Question Time 4th April 2019
A date that has gone down in literary history.
“[Winston Smith wrote] in small clumsy letters:
April 4th 1984
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984….his mind hovered for a moment around the date on the page, and then he fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word doublethink. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him.
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music…
The next moment a hideous, grinding screech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s new. Question Time had started.”
Panel:
MAIREAD MCGUINESS (gasbag Irish MEP and EU vice-president apparatchik. Salary £100,000+ pa. plus £300 per day attendance “subsistence” allowance plus travel costs of £50,000 p.a. plus staff costs of £4000 per month plus subsidised tax free shopping – the trough is deep and wide. Her net worth is estimated to be approx £2.5 million)
DAVID LAMMY; race baiter, chippy racist, mastermind contestant (failed), owner of £600 bike – paid for by you. Likens Leavers to Nazis.
ASH SARKAR: Senior Editor @novaramedia. Literature bore. Anarcho-fabulous. Muslim. THFC. Walks like a supermodel. Fucks like a champion. (This is taken word for word from her own Twitter description. I don’t know what “THFC” means). Cardboard communist but admits she has “some problems” with Stalin. The 30 million+ murdered by Stalin had problems with him as well.
CHARLES MOORE: Journo. The only Leaver on the panel
JEREMY WRIGHT: Tory. Pro-EU. Traitor.
Presenter: Fiona Bruce. Earnings from the licence payers c£900,000. Lives in N.London well away from enriched areas.
Venue: Dulwich
It had been advertised last week as to be from Bolton. One wonders why the change. Speculate at leisure. Perhaps there is less piano wire in dainty Dulwich.
The twitter feed of Question Time is always replete with hate and venom from the Left and it is normally directed towards the audience: “Gammons”, “Ukippers”, “thick audience” “EDL bussed in” etc etc. Inexplicably, and proof if any were needed that these comments emanate from those whose grip on contemporary politics is meagre to say the least, there is a belief that the BBC bias the panel to pro-brexit and right wing speakers.
Bruce presented the panel as “two journalists, one from the right and one from the left”. I would have some considerable argument with the claim that Moore is from the “right” while I’d put Sarkar on the fringes of the Far Left verging on policies that would not be unknown to Laverntiy Beria.
This was the most deplorably biased panel in the history of QT and quite rightly Charles Moore felt he had to call out the BBC on the Remainer/Leaver imbalance. Bruce went into overdrive shouting him down and despite Moore offering independent evidence that the QT panel has been 70/30 Remainer/Leave she refused to accept it and even, later in the programme, said that the audience was 50/50 balanced. You could have fooled me.
Lammy and McGuiness worked as a wrestling tag team with Sarkar screaming from beyond the ropes. McGuiness doing the softly softly kick to the nuts with “you’re all going to be poorer” and Lammy following up with the heavy duty ranting reminiscent of a 30’s Mosleyite bellowing non sequiturs surrounded by his Brownshirt thugs. Lammy I can take because he is so obviously an ignorant fool but McGuiness I find loathsome in her duplicitous “I represent the poor border counties of Ireland” but conveniently forgetting to tell us that she is tits deep in the mendacious EU trough squirrelling away more moolah per year than many of her constituents would see In a lifetime. I was pleased to see Moore finally nail her on the Irish border question when he asked if the U.K. wasn’t going to put up a hard border then who was? The EU? She blustered. Her passing shot to us was that “you will be much poorer if you leave”. Oh yes, brethren, it was a threat.
Jeremy Wright when compared to the Lammy/McGuiness/Sarkar triumvirate seemed genuinely mild and congenial until you remembered that the WA he promoted was in fact worse than Remaining. In fact the whole discussion has now descended into sound bites developed over the months and years by the media. They signify empty nothings and only serve to provide a kind of idiot shorthand for those who can’t be bothered to turn over the first page of a contract to see what else lies beneath. And this is quite evident in the comments coming from the audience which regurgitate the same old tired cliches so beloved of the MSM. We got the “they didn’t know what they were voting for” which I was glad to see was countered by Moore who said that this was an argument only ever used by those who voted Remain who presumably DID know what they were voting for. The rest – the Leavers – were, by implication, presumably thick.
Ash Sarkar apparently teaches at Anglia Polytechnic (now renamed a university), inculcating the soft minds of her pupils with the higher principles of Marxist dogma while pocketing £50k a year as an academic and whatever else she can garner from the BBC appearances – which are many and frequent. Where she came from, why she is regarded as worthy of air time and who would think her views were anything other than overblown student blather they are I have no idea.
A rank episode which indicates that the BBC’s gloves are well and truly off.
© Roger Ackroyd 2019
Roger’s book.
Audio file
