Question Time 23rd September 2021
The Panel:
Grant Shapps (Conservative)
David Lammy (Labour)
Kate Andrews (Journalist)
Richard Walker (Businessman)
Munira Wilson (LibDem)
Venue: Cambridge
QT has rather a limited gene pool as its guests. One of the important DNA qualifications is to be not British. Around tonight’s Question Time table, Mr Lammy is from British Guiana, Ms Wilson from Pakistan, Kate Andrews, America and Fiona Bruce, Singapore. Mr Shapps and his wife Belinda Goldstone hail from the People’s Democratic Republic of Careful Now.
However, one of the previously approved QT haplogroups has been genetically modified into cancelled non-personhood. As the tinged and female £197,000 a year head of the Royal College of Nursing, Donna Kinnair was an obvious BBC favourite. However, Ms Kinnair has fallen off her bike – in more than one sense of the phrase. On July 1st the Nursing Times reported,
“Dame Donna Kinnair has announced that she is permanently stepping down as chief executive and general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing. Dame Donna has been on sick leave since April following a cycling accident but has now handed in her resignation which is effective immediately.”
There followed congratulatory claptrap which omitted to mention that, during her absence from the office, her replacement opened Dame Donna’s emails to discover that, unbeknown to the Royal College, Ms Kinnair had ‘accepted hospitality’ from George Farha, the Saudi financier at the heart of Prince Charles’ cash for honours embarrassment. Not only that, she held meetings with Health Secretary Matt Hancock without telling the RCN and had ‘earnings from other organisations’ the RCN weren’t made aware of. Amongst a deafening silence from the rest of mainstream media, the sorry tale is covered here by the Daily Mail.
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First question, higher prices but lower Universal Credit payments.
“Brutally cruel, unfair and nasty,” said David Lammy (Labour). If you’re on £18,000 a year, he sighed. You might want to do few more black history events, he forgot to add. David refused to cost the Labour Party’s proposals until the general election. Grant Shapps (Conservative) pointed out there are now more employment opportunities plus the Government had spend £400 billion on the coronavirus pandemic. More Universal Credit would mean higher taxes to pay for it, he added.
Grammar school boy Grant Shapps is the Tory MP for Welwyn Hatfield and the Secretary of State for Transport. Mr Shapps is an alumnus of Manchester Polytechnic having been awarded an HND in Business and Finance. His get rich quick schemes as a ‘businessman’ have included passing himself off as a ‘Mr Green’ while creating internet blogs by pulling content from other blogs in order to generate money via Google Ads. He entered Parliament in 2005.
A cliff edge for the most vulnerable, thought Kate Andrews (journalist). the Government had been generous during the pandemic but beyond coronavirus all this had to be paid for. She challenged David Lammy to do more than just oppose the Government and to come together with the Tories to avoid the cliff edge.
Richard Walker (food retailer) wasn’t happy. He was thinking about his customers. They go from the benefits office to their local Iceland and fill his till. Not fair. He wanted income tax to rise, to churn people who don’t shop at Iceland’s money into Iceland’s tills.
Munira Wilson (LibDem) pointed out a series of price and tax rises. The average nurse weighs 330 lbs. Sorry, will be paying £330 more in tax. David Lammy decided 25% of young people were living in poverty and it took St Marcus of Rashford to force the Government to spend your taxes on free school meals. He called the Tories the nasty party.
Folks, if you’re hard up, get a job. Now’s the time. The employment market is your friend. They are hiring.
Question two, HGV vacancies, what to do?
Recruit new young drivers was Richard’s plan. The average age of an HGV driver is 57, he said. As well as the HGV problems there was also the shortage of CO2. There was a bit of perfect storm. The drivers were getting a pay rise but it takes six to nine months to recruit and train them. Richard wanted to bring them in from abroad, presumably to kill off those pay rises.
Murina agreed with Richard. “There will be less choice.” She wanted to bring them in from abroad as well.
A chap in the audience threw a spanner in the works. Why not use this as way of finding carbon neutral kinds of distribution? Tut tut, not to point out the endless self contradictions in the leftie dreamland.
Why do we need all these choices? As long as you get fed, does it matter?
Grant blamed coronavirus for slowing everything down and Lammy thought that was funny. There are already 6 million Europeans living here and there are shortages of drivers in Germany and Poland too.
Bruce was obsessed with Christmas. Of all the endless scare stories we have to put up with these days they are now literally going to tell us that Christmas is going to be cancelled. Lammy joined in, “A winter of discontent”. Brexit! “Where’s the trade deal?” Fruit pickers! Lammy shouted and wanted immigration to go up, to a revealing silence from the carefully selected university town audience.
David Lindon Lammy is Labour MP for Tottenham, Shadow Secretary of State for Justice and Shadow Lord Chancellor. Mr Lammy doesn’t live in his constituency, preferring a £1.2 million house in Crouch End – black African population, 1.2%. His wife is painter Nicola Green who specialises in portraying famous people with their faces blanked out. Pictured here is her tribute to, erm, well, I don’t know. And here’s her representation of, oh. Ah. Um.
According to Mrs Lammy, via her online CV,
In 2015, Nicola Green, with ICF, co-founded the Phase I Diaspora Platform Programme, which would take emerging ethnic minority UK-based artists and curators to the 56th Venice Biennale to witness curator Okwui Enwezor ‘All The World’s Futures’ Biennale intervention, where he critically examined its entanglement with race, politics and power.
Couples have a way of finding each other.
David was a boarder at the Kings School, Peterborough and graduated in Law from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. After further study at Harvard, he was called to the bar in 1994. In an Independent article in 2011, Mr Lammy confided to Dan Poole that he was one of those lawyers more interested in policy than in representing clients. A career in politics beckoned with his election to Parliament in 2000 following the sudden death of then Tottenham MP barmy leftie Bernie Grant.
Mr Lammy’s faux pas are legendary. White smoke for a new pope is racist. His mother raised him on tax credits despite the tax credit system not being introduced until Lammy was 31. Claiming you never see a policeman around here while being filmed standing next to a policeman etc etc etc.
On an up-note, Mr Lammy is a published author. However, a victim of racism, his great work, Out of the Ashes, Britain After the Riots (hold on David, shouldn’t that be London after the race riots?) is the very disappointing 621,766th most popular book on Amazon, a miserable 602,011 places behind the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom.
Incidentally, given his life of unparalleled privilege why does Mr Lammy go on and on about race? Because he’s paid to. See Mr Lammy’s declared Parliamentary interests in the addendum.
Raise wages if you want more HGV drivers, said Kate. Workers are the new bosses she pointed out. People in distribution are about to be valued. Stopping freedom of movement will give a well deserved pay rise to native workers. “This is their moment.” She was excited to see it.
Kate Andrews is the economics correspondent at GB News supremo Andrew Neil’s The Spectator. Kate was educated privately at the $20,000 a year Christian Heritage School and the $48,000 a year Greens Farm Academy, both in her native Connecticut. After which she studied at our own St Andrews University where she was a member of the Blind Mirth ‘humour’ troupe. Miss Andrews is immortalised here, petite and in a grey dress, acting as a prop to a non-funny American ‘comedian’.
After graduating in International Relations and Philosophy, Miss Andrews has successfully avoided work, having secured a succession of pointless non-productive positions in media and politics.
Climate change crackpots. Should the police have more power to move them on? Bruce asked if anyone in the audience supported the M25 blockade protestors. Some did. The consensus being that it was up to the Government to do something about ‘climate change’.
Grant thought it was all wrong and caused more pollution as the cars were sitting there for long periods of time fuming – so to speak. We’re en route to achieve less carbon with electric vehicles. Applause from the audience.
Lammy supported the protestors as he believes in the right to protest but within the law. These weren’t extra powers, the powers were there and the High Court had sent a signal.
A gentleman in the audience thought the protestors were right in principle but should be put in an HGV lorry, taken to the top of Scotland and then forced to walk home.
Kate was up for a hard line. It wasn’t protest it was chaos. She decided there was a consensus for green issues and ‘climate change’.
Munira didn’t agree with the means but did agree with the cause. “When the LibDems had been in Government…..” She felt the coalition had been more ‘green’ than the, “Tories on their own.”
Grammar school girl Munira Wilson is only the third elected Liberal MP of colour since the party was founded in 1859. Hardly surprising as previous party leaders, such as Gladstone, made their money out of slavery. The Gladstones received the equivalent of £14 million in compensation at abolition. Added to which, former Liberal prime minister Lloyd George was an overly enthusiastic supporter of Hitler during his visits to Germany before the war. A cesspit of intolerance, there have been more blacks in the Klu Kluk Klan and the Nazi Party than in the Liberal Democrat Party in the House of Commons.
After graduating from Cambridge University in Modern and Medieval Languages, Munira trained as a tax consultant at Ernst & Young before becoming a campaigns organiser for the LibDems. In 2006 she was a political assistant to $1 million a year Facebook executive Nick Clegg, then a LibDem MP. Subsequently, she became a lobbyist for, amongst others, mega big pharma (including Merck), Save the Children and the NHS.
She entered parliament in 2019 as MP for Twickenham, occupying Vince Cable’s gravestone cold seat.
Details of Murina’s boss LibDem leader Sir Edward Davy’s links with Chinese financed Sizewell EDF nuclear power station and Chinese asset management companies are touched upon in a previous QT Review available here.
Richard pretended to bring rationality into carbonphobia. Every rational person would agree with the climate crackpots aims but no rational person would agree with their means. Kate contradicted him and said the protestors had some very extreme views and some of the problems at the moment were being caused by the failure of green wind power. That’s as close as you’re going to get to someone in the bubble questioning the global warming dogma.
Privately educated at the £12,000 a year Grange School in Northwich, Cheshire, Richard Walker graduated from Durham in Economics and Social Geography before a five-year stint in asset management with Jones Lang La Salle. Following which he joined the family business, Sir Malcolm Walker’s Iceland foods, becoming managing director in 2018.
Richard is also chairman of Bywater Properties, which redevelops medium-sized city centre properties. For instance, redundant office space into student studios and an old snooker hall into 9 ‘exemplar’ apartments.
The final question was about face to face appointments with GPs.
Munira congratulated the GPs for not seeing people. She wanted them to be ‘freed up’. Perhaps work two days a week instead of three? Richard thought there were medical issues that can only be spotted in person. He told us there was a huge workload. No, Richard, they sit at home on the phone. Some of them can hardly speak English, which doesn’t help.
Lammy thought it was important people could see GPs but issues had to be fixed. There was a problem even before the pandemic. Lots of cases are missed.
The problem is the BMA and professional bodies within medicine. They are like 1970s trades unions. We need to empower the patients in the same way that stopping freedom of movement has empowered truck drivers. Doctors shouldn’t be on a salary, they should be paid per patient they see or better still, per patient they cure. Kate Williams came the closest to confirming my diagnosis.
Addendum
David Lammy’s member interests declared within the last 12 months. Some events were cancelled because of coronavirus but Lammy was paid anyway.
£1640 Novartis Pharmaceuticals, speaking event and Q&A
£3820 Lloyds of London, Black History Month (BHM) month event
£2050 Finsbury Group Ltd, BHM event
£1640 VM Ware, employee celebration of BHM
£1435 Blackstone diversity network, Q&A
£1640 Royal Bank of Scotland, BHM event
£2460 Google, Google Group diversity and inclusion
£1640 Forward PMX, Q&A on his book
£2050 Hammerson, Q&A on his book
£2050 VM Ware, launch of black employees’ resource group
£1640 SumUp, Q&A on racial diversity
£2870 Fund Finance, appearing on a panel
£1640 We Are Creative Equals, speaking
£4100 Deloitte’s, speaking
£2870 Facebook, speaking
£30,445 LBC, presenting shows
£737 Tufts University, speaking on race, justice and equality
£1460 Wilson centre foreign policy climate policy panel
£1250 International School Bursars, panel.
£2460 Close Brothers, panel event.
£2469 Trainline, diversity, inclusion and race event.
© Always Worth Saying 2021
The Goodnight Vienna Audio file