A five and a half minute section of (17:21 - 22: 53) yesterday’s Politics Live covered Lisa Forbes’s election. Initially, Faiza Shaheen defended Forbes’s Tweet, using the “She didn’t notice the caption” defence. When that wouldn’t wash she tried a bit of whataboutery. What about Islamophobia? she said. Then, what about Ann Widdecombe?
Just a minute, who IS Faiza Shaheen and why is she always on the Beeb? Okay, she’s a Labour Party candidate who only joined the party after JC was elected; she’s after Ian Duncan Smith’s seat and the Guardian newspaper calls her a "rising star" campaigner.
You know when your kids do that thing when they think you’re being annoying and stupid? Mine used to, and I know all their mates did it a lot. They’d push their tongue in front of their bottom teeth to make their lower lip look ‘monkey’ and go ‘ugh’?
Shaheen is grown up, but she reminded me of Kevin the Teenager, gurning like billy-oh, especially when it came to the bit about Ann Widdecombe.
This lady is said to have studied at Oxford so you’d think she might have at least learned to speak proper. What grievance has the Labour Party got against the le’er T?Disgusting reaction by the Brexit Party to blatant homophobia within their party.— Ben McGowan (@BenMcGowan_) June 7, 2019
Props to @faizashaheen for being so patient throughout it all pic.twitter.com/1mgwUYZceC
Incidentally, this caught my eye, because it happened in my neck of the woods. The good people of the far south-west have no-platformed Widdy. The most exasperating thing about all this OTT hooha is that she wasn’t advocating ’cures’ for homosexuality in the first place.
These days reporting often ignores inconvenient facts and verges on ‘reductio ad absurdum’. It seems to be par for the course. Someone says something, (it could be anything at all) about a controversial subject, and some god-forsaken reporter will reinterpret it to slot into their own prejudice.
One day, science could invent a cure for this.
