Always Worth Saying’s Question Time Review

Question Time 4th June 2020

Panel:

Nadhim Zahawi (Conservative)
David Lammy (Labour)
Donna Kinnair (Royal College of Nursing)
Hugh Pennington (Microbiologist)

Venue: Southampton

Medical school tutor to Professor Van-Tan, the patient zero who gave Steven Hawkins motor neurone disease, the boisterous physiology student who cut off his own penis and sent it to “That’s Life” because he thought it looked like a carrot, Nobel laureate The Very Reverend Professor Doctor Sir Robert Peston MD FRCS DPhil MPhil FRS ITV, has been reinstated as QT medical expert. His replacement, last week’s Ms McCay, was offered yet another job, after I’d finished my research and before the programme had started. As announced by Fiona Bruce during last week’s programme, Ms McCay is now at the World Bank.

Having said all of that, Professor Sir Doctor Robert is unavailable tonight as he must demonstrate his anti-looting vaccine in Minneapolis City Hall. His immense absence from the Question Time panel must be filled by two medical experts, Donna Kinnair and Hugh Pennington.

Your modest reviewer has a happy memory of tonight’s venue, Southampton. Our local XI sent Peter Shilton (subsequently sound on Brexit) et al away from the windswept terraces two goals down, in the first leg of a cup tie. The Dell called. Off I set, the length of England. Unfortunately, I was under the impression that you could get from London to Southampton on the Underground. Disappointment followed. I did manage to get to the match on time but further disappointment occurred when the Saints won in injury time. Nearly four decades have passed, at least I have survived them better than the Dell.

“Worst” continues to be a keyword at the BBC. As of Wednesday evening, European deaths per million from Covid-19, according to Oxford University’s World in Data project were :

1st Belgium 820
2nd Spain 597
3rd UK 579
4th Italy 554

If Puffins would like to crowdfund BAME vulnerable David Lammy to somewhere safer, Venezuela tips the scales at 0.6, Syria, 0.3, Mongolia, Bhutan, Namibia and Uganda, at zero.

Incidentally, the late Bernard Manning used to do twenty minutes on Steven Hawkins’s sex life. It shouldn’t have been funny.

The Question Time audience consists of twelve people up on the wall on the big screen. Obviously, there’s a black woman, a black man, and ten BBC approved white people. The black woman asked about coronavirus and BAME. Donna Kinnair (RCN) rambled on about PPE making it obvious that she hadn’t read the report. I doubt if the others had either. However, as the great Bill Shankley used to say in his team talks, when they’re asleep Puffin’s are awake.

QT Review research often takes me to exotic places. A private bank in the Bahamas or Panama occasionally beckons. This week I have been trapped in a locked room with Cox proportional hazards regression while wrestling with confidence intervals and multivariables. Much has been made of BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) coronavirus. You have been told that half an hour in Barnard Castle is literally worse than bubonic plague, whilst having a Black Lives Matters march and rally is good for you. Is this true?

A much-heralded government report looking at disparities within the coronavirus pandemic was published on Tuesday. The big disparity is age. People over 80 are 67 times more likely to die of coronavirus than people under 20. Regarding sex, men are 1.7 times more likely to die than women.

Regarding BAME (page 83 onwards), 15 other ethnicities besides White British are listed. 13 of these have a lower COVID-19 death rate than the White British. When the confidence interval (the range of plausible values) is taken into account, 14 have a lower rate, the one remaining non-White British ethnicity in the woodpile being, ‘Caribbean’.

If we look at deaths aged between 20 and 64, some of the numbers are very small. During the time covered by the research, there had only been 19 Chinese deaths. Likewise, there had only been 59 Bangladeshi deaths but this still gives an upper confidence index of over three times White British. These higher numbers are the ones that mainstream media have been quoting.

If you hear of Bangladeshi victimhood, it is based upon 59 working-age deaths, out of a current all ages and all ethnicities total number of deaths of 40,000.

A multivariable (ie not just being dead) approach, conveniently gives higher numbers for BAME. Those extra variables are; sex, age, deprivation and region. Occupation, comorbidities (being simultaneously killed by another condition) and obesity are missed out. Deprivation is based upon the local authority area, not upon the situation of the particular individual that lived there. In conclusion, parts of the report are deliberately weighted in order to lay the BAME card. Avoid.

Whist doing this research, I stumbled across a map of upper-tier local authority boundaries. It seems a shame to waste it. Just for fun, see if you can count up how many UTLA’s Ian Blackford passed through on his 700-mile self-isolating lockdown trip from London to Skye. I make it about thirty.

Back in the Question Time studio, the black male audience member was invited by £15,000 an hour equality expert Fiona Bruce to ask his question. He sounded very posh. He had been oppressed for many centuries. What’s to be done?

Nadhim Zahawi played the race card. He was bullied at school. The poor, oppressed, disadvantaged soul was educated privately at Ibstock Place School, Roehampton and at Kings College School, Wimbledon. Not quite the Bronx. People are nasty to him on social media and suggest that he doesn’t quite belong to Stratford-upon-Avon. However could one suggest such a thing? Read on.

Nadhim Zahawi is MP for Stratford-upon-Avon and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children and Families. Not quite a Worcestershire Zahawi, he was born in Iraq to Kurdish parents and came to England when he was nine. Like many ethnic MPs, he has maintained a profitable interest in the ‘old country’. Yes, that includes you Barroness Saida Hussein Warsi of Dewsbury. Dear BBC, please please, please, please, please invite Baroness Warsi onto Question Time so that I can give her a good kicking.

Nadhim Zahawi was elected to parliament in May 2010. In the following month, he and his wife incorporated Zahawi and Zahawi at Companies House as an ‘other business support services not elsewhere classified’. More helpfully, the House of Commons list of members interests describes it as a ‘Business Advisory Service’. What kind of businesses might the Zahawis advise?

Zahawi and Zahawi tended to have about half a dozen clients at any one time. Often oil companies that had a commercial interest in Zadawi’s Kurdish Region in Iraq (KRI), such as Talisman or Genel. Another, that Zadawi avised for four years, was Afran plc. Zahawi declared that their offices were in Woodlands, Texas, but thanks to our friends at the Panama Papers, we know that he could also have declared them to be in Switzerland, Panama, the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas or Guernsey, amongst others. Afren plc was originally a West African oil producer which subsequently expanded into Iraqi Kurdistan. When they got into difficulties and crashed, the BBC reported that,

“Afren, once valued on the FTSE 250 index at £2.6bn, collapsed in 2015 after the oil price slump and the failure of an Iraqi Kurdistan project.”

Worse was to come, Afren’s investors collapsed into acrimonious litigation. Two senior executives were subsequently jailed for fraud and money laundering. However, in the very month that Afren went into administration, Zahawi joined another oil company with another Kurdish oil concession, Gulf Keystone Petroleum, of Hamilton, Bermuda. They paid him £20,000+ a month, as well as regular five-figure bonus payments, to be a Strategic Manager.

During all of this time, Zahawi was also on the All Party Parliamentary Committee for Iraq and was enjoying jollies to Kurdistan, Istanbul, Ankara, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Dubai. He was also a long-standing non-executive director of SThree, an engineering and oil company recruiting agency who paid him £3,333 pounds a month for 7 hours work.

In 2013, Zahawi was caught out by his MPs expenses claims, the Daily Mirror publishing that he had claimed £5,800 from the taxpayer to heat his stables. He also claimed 53p to buy a hole punch, 63p for a ballpoint pen, 89p for a stapler and 31p on paper clips.

In 2017 The Guardian reported that the Zahawi’s had accumulated a property portfolio worth in excess of £25 million pounds. This included his livery stables in Warwickshire, a £13m mansion in Belgravia and various other commercial and rental properties. These properties were part-financed by loans from the Santander bank.

Coming up to date, as he begins to climb the junior ministerial ladder, he has resigned from Zahawi and Zahawi, although his wife remains. She also has an interest in at least two other property companies, Zahawi Brierley Hill Limited and Zahawi Wantage which have continued to buy property with money loaned from Santander. However, she does not appear as Mrs Zadawi, rather uses her maiden name. Don’t bother Googling “stout Stratford ‘pon Avon lass”, as she is known Ms Lana Fawsi Jamil Saib. No doubt a Worcestershire Saib all the same.

You humble author couldn’t help but notice that Mr Zahawi gets paid for writing articles. I accidentally wrote the rates down. £420 for the Observer, £300 The Times, £700 Mail on Sunday, £150 The Sun, up to £1000 for the Express. Might there be a great injustice in need of righting? Dear Puffins, if I were to film myself gasping, “I can’t feed my family”, might it catch on?

Donna answered the question by saying that she sees racism all of the time. When the Queen made her a Dame? When she was appointed Chief Executive and General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing? When she’s invited onto Question Time twice in one series? Puffins, shall we riot?

Hugh Pennington was also speaking from up on the big wall, from his home in Aberdeen. His bookcases seemed to be at very funny angles, as though there’d been a mad dash to cover the nudes hanging on the walls. He was pessimistic. He had been in the United States during the time of Martin Luther King and had seen the national guard deployed in Chicago. “These things keep on coming round again,” he muttered pessimistically.

When it was his turn, David Lammy paused. Was he checking his privilege? Boarding school, tick, University of London, tick, Harvard, tick, called to the Bar, tick, £650 bike on MPs expenses, tick, accuses Middlesborough educated state school pupil Rod Liddle of having privilege, tick, race-baiter extraordinaire (white smoke for a new Pope is racist), tick, £2 million pound house, of course.

Lammy’s spat with Rod Liddle occurred when Liddle challenged Lammy’s assertion that his mother had raised him on tax credits. Liddle did have a point. The tax credit system wasn’t introduced until Lammy was 31.

Famously, Lammy was filmed complaining, after yet another stabbing in his constituency, that he never saw a policeman, whilst being erm, filmed within sight of a policeman.

Mr Lammy’s contribution to harmony between peoples includes remaining a member of Jeremy Corbyn’s toxic Labour Party when his Jewish colleagues needed bodyguards at the Labour Party Conference and when Corbyn approved a mural showing the Jews playing monopoly on the bones of the broken poor. Given that this week’s Black Lives Matter movement now involves Palestinian flags and vandalising synagogues, Mr Lammy certainly knows his way home.

Incidentally, Lammy’s wife is painter Nicola Green, who specialises in portraits of famous people with their faces blanked out. God makes them and pairs them. On her website she boasts, “Green is renowned for gaining unprecedented access to iconic personalities from the world of politics.” Isn’t she wonderful? Obviously nothing to do with her husband being an MP.

Lammy claimed that he could hardly breathe for racism but hadn’t gone onto the streets for the Black Lives Matter march. Surprisingly, Lammy isn’t an enthusiast for the brothers in the hood and prefers not to live in his constituency. In 2009 he left minority white, multicultural Tottenham and bought a £1.2 million pound house in Crouch End (2011 census, 1.5% Black African). He claimed that he moved there because of the schools.

According to the Daily Mail, 9th November 2014,

“At the school nearest to his former home in Tottenham, more than half of the pupils speak English as an additional language. The levels of pupils needing free school meals and having special educational needs – both indicators of a school facing a challenging academic environment – are also well above average. According to Ofsted, ‘the number of pupils who join in the middle of the year is high compared with other schools and many of those pupils are at the very early stages of learning English’

Mr Lammy preferred to send his children to this one:

“However, the school inspectorate rates the Catholic school attended by Mr Lammy’s two children in Crouch End as ‘outstanding’ overall- compared to just ‘good’ for the Tottenham school. It notes that only a small number of pupils speak English as a foreign language.”

Following the Tottenham riots in 2011 (after the death of a violent criminal, Mark Duggan, while being arrested), Mr Lammy took a conservative view, blaming the disturbances on,

“Grand theft auto culture that glamourises violence. A consumer culture fixated on the brands we wear, not who we are and what we achieve. A gang culture with warped notions of loyalty, respect and honour.”

He went on to say that parents need to be able to discipline their children in order to keep them away from knife crime and gang culture,

“Many constituents came up to me after the riots and blamed the Labour government saying, “You guys stopped us being able to smack our children,” they no longer feel sovereign in their own homes. Parents in my constituency are frightened that if they smack their children, a social worker will come knocking at the door. The ability to exercise their own judgement in relation to discipline and reasonable chastisement has been taken away.”

In reality, the vast majority of black people who are harmed are harmed by other black people. Likewise, the vast majority of victims of racism are white. Even in the official reports. If we look at the National Police Chiefs Council’s “Hate Crime England and Wales, 2017/2018”, in table 3.3 on page 26, we are told that there were 105,459 racially motivated hate crimes in that year and that 94,643 of the victims were white. That’s what it says in the official report. Total silence. You know what the media-political narrative is. It is a total lie. It will not change.

Lammy and his constituents were correct in 2011. His recent comments on the George Floyd riots are race-baiting, Trump deranged nonsense.

This week’s QT Review’s Maitlis monologue moment returns us to the United States. The world has gone mad. Maybe it always was? Perhaps it has taken your humble and inadequate reviewer over half a century to realise what the rest of you knew already knew? In a week dominated by victimhood and the importance of black lives, a 6″ 6′ intoxicated convicted criminal, who could kill you with a single punch, must always be referred to as ‘unarmed’. Meanwhile, a majority of black Americans, total innocents, truly defenceless in the womb, are killed before they are even born. Black Lives Matter.
 

© Always Worth Saying 2020
 

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