Boris Johnson led the Brexit campaign with a lot of dog-whistles about dirty foreign muck stealing our jobs and clogging up our NHS, before being stabbed in the back by Michael Gove and bowing out of politics, until, today, he was made Foreign Secretary by Theresa May, the UK’s new Pry Minister.
But wait, there’s more! Jose Manuel Barroso, former boss of the European Commission, took a top job at Goldman Sachs, just weeks after the expiry of the lockout period during which former EU civil servants were not allowed to work for the corporations they’d formerly regulated.
Just to recap: the Brexit vote was in large part driven by the (correct) perception on the part of the disaffected working class in the UK that the entire EU project was a neoliberal exercise in transferring power to the forces of finance capitalism. Irony is not dead.
The bank said last week it had hired Barroso, a conservative Portuguese ex-premier who headed the European Union’s executive arm from 2004-2014, to be an adviser and non-executive chairman of its international business.
French European Affairs Minister Harlem Desir said the “scandalous” move raised questions about the EU’s conflict of interest rules and said they needed to be tightened.
“It’s a mistake on the part of Mr. Barroso and the worst disservice that a former Commission president could do to the European project at a moment in history when it needs to be supported and strengthened,” Desir said during a question and answer session in the lower house of France’s parliament.
France calls on ex-EU chief Barroso to drop Goldman Sachs job
[France 24]