Johnson, Biden and three BA – Politics

It is known that Boris Johnson does his best to get his messages across to the people, not caring how ridiculous his confrontation sometimes gets. The slogan that the Conservative Party currently uses to describe their policies at every opportunity is “Building Back Better”. The British Prime Minister posted a few shaky videos on social media a while ago. In one of them he distributes a toast and hangs, while the slogan fades, like this: “Rebuild butter.” In another case, he unwrapped a spotted fish, put a bite in his mouth and said, “Hmm, build the back batter.” Reconstructing populism, Johnson is a master of discipline.

Ideally, slogans are not forgotten and show in a few words what the politician stands for. It is ideal if you can call them in choirs. Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” is the best example of this in recent history. The phrase “Build Back Better” now sounds so catchy – in contrast to the German translation of “Besser Wiederaufbauen” – that these words are not only common in London at the moment. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has used the BBB logo several times, including former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and the US Congress in Washington these days is debating Joe Biden’s “building back better” agenda.

In essence, the programs behind the three words are always in some way about structure, infrastructure, climate protection, etc. The logo is so generic that it goes with anything about optimization. And with it everything politicians want to do. Logos that can no longer be clearly customized are of course arbitrary, so: who actually said “Build Better” first?

It all started with Boris Johnson, Biden and three BSs last year when Johnson first used them in May, standing at a lectern marked “Build Build.” In July, Biden also included the logo, which is why Donald Trump’s whaling team accused him of plagiarism. In this way, they are all impostors, Johnson, Biden and the others, because the slogan first appeared years ago: during a United Nations conference in Japan in 2015, which was about risk reduction in natural disasters and reconstruction. Then it was the United Nations again who used the term next time, in an April 2020 press release about the renewal of the world after the pandemic.

When asked by S. Zedd, whoever came up with the slogan at the United Nations, the Secretary-General’s spokesperson found it “very interesting”. But it’s hard to tell, the sentence has been around for a long time, and one cannot ultimately guarantee that it was actually invented by a UN employee. But they are “so happy” that this slogan has been so well received “and used by many leaders around the world”. The speaker says that it is the responsibility of each of them to ensure that the three words become reality.