Question Time 4th November 2021
The Panel:
Paul Scully (Conservative)
Emily Thornberry (Labour)
Tim Stanley (Journalist)
Caroline Lucas (Greens)
Paul Polman (Former CEO)
Venue: Eastleigh
Amir wants to know if Tory sleaze has returned in relation to the tangle over Mr Owen Pattsinon MP, a paid lobbyist who had broken the lobbying regulations. With interest, began Caroline Lucas (Greens). She was shocked. I was shocked by her white poppy. She was still shocked by Priti Patel being accused of bullying and Boris proroguing parliament during the House of Commons Brexit log jam.
No, it’s not, said Paul Scully (Conservative). We need a second structure to keep on examining bent MPs until they get away with it, he was thinking.
Emily Thornberry (Labour) was appealing. Not in that sense, in the legal sense claiming MPs have a right to appeal decisions that go against them. She wanted such a thing to be an independent process rather than have MPs voting in judgement over each other.
Tim Stanley (journalist) had been invited to meet the Prime Minister the previous day but hadn’t been able to get a dog sitter. Mr Stanley was just as bad at making excuses for the Tories as he is at organising his pet care and made a fool of himself trying to defend Pattinson. He played the David Amess card, which was sickening.
A lady in the audience suggested MPs should just be MPs and not be paid for anything else. Stanley contradicted her.
Paul Polman (former CEO) saw this as an own goal. We need more trust and a higher moral standard. Paul decided he was one of the ‘public at large’. He plugged his new book. At Unilever he wouldn’t let such things happen. Hahahahahahahahhahahaha, deep breath, hahahahahahahaha.
Eco-friendly Paul made his money in chemicals and food processing, a fact he misses out from his LinkedIn profile which is full of green bollocks. There, he announces himself a ‘Friend of COP 26’ but omits a 40-year career at Procter and Gamble, Nestle and Unilever.
In a September 29th 2016 Financial Times interview conducted by Michael Skapinker and Scheherazade Daneshku, the then Unilever supremo Paul said,
“I would work here for free. Honestly, the salary itself doesn’t motivate me.”
Following an epic corporate communications fail, Unilever continued to pay him E10 million a year. As for being worth the money, Remainer Polmans’ 2018 plan to relocate Unilever’s corporate HQ to Holland collapsed after a shareholder revolt. His salary by then was £12.65 million per annum.
As for his previous employers, Procter and Gamble are the ones who turn virgin forests into palm oil and toilet paper on such a scale that even the institutional investors blush. Nestle’s are the philanthropists who have brought you unhealthy food, killer baby milk, E.coli cookies, dairy from farms confiscated by Robert Mugabe and coffee plantations worked by child and slave labour.
Back at Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate profited bigly from a 67,000 square kilometre concession in colonial Congo. In a History Today article, fellow Question Time guest Tim Stanley, estimated the Belgian presence in the Congo, especially during the time of King Leopold, killed up to 15 million native Congolese.
Also profiting from Unilever’s activities overseas were the Bruce family. Fiona’s father was a Singapore based Unilever executive. Fiona was born in the then Malay state in 1964. Later, Fiona was sent to the £20,000 a year Haberdashers’ Askes school which has recently changed its name to Haberdashers Hatcham to try to disguise the fact it was founded on the proceeds of slavery by Robert Aske of the East India Company. In the 1960s Unilever’s two big incomes were from edible oils and teas. At the time, tea pickers in the Indian subcontinent and East Africa were badly paid and lived in miserable conditions.
In the modern-day, Unilever produce a ‘Fair and Lovely’ skin lightening cream, which grosses $500 million a year in India, with packaging depicting an Indian lady with an impossibly pale complexion. To the $8 billion a year global skin lightening market Unilever also supplies ‘Pond’s Pure White’, a product that promises to ‘reveal a pure white you’.
In South Africa, their Tresemme shampoo converts ‘dry, damaged and fizzy’ black hair into a white woman’s ‘normal’ hair.
Why does the media-political bubble let Unilever get away with what, in any other context, would be shouted down as the vilest racism? Because Unilever spends a vast amount of money on advertising, lobby hard and pay money to MPs. In the mid-2010s, they were paying Malcolm Rifkind MP £86,000 a year – more than his MP’s salary.
These days Mr Polman is a green wallah and a top-flight elitist with positions at the United Nations from which moral high ground he preaches to the rest of us and influences government policy.
An unpleasant pattern of behaviour, Lardy Emily reminded us, but she was talking about Boris with his un-declared book royalties and holiday in Mustique.
Fiona Bruce moved on to the next massive subject which was COP26. Paul thought London issues trivial and the climate change conference in Glasgow, from where he was speaking via a video link, more important. He declared COP a great success with China having signed up to its commitments even though President Xi was never there to sign anything. The next step is to hold people to those commitments, he said ominously. He praised Indonesia. He kept on praising Indonesia. Do they pay him?
Tim was feeling positive. The world was being pushed in a particular direction. Because targets had been set there would be development towards them. He was disappointed with Indonesia. Does he want on the payroll? He rightly said our ambitions are out of sync with the technology available. He suggested lowering our standard of living and increasing our taxes. Tim, why not carry on using fossil fuels until those new technologies are ready?
Caroline Lucas said the issue right now is the future. Oh. She suggested a better world could be created even if global warming is a hoax. She didn’t mention the cost, time scale or the laws of physics but houses can be insulated, local supply chains can thrive and children can play in the streets again – presumably because cars have been banned.
Caroline Lucas (not her real name) is the Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion. Public school girl Ms Lucas was educated at £40,000 a year Malvern College. A convicted criminal (2001, breach of the peace), Ms Lucas is married to public schoolboy Richard Le Quesne Savage (£40,000 a year Marlborough College), who is in turn an English master at the £37,000 a year Ardingly College.
Ms Lucas’ political donors include a George Soros funded lobby group and Mark and Margaret Constantine, who made their money through retail outlets in those evil things called airports. A more complete QT Review biography of Caroline is available here
As well as having a Green MP, Brighton has a Green council, albeit a minority one. The Green’s took control last year after three Labour Party resignations – two because of anti-Semitism. A Ms Pissaridou was suspended by Labour after a social media post which, according to the Brighton and Hove News, did the following,
linked one of the Rothschilds with what it claimed was the imminent collapse of the German banking system and warnings to stockpile food. It was illustrated with a picture of a smiling Sir Jacob Rothschild surrounded by bars of gold contrasted with an anxious child grabbing bottles of water, and stated that his family had been in “de facto control of the world’s central banks for centuries.”
The other suspended Brighton members were Ms Knight and Ms Brennan. Why are none of these Labour harridans married? Oh (Ms Pissaridou). Ah (Ms knight). Well. (Ms Brennan)
Chaos in the council chamber is mirrored by chaos on Brighton’s streets which are full of rubbish and overrun by weeds. Why are places like Brighton labelled ‘progressive’? They’re just dumps.
Lardy Emily looked at commitments and worried if the allegedly high ideals of COP26 would be implemented. She wanted a proper plan. In other words, she wants to put into law her crackpot leftie climate views in order to force you to do all sorts of things that you don’t want to do and which make no difference to global temperatures anyway.
Emily Thornberry, not her real name – Lieutenant Colonel (temporary) The Right Honourable and Learned Lady Emily Ann Nugee QC MP, known in this parish as ‘Lardy Emily’, is one of the legal profession’s hereditary great and good. In the interest of equality of opportunity and diversity, her father Cedric was a United Nations Assistant Secretary-General. Her husband, Sir Christopher George Nugee is a High Court of Appeal judge. Her father-in-law was pre-eminent Chancery barrister, Edward Nugee. Her mother-in-law was Rachel Makower, a Bletchley Park code breaker and World Central President of the Mother’s Union.
Fiona Bruce declared Unilever globally responsible. We know better, Puffins. Paul Polman also wanted these commitments made statuary, including expensive electric cars, which only people like him can afford, and more useless wind farms. He pretended this would help the little people.
Heat pumps and electric cars? But we can’t afford them, was the next question.
Paul Scully reassured us that heat pumps would get cheaper and hotter as, over the next few years, the laws of physics change. Emily suggested you spend a fortune on a heat pump and another fortune on insulation (ie re-building your house) in order to be colder than you are now while spending several times more on the heating bill.
Banning gas central heating and petrol and diesel cars is a Poll Tax on speed. There are two general elections between now and the introduction of the bans in 2030. The warmist politicians will be thrown out. Good riddance.
Tim had a theory. Green energy will be cheaper than fossil fuels. He provided no evidence but had noticed the opposite, that his electricity bill had doubled through the summer.
Caroline was going to pay for all of this for you, but with your taxes. She preferred a mass public transport system to you having your own car.
Sixty percent of the energy can be done green and cheaper than fossil fuels, declared Paul without any evidence. He is wrong, ‘green’ energy costs a fortune – that’s why your bills keep on going up.
Can a racist term ever be banter? Asked a lady in the audience referencing the media and social media pile-in over an independent legal enquiry at Yorkshire Cricket Club regarding allegations made by former player Azeen Rafiq. “It’s the ‘P’ word,” Bruce informed us, “and it’s spelt P – A – K – I.”
The panellists wet themselves and ummed and ahhed their way through their stumbling answers, petrified that the next victim of Rafiq’s scattergun social media allegations might be themselves or their political parties or the publications they work for.
Caroline singled out for praise an organisation called ‘Hope Not Hate’, not realising it is one middle-aged man ranting on Twitter from his mother’s spare room.
As for the well-being of countless thousands of British girls victimised by Pakistani grooming gangs. Deadly silence.
In answer to the question, anything can be said in private, it’s absolutely nothing to do with politicians or the media.
Acknowledgements and Further Reading
Paul Polman’s pay.
Procter and Gamble, institutional investor concerns.
Reasons to hate Nestle.
Unilever in the congo.
Tim Stanley, History Today, Belgian colonialism.
Unilever skin lightening products.
Addendum
Some of the Members of the House of Lords who declare a financial interest in Unilever.
Lord Balfe
Lord Boswell of Aynho
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Haywood
Lord Burns
Lord Carter of Coles
Lord (Ken) Clarke of Nottingham
Lord Cromwell
Baroness Deech
Lord Dunlop
Lord Etherton
Lord Glendonbrook
Lord Grabiner
Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
Lord Haywood
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard
Lord Levene of Portsoken
Lord Londesborough
Lord Lupton
Baroness Mallalieu
Lord Mance
Baroness Noakes
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede
Lord Sassoon
Lord Stirling of Plaistow
Lord Taverne
© Always Worth Saying 2021
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