Did British Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson say the quote ‘Those who break the law will have nowhere to hide’?
The alleged quote gained new resonance after U.K. Police reopened investigations into “partygate.”
On July 4, 2023, British police announced that they had reopened an investigation into “lockdown-breaching government parties” after viewing footage of “Conservative Party staffers dancing and drinking at a 2020 Christmas soiree.” This and other social functions during the pandemic became a controversy in the U.K. known as “partygate,” as reported by The Associated Press (AP):
British police on Tuesday reopened an investigation into lockdown-breaching government parties after viewing video of Conservative Party staffers dancing and drinking at a 2020 Christmas soiree.
The “jingle and mingle” party at Conservative headquarters was held when indoor social mixing was barred under rules imposed to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
The Metropolitan Police force said it also was looking into a gathering in Parliament on Dec. 8, 2020 reportedly attended by members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
The announcement brought with it a rise in memes or references to an alleged Boris Johnson quote about criminals being unable to hide from the law:
Johnson failed to comply with a high court order and did not return his phone containing evidence for the COVID inquiry. We can all make reasonable assumptions why. When will Johnson be arrested? pic.twitter.com/eocEe9ErLg
— Dr Martin Opposes Gov’t Corruption (@MartinRemains) July 11, 2023
The referenced quote is authentic and correctly attributed to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He said these words during an Interview with The Sun in the context of a 2021 government initiative to curb so-called “county line” drug trafficking — the gang-controlled flow of drugs from urban areas to rural areas, as reported by The Independent in December 2021:
Police will carry out 6,400 “disruptions” against the activities of organised criminals, targeting the road and rail networks they use while protecting vulnerable young people exploited by the gangs to run drugs for them. In an interview with The Sun On Sunday, Mr Johnson said it could include removing the passports and driving licences of offenders. […
In a statement ahead of the strategy launch, the Prime Minister said: “Drugs are a scourge on our society, fuelling violence on our streets which communities across the country are forced to endure.
“That’s why, to cut crime and truly level up across the country, we must step up efforts to wipe out the vile county lines gangs who are blighting our neighbourhoods, exploiting children and ruining lives.
“Backed by record investment, the strategy we’re setting out today will attack supply and break the county lines model which sees criminals profit from people’s misery. Those who break the law will have nowhere to hide.”
In conclusion, because Johnson said these words, we rate the claim is Correctly Attributed to him.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word ‘woke’ is broadly used to describe a state of being “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues especially of racial and social injustice”. While it originated from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in the early part of the 20th century, the term has become a common part of American slang and has been gradually co-opted by right wing players to be used as an insult.
Its usage has evolved and grown so much that conservatives now use it as a pejorative to refer to progressives or left-leaning liberals.
The phrase “stay woke” has long been used in Black communities to indicate staying alert to others’ deception–especially law enforcement–as a survival mechanism, but in 2014 “stay woke” became common usage among Black Lives Matter activists after the police killing of Michael Brown, bringing it into the wider lexicon.
Radio host Lana Quest wrote on Twitter that the first documented usage of the term “stay woke” was by Black folk singer Lead Belly when he was talking about his 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys.” According to Quest, the song referred to “nine Black teens falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931, [who] were sentenced to death. NAACP forced repeated retrials. They were finally freed but never recovered.”
In an interview about the song, Lead Belly said, “Stay woke, keep your eyes open.”
“Stay woke. Keep your eyes open.” – Lead Belly
The Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teens falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931, were sentenced to death. NAACP forced repeated retrials. They were finally freed but never recovered.
Lead Belly does indeed use these words when discussing the song, as heard in this archival recording from the Smithsonian. A free version of the recording is available on YouTube, and he can be heard using the phrase at the 4:30 mark:
The song refers to the real-life incident in 1931 involving nine Black teens who were wrongfully convicted for allegedly raping two white women. The case is considered to be one of the first prominent examples of how the U.S. justice system treated Black people, and was said to have inspired Harper Lee who went on to write “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Is that the first documented use of the phrase? We looked at early recorded uses of “woke” and “stay woke” and found that while this is possibly the first recorded usage of the phrase, however, there could be numerous other examples that we just have not discovered yet.
Merriam-Webster, which included “woke” in its dictionary in 2017, stated about the word: “It can be hard to trace slang back to its origins since slang’s origins are usually spoken, and it can be particularly difficult to trace a slang word that has its origins in a dialect. Woke’s transformation into a byword of social awareness likely started decades earlier but began to be more broadly known in 2008, with the release of Erykah Badu’s song “Master Teacher”
But, Bijan C. Baynes, a columnist, argued in the Washington Post that the concept of “wokeness” first emerged through the Nation of Islam that was formed in Detroit in 1930. The group said that the Black community needed a spiritual awakening from its state of mental sleep.
In “The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey,” a compilation of the words of activist Marcus Garvey, first published in February 2, 1923, he stated, “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa! Let us work towards the one glorious end of a free, redeemed and mighty nation. Let Africa be a bright star among the constellation of nations.” In this case he was calling on Black people globally to become more socially and politically conscious.
A 1943 story by J. Saunders Redding in The Atlantic described a great “awakening” among Black people in the North and South, evidenced by growing unrest and labor organizing. He details a 1940 exchange with an official in the Negro United Mine Workers of West Virginia, who said to him, “Let me tell you, buddy. Waking up is a damn sight harder than going to sleep, but we’ll stay woke up longer.”
In 1959, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech to graduates of Morehouse College, an historically Black men’s liberal arts college, titled, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” In the speech he called on graduates to strive for greater success (emphasis, ours):
Now the great question facing us today is whether we will remain awake through this worldshaking revolution, and achieve the new mental attitudes which the situations and conditions demand. There would be nothing more tragic during this period than to allow our mental and moral attitudes to sleep while this tremendous social change takes place. May I suggest a few of the the changed responses that we must make in order to remain awake during this great revolution […] In this new age that is emerging we will be forced to compete with people of all races and nationalities. Therefore, we cannot aim merely to be good Negro teachers, good Negro doctors, good Negro ministers, good Negro skilled labours. Maybe that was alright in the past. But today if you are merely seeking to do a good Negro job, you have already failed your [strikeout illegible] matriculation examination for entrance into the university of integration. You have failed to remain awake through a great revolution.
At the time, King was becoming a pariah, who had been a subject of investigation by the FBI due to his activism.
In 1962, Black novelist William Melvin Kelley wrote about the term “woke” in The New York Times, titled “If You’re Woke You Dig it.” He described the phrase as a “Negro idiom”:
The Negro’s pride in this idiom is that of a man who watches someone else do ineptly what he can do well. The Negro laughs at white people who try to use his language. He experiences the same glee when he witnesses a white audience at a jazz concert clapping on the first and third beat.
The phrase “woke” and to “stay woke” is not new — it began appearing in the 1940s and was first used by African Americans to “literally mean becoming woken up or sensitized to issues of justice”, says linguist and lexicographer Tony Thorne.
Mr Thorne, a visiting consultant at King’s College London, told The Independent that the word is rooted in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and was used in American street and youth culture for a long time.
Today both the usage of “woke” and the phrase “stay woke” have become so common that many do not remember its origins in AAVE. While it is difficult to determine the first use of the phrase “stay woke,” it has been recorded a number of times through the 20th century and is an important call to action for the Black community.
An online article was virally shared in June 2023 that said the long-running morning talk show’s cancellation was “bound to happen.”
The dunning-kruger-times.com website reported, “Canceled: ABC Removes ‘The View’ From Its 2024 Roster: ‘Nobody Watches Anymore.'”
Dunning-kruger-times.com is associated with America’s Last Line of Defense, a network of websites that publishes satirical articles. Historically, the apparent goal of this network was to attempt to get conservative-minded Americans to believe and share the made-up stories.
The beginning of the satirical article claimed that ABC had canceled “The View.” The featured picture included with the story showed left-leaning hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar making facial expressions as if they had just found out their show was ending.
On June 6, the story appeared to be taking off on Twitter with more shares than on any day since it had been published.
Did ABC Cancel ‘The View,’ Removing the Show as of 2024?
However, this was not a true story.
This news article was published on a website that describes its output as satirical in nature.
Near the end of the story, it mentioned the word “taters.” This term is what fans of America’s Last Line of Defense use to refer to the website’s conservative readers.
The “About Us” page for dunning-kruger-times.com describes “taters” as follows:
“Taters” are the conservative fans of America’s Last Line of Defense. They are fragile, frightened, mostly older caucasian Americans. They believe nearly anything. While we go out of our way to educate them that not everything they agree with is true, they are still old, typically ignorant, and again — very afraid of everything.
Our mission is to do our best to show them the light, through shame if necessary, and to have a good time doing it, because…old and afraid or not, these people are responsible for the patriarchy we’re railing so hard against. They don’t understand logic and they couldn’t care less about reason. Facts are irrelevant. BUT…they do understand shame.
