Always Worth Saying’s Question Time Review

Question Time 18th November 2021

The Panel:

Mims Davies (Conservative)
Stella Creasy (Labour)
Jordan Peterson (Psycologyst and author)
Stephen Flynn (Scottish National Party)
Nazir Afzal (Solicitor)

Venue: Beckenham

Beckenham lies a mere seven miles from Charing Cross. Unfortunately, if you were to catch a London bound train at Beckenham Junction station you would find yourself arriving at Victoria and would have to take an Upminster service to Embankment then walk to Charing Cross if you were determined to visit from where these London milages are calculated.

In Beckenham High Street, near St Georges Parish Church, there stands an ancient stone. Dated 1713, it reads ‘Croydon Market Place, 4 Miles 6 Furlongs through the town’. Hmmm. Your humble reviewer pens this modest work a full 269 miles 1 furlong and 64 chains from Croydon. Still not far enough.

***

The first question, asked in a posh southern accent, was about the betrayal of the north with a change to the Northern Powerhouse railway plan.

As viewers probably already knew, for obvious reasons, Stella Creasy couldn’t be on the show because … oh ….. ah …. well ……

Stella Creasy (Labour) rattled away like a runaway train without really saying anything beyond having a moan. It was uneven, she said, meaning the differences between the north and south.

Nazir Afzal (solicitor) has Pacer trains up the north. Old busses on wheels. “We in the north of England invented railways,” he claimed. Pal, we invented railways, your lot were still in the other Northwest Frontier in 1825.

Miriam Davies (Conservative) predicted massive money coming along the line. You’d be able to get to Nottingham 26 minutes earlier. Not sure I’d want to. A gentleman in the audience mentioned the late-running Elizabeth Crossrail line which is presently one million and fifty-one thousand minutes (that’s 2 years) late. A French woman said we are 50 years behind the times. Unlike France which is 150 years behind the times, one was tempted to add.

Stephen Flynn (SNP) said HS2 wouldn’t be going to Scotland. Bruce interrupted to mention the late delivery of Scottish ferries. “Not my patch,” was the best he could do.

Jordan Peterson said politicians depend too much on opinion polls. It happened in his native Canada and it was despicable. It was trust that made everything work.

The next question was about the immigration and asylum crisis. Bruce referenced the Liverpool bombing. Azil praised the taxi driver. We’ve lost the ability to send people back because of Brexit. Azil is a lawyer, you can’t blame human rights and immigration lawyers for this merry-go-round where people are never deported, he pretended.

Jordan didn’t want to politicise this, meaning the Liverpool bombing. The bombers who plan these things are too malign and shouldn’t be politicised. The psychological conclusions were more disturbing than the political. He wanted to upgrade poorer countries by allowing high pollution energy production which would prevent the natives from wanting to migrate.

They’re not economic migrants, said the SNP chap. They’re fleeing something, he added, something unspeakable. I suppose he meant France.

Mention of something unspeakable allows for our regular reminder that the Scottish National Party has its origins in Nazism, fascism, racism and sectarian bigotry. SNP founding father Arthur Donaldson associated with the Hitler Youth. Another founding father, Alexander Dewar Gibb, was a self-confessed fascist who quoted Hitler in his speeches and expressed a visceral hatred of the Irish.

Stella had three simple things. Or rather three simplistic things, so simplistic I won’t repeat them. Suffice it to say, she’s in favour of mass uncontrolled immigration. Three things that might be, get them into Britain, get them claiming benefits and get them voting Stella.

Stella Creasy (NHRN – Dr Stella Judith Creasy) is Shadow Minister of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. She is the Labour MP for Walthamstow in East London. The daughter of an opera singer and a headteacher, grammar school girl Stella graduated from Magdalene College, Cambridge and the London School of Economics where she completed a PhD in ‘Understanding The Life World of Social Exclusion’. Since completing her impressive education, Stella has been excluded from having a job with nothing on her CV except public affairs advocacy and politics before becoming an MP in 2010.

Previously, an inferior politics blog, sinking under the tutelage of a fat, gin-soaked Hull University graduate, took time out from compiling lists of SPADs to examine Comrade Stella’s lineage.

In response, an angry Stella, her blue blood boiling, tweeted:

and FYI there ain’t no downton abbey (sic) in my family – try using a better source than Wikipedia for your stories …..

To which the blog’s portly Greggs salivating drunk replied that he’d been reading Debrett’s, not wiki.

Sure enough, Debrett’s contains an entry written by Comrade Creasy’s mother, Corrina Frances Avril Martin, a graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, in which she writes,

My parents came from a very aristocratic background, so it never occurred to them to be anything other than Tory. I grew up in Bushey in Hertfordshire and went to a public school called [£33,000 a year] St Margaret’s. At college, I realised how enormously privileged I was, so partly out of a sense of guilt, I joined the Labour Party.

The Vereker side of the family is detailed on Seaman Staines’ GF website (for it is he) and is traced back to John Prendergast Vereker, Viscount Gort (III).

Modestly, or perhaps out of jealously, Fatty misses out Standish O’Grady, 1st Viscount Guillamore, son of Darby O’Grady the High Sheriff of the County of Limerick.

QT Review feels obliged to research the other side of Stella’s family. Her paternal grandfather was Hugh Bellas Martin, a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire and of the Indian Civil Service. Stella’s paternal uncle was educated at £43,500 per year Harrow School and Wadham College, Oxford.

Despite her aristocratic pedigree, full-time salary, expenses and massive pension (all paid for by you) Puffin Wycombewanderer points out Stella needs another trip to the well via a Go Fund Me page advertised on her Twitter profile.

Interestingly, under the Political Parties Elections and Referendums Act 2000, donations under £500 aren’t donations and don’t have to be checked to make sure they come from a ‘permissible source’. Surprise, surprise, the biggest donation on Stella’s Go Fund Me is £500 from ‘Anonymous’.

Some cleverly worded small print sits at the bottom of the Walthamstow MP’s profile regarding her generous offer to authenticate donations of over £50 – next to a long list of anonymous donations of over £50. There is a loophole that Stella is taking advantage of.

We will pretend we don’t know about it and give Ms Creasy’s cage a little rattle. As ever, never ask a question unless you already know the answer. QT Review attempted to lure her into our little trap with an email entitled “Interested in a donation” and was surprised by the QT panellist’s answer all the same.

The following reply arrived:

CREASY, Stella
to me

Thank you for your email. I appreciate you seeking to get in touch, and please note I am on an extended period of absence for maternity reasons.

Oh. Further on, her lengthy email remarked.

Please note if you are not local and I have not asked you to contact me, then you are unlikely to receive a response to your email .…. I apologise in advance for this and hope you can appreciate the reasons why!

Yes, we know why, Love, because you can’t be bothered with the voters (or the baby) and would rather be on the telly.

I think we’re doing our best, suggested Mims (not her real name). Miriam Jane Alice Davies is the Conservative MP for Mid Sussex. Privately educated at the £40,000 a year Royal Russel School in Croydon, Miriam is a graduate of Swansea University. She then blamed the Scottish nationalists for Dover. She rechristened the people traffickers as gangmasters.

Question three. Is it time to outlaw second jobs for MPs or would it cause a brain drain from the House of Commons? The troll-o-meter was twitching.

Scandall. Embroiled. £28,000 not declared by the leader of the Scottish Tories, Stephen Flynn reminded us.

What about Ian Blackford’s £300,000, wondered Bruce?

That’s different, the SNP man pointed out.

Jordan Peterson, perhaps with half an eye on a seat, felt sorry for the politicians and remarked that it was difficult to do more than one thing at a time.

Mr Afzal wanted them to stack shelves and pick fruit as second jobs. Having said that, there was value in extra public service work. Really? How does it produce value? The public sector uses value up, that’s why the private sector has to pay for the public sector through taxation.

Did you vote for an MP for Beckenham or an MP for Barclays, he asked the audience?

Nazir Afzal, one of the Warwickshire Afzals, is a graduate of Birmingham University and has persued a career in law.

With the election of the coalition government in 2010, Prime Minister Mr Cameron and Home Secretary Mrs May tiptoed into the minefield of widespread Asian Muslim paedophile rape of British girls.

Much of this was perpetrated by Pakistanis in the north. Therefore, it was thought good politics to have an Asian Muslim prosecutor for the North West of England. Nazir Afzal was appointed.

In a problematic 2014 Guardian article, in which Afzal tied himself in knots trying to deflect on behalf of his co-religionists, the following quote catches the eye.

they [the victims] were vulnerable and their vulnerability caused them to seek out “warmth, love, transport, mind-numbing substances, drugs, alcohol and food”.

The idea that girls (some as young as 12) seek out environments in which to be raped had been previously visited, on May 12th 2012, in a controversial Oldham episode of Question Time.

Wiki contains the following quotes from the programme in which the jailing of a grooming gang in nearby Rochdale was addressed,

[Peter] Oborne said the victims had “accepted the advances” of their attackers and added: “What does it tell us about what’s happened to our society that we have 12-year-old girls, 13-year-old girls, who are happy to give up their affection and their beauty to men in exchange for a packet of crisps?”

These comments drew aghast glances from the audience. Dimbleby gave Oborne a chance to correct himself which he refused.

Oborne was rightly accused of blaming the victims. In a September 30th 2012 piece in The Herald, the week after the publication of a report into ‘Rochdale’, Vicky Allan referenced Oborne’s comments and added,

In other words, there is a prevalent conviction that young girls are somehow asking for whatever they get [as soon as they begin to behave in a sexual manner, or choose to involve themselves with men.]

From his first-hand experience, this author would disagree with the second half of Allen’s comment but it would be unfair to quote her partially. No matter.

We might rationalise that Afzal fell into the unpleasant ‘somehow asking’ trope because of misplaced loyalty to his fellow Pakistanis and Muslims, but why Oborne?

Because of his professional links to Pakistan and the Islamic world, that’s why.

Here he is at the Pakistan High Commission and here is one of his pieces from Sultan Ali Lakhani’s Karachi based Express Tribune. This is a pro-Muslim article penned for Russia Today.

His tweeted video, ‘Love letter to Pakistan’, can be seen here. And here is his book about the history of Pakistani Cricket.

QT Review understands that Oborne is close to senior figures in the Pakistan military and regularly enjoys their hospitality in the Islamic republic.

Elsewhere, he blames the UK for the Manchester terror attack. Not only that, Peter has contributed innumerable articles to Middle East Eye including one encouraging a boycott of the government’s anti-terrorism Prevent scheme.

Although Middle East Eye claims to be independently funded, it refuses to name its owners or any of those funders. Evidence suggests (see further reading) the London based publication is a covert media arm of the Qatari royal family, with links to extremists such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda.

Space forbids, but there is much, much more. Keep this in mind when the powers that be take surprising sides in issues such as racism and Islamophobia.

More recently, Peter Oborne and by coincidence George Dobell of ESPNcricinfo (who claims to have broken the Azeem Rafiq story), led the charge in criticising the ECB for September’s cancellation of England’s Pakistan tour.

It’s very difficult to be successful and corrupt, said Jordan, pushing the troll-o-meter into the red zone. Only three percent of the population are psychopathic as it isn’t a good survival strategy.

Next question was about Azeem Rafiq!

Nazir made a joke but I couldn’t hear it and didn’t have any subtitles. Bruce put on her cross face and said, “Do you think it was wrong of me to come to you first?”

“I think so,” he replied.

“Let’s not do it then,” she said cutting him off and turning to Jordan.

Does that make her a racist? Or maybe Nazir is? Or maybe both of them?

“I’m not being sarcastic,” she said sarcastically.

As a general rule, things need to be particularized, began Jordan, rather than generalised. Who? When? What exactly? Instead of a generalised counterproductive group against group. The term racism, he put it in inverted commas which his hands, is vague and global.

The rest of them weren’t happy.

He used inverted commas as it indicated low-resolution thinking. Isn’t he clever! In fact, he is clever. He was on to something.

Stella complained about racist comments at the Yorkshire cricket club.

Those specific people should be specifically held accountable for their actions, Jordan replied, rather than ideas of structural racism.

But, said Bruce, St Azeem of Rafiq has mentioned structural racism, not needing to add that he can’t be contradicted.

That isn’t helpful, said Jordan, as it pitches groups against groups.

Stella is keen on the group, as she needs to dog-whistle them on grounds of race to get them to vote for her. She solved my above conundrum by calling Bruce a racist for going to the person of colour first with this question.

Now, now girls, best of order. You’re not at home now, you know.

Jordan interrupted. What Stella thought was racism, Jordan thought had been meant as a mark of respect.

“Poor young man being bullied,” said Stella.

Bruce interrupted, poor young anti-Semite being bullied, she sort of said noting that Mr Rafiq’s historic facebook messages had hit the fan earlier in the day.

At last, it was Nazir’s turn to speak. He was tired of all the racism he has to explain. A rigged system based on privilege. Tennis. rowing, cycling too.

Nope, said Jordon, although more wordily.

When they missed the penalties in the Euro final, who got the abuse? Asked Nazir.

The people who missed them, you idiot.

When white managers get relegated they get another job, when black men get relegated they don’t. We’re five miles away from where Stephen Lawrence was murdered.

Stephen of the SNP contradicted psychiatrist Jordan and declared this a systemic problem that needs a systemic answer. As for the penalties, he’d been wanting England to lose.

Is that a bit racist?

At which point Bruce blew the full-time whistle.