The morning's Sunday Morning Live, inevitably, discussed the migrant crisis, asking the question "Should Britain be a safe haven for migrants?"
Sian Williams, just as inevitably, began by focusing on the issue everyone (at the BBC) seems to think is the most important aspect of all: whether David Cameron was wrong to use the word "swarm".
Three out of her four guests agreed it was wrong to use such language; one said it wasn't such a big deal (and got loudly talked over for his pains).
The panel consisted of the Independent's Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (the one doing most of the loud talking-over), left-wing former Anglican bishop Stephen Lowe, left-leaning former Independent columnist Christina Patterson and Pastor Clement Okusi, lead pastor of Potters House Church, Croydon.
Despite initial appearances to the contrary and a bit of heat (with Pastor Clement trying to pursue a less predictable path and Yasmin yabbering over everyone else as usual), the panel converged on the value of EU-wide controlled mass migration and on the shamefulness of Britain's commitment to refugees.
As a commenter at Biased BBC anticipated before watching it, "So that's no real debate at all then, just all shades of the same argument" (a very accurate prediction, I think).
Tommy Sandhu then read out some viewer messages, some of which sounded pretty extreme, before featuring a viewer on video who then strongly denounced those kind of people (with those kind of views) as "sociopaths". Sian then invited Christina Patterson to agree with the video guy about such people becoming "sociopaths", which Christina duly did.
And so on and so forth.
That was not a balanced panel or a balanced discussion.
The BBC is really not helping itself with this kind of thing - as the public vote would have shown if the programme still dared to put its questions to the audience (which it doesn't).
