Further to Craig’s excellent review of this morning’s Andrew Marr, I thought Boris’s performance was a bit of an anticlimax. His most notable quality is his refusal to be intimidated by the Marrs and Paxos of the media world when they turn on that haughty superiority (in Paxo’s case) and a kind of hectoring irritability in Marrs’s, both of which seem to get the better of other politicians.
Boris shares that quality with Nigel Farage, come to think of it. Neither of them are in awe of the self-regarding BBC titans, and they both still manage to retain their personal charm whilst determinedly ‘not having any of it’.
However Boris was more bumbling than decisive today; the stand-out moment was when he said to Andy something like: “As a lefty BBC journalist you would say that.”
People should say that more often. As for Ed, well, if he keeps saying ‘let’s be clear’ we can only assume it’s an admission of being unclear hitherto.
I wish all politicians would stop saying “It’s the right thing to do”. They might get away with “I believe it’s the right thing to do” - but who needs to be told what the right thing to do is by a politician. Let us decide that for ourselves please.
I do find the constant probing about possible alliances and allegiances tedious. We know premature confirmation of future allegiances would have undesirable ramifications for the voting. The politician can’t answer in any meaningful way, so why must the interviewer keep trying to wheedle it out? Ed’s outright denial of Labour tying a post-election knot with the SNP was so obviously a tactic that it was pointless.
There is one question I’d have liked put to Mr. Let’s-be-clear.
In the Labour manifesto:
We’ll take robust action against hate crimeAs a country, we must stand together to eradicate hatred, prejudice and intolerance, rather than letting it spread. A Labour government will develop a cross-government strategy on hate crime, from schools to social media, to tackle the growth in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. We’ll ensure hate crimes are properly recorded, including incidents of Islamophobia, as is currently done with other types of crime.
A future Labour Government is committed to outlaw the scourge of Islamophobia by changing the law and making it an aggravated crime, according to the Party’s Leader Ed Miliband.
“We are going to make it an aggravated crime. We are going to make sure it is marked on people’s records with the police to make sure they root out Islamophobia as a hate crime,” Miliband told the Editor of The Muslim News, Ahmed J Versi in a wide ranging exclusive interview.“We are going to change the law on this so we make it absolutely clear of our abhorrence of hate crime and Islamophobia. It will be the first time that the police will record Islamophobic attacks right across the country,” he said.Labour Party Manifesto pledged to take a “zero-tolerance approach to hate crime” regarding the growth of Islamophobia as well as anti-Semitism. “We will challenge prejudice before it grows, whether in schools, universities or on social media. And we will strengthen the law on disability, homophobic, and transphobic hate crime,” it said.
So what is it to be? Is a Labour government going to make ‘Islamophobia’ a hate crime?
ASBO for Craig, prison for me?
