Will we see more articles called ‘My Leftie Hell” after last night’s Question Time? Probably no-one will bother. They’re resigned to it.
Like the ‘Any Questions’ that caused Allison Pearson such grief, Q.T. came from the Cambridge area, and the audience was as surreally leftie as they come.
On the panel were: Yanis Varoufakis, Ken Clarke MP, Chris Bryant MP, Suzanne Evans and Julia Hartley-Brewer.
The question: “Should we take more refugees than we can cope with?”
Note the way the question was phrased. Not ‘should we take in everyone in the whole wide world that fancies an easy life on benefits?’ Just the slightly loaded “More than we can cope with”.
Dimbleby turned to Suzanne Evans first, no doubt expecting her to make the familiar argument against this country taking in all and sundry, which she duly did. It was greeted with deathly silence. After a suitable pause so we could soak up the hostility in the atmosphere, the chair turned to Yanis Varoufakis whose first words were “The opposite”. The audience erupted with whoops and cheers.
The overbearing Greek ex-finance minister proved popular with the audience. “Borders are an absurdity” he said.
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| We are all migrants |
Suzanne Evans, Julia Hartley-Brewer, and a dully equivocating Ken Clarke unsuccessfully tried to reason with the audience, but the two remaining panellists agreed that we should take in anyone and everyone who wished to come because overall, migrants are of great benefit to the country.
When it was suggested that their ‘welcome to all’ policy would put an even greater strain on our already over-stretched NHS, Chris Bryant said “If you see a migrant in the NHS it’s likely to be someone who’s treating you, not being treated.” The audience were in leftie heaven.
There is a parallel world.
Leftie Hell and the BBC constitute one world; the rest of Britain constitutes the other.
Actually it was more like "approaching balance" hell.
ReplyDeleteI think QT might have been reforming their audience selection procedure because there were definitely some UKIP supporters in there. And as for the panel itself, well it probably fairly reflected UK opinion with the possible exception of the racist right. There were two panellists prepared to spell out the damage caused by mass immigration.
Probably if you took away Dimbleby's left-liberal interventionism you would be getting towards something close to a reasonable programme.
I hope I have time to watch this tomorrow. I'd say it looks like the most right-slanted panel in living memory, but Clarke is establishment Tory, and Varoufakis by himself outweighs him, Evans, and Julia H-B.
ReplyDeleteVaroufakis is easily one of my favorite politicians or political figures in the last couple years. Apparently he nailed Osborne's political economic schemes as "faux austerity", which is absolutely true. Of course, being the madman that he is, he also said that what little austerity there was killed the economic recovery (sounds like Michael Portillo, but never mind). He is brilliant in his ability to run rings around everyone else, to baffle the professional pundits and opinion-mongers, and be both 100% right and 100% wrong at the same time.
The problem with these audiences is that anyone sitting at home might feel that their own, quite reasonable views on a subject such as immigration is in fact the minority view. Such is the power of television. To be constantly told that to oppose uncontrolled immigration is racist is a very poisonous form of propaganda. If there really was any will on the BBC’s part to do anything about this they would have done so a long time ago.
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