to two children only, a budget policy seemingly designed to attack the poorest families in the country, an effective two-child policy, here, that makes the poorest families poorer.

Example: the last budget also announced that there would be no automatic housing benefit for 18- to-21-year-olds, which, yes, admittedly is a touch older than the ten-year-old Boris Johnson just monstered and killed, but is still a sort of unspoken attack on the youth, the poor youth now stuck in a sort of void where they can't really go to university and aren't entitled to move out into public housing, so… um… get a job, I guess, fuckers?

Example: I mean, say that ten-year-old is left injured and disabled after Boris Johnson destroyed him with his body, left in a wheelchair, or somehow chronically ill. Well, sorry kiddo, because the Conservative Welfare Bill—which, among other things, threatens a cap on benefits for households that stops at £26,000 [$40,000], which many critics have noted will make many parts of southern England literally unaffordable for young families to live in—proposes to limit benefits for those on the employment and support allowance (ESA) down to the equivalent of the jobseeker's allowance (JSA), which means those with long-term health issues could see their benefits cut by as much as £30 [$46] a week.

Example: let's not even wade near to the quagmire that is the minimum and living wage.

I mean, still: it is funny that Boris Johnson exploded a boy using only his shoulders and the boy died (for clarity, he didn't die: he told the press that meeting and being killed by Johnson was "enjoyable"), and the video is a cheery watch, and I don't want to be all, "Guys, you know there are people dying in the world?" about it—harsh reality is the absolute boner-killer of humor—but still: this oafish bear man wants to be the leader of the Tories one day, and it's worth remembering that when he isn't dangling from ziplines or saying "wiff waff" or charging a Japanese boy's soul out of his body using force, he's sitting around thinking all of the above is OK.

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