Question Time 25th March 2022
The Panel:
Damian Hines (Conservative)
Lisa Nandy (Labour)
Kate Andrews (The Spectator)
Dom Joly (Comedian)
Mark Serwokta (PCS Union)
Venue: Reading
Puffins often wonder, in the unread comments nested below the QT Review HQ team’s weekly un-read review, how many people (if any) watch Question Time? QT Review can reveal that last week’s episode was watched by 1.7 million. The days of mass audiences for broadcast TV are over. A time when 17 or 18 million would habitually watch a TV show is long past.
The internet, streaming services, multi-channel TV and, most of all, the thinly disguised contempt cosmopolitan woke programme-makers have for the viewers has seen audiences tumble.
On Thursday 17th March the highest-rated programme, Emmerdale Farm (these days resembling an urban farm in Bangladesh) attracted only 4.6 million. EastEnders (judging by the cast, a reference to the Middle East) attracts 2.5 million, a mere tenth of when in its hay day.
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Has the chancellor done enough to help those having to choose between eating or heating?
Lisa Nandy (Labour) was shocked. In her constituency, Wigan, they don’t have gas, electricity or food and even if they did they wouldn’t be able to afford them. She spoke very quickly before concluding, ‘What people most can’t afford is a Tory government’.
Damian Hines (Conservative) preferred to blame Putin. There was lots of support for the less well off, much of it already announced with no need to announce it again during yesterday’s spring statement. Petrol is back down to the price it was two weeks ago.
Damian Partick George Hines is the Conservative MP for East Hampshire. Having benefitted from a selective education at Ambrose College, Hale Barn near posh Altringham, Damian graduated with a first in PPE from Trinity College, Oxford.
A gentleman in the audience told Damian this wasn’t good enough. He suggested ‘real action’ and a plan for the country instead of ‘Oscar performances’ from politicians.
No government can protect everybody from everything, replied Damian.
What would Labour do? Asked someone else. Tax more and spend more replied Litha, dressed in the full Ukrainian kit of yellow blouse and blue jacket.
No easy answer, said Kate Andrews (The Spectator), draped in the same outfit. No matter how much Litha taxes and spends it will still be a drop in the ocean given the numbers involved.
And anyway, other people’s money doesn’t belong to the government.
Nobody suggested the needy get jobs. They are recruiting. In many parts of the country and sectors of the economy, recruiters are desperate. Now is an excellent time to look for a job.
No, began Mark Serwotka. He continued morosely, what the chancellor has done will only benefit the better off. You’d think Mark would be pleased about that. He wanted a windfall tax. Benefits should increase, as should wages in the public sector.
As if picking up a brick next to the greenhouse in the garden of his own Surrey mansion, Mark criticised Rishi Sunak for being wealthy.
QT Review often complains that panellists are real-world unemployables of an Oxbridge Politics, Philosophy and Economics breed. Not so Mark Serwotka. Turning his back on the dreaming spires and glittering prizes, Mark left school at 16 and worked in a benefits office.
He also became involved in the trades union movement, rising to be General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) which represents civil servants.
So left-wing, Mark was expelled from the Labour Party. Too extreme for leader Neil Kinnock, he was thrown out in 1991 after being exposed as a member of a party within a party, the Trotskyist Socialist Alliance.
Unfortunately, proletarian Mark was being stalked by greed as if by a Spanish assassin armed with an axe in Mexico City. Working for the DHSS and joining the union on his first day turned out to be a more profitable move than studying Brain Surgery with Nuclear Physics at Magdelene.
First elected as general secretary in 2000, by 2011 Wales Online were able to inform us Comrade Mark’s salary had risen to £86,000 per annum at a time when the average salary of his members was just under £23,000. Added to which, £26,159 was paid into his pension. At the time, the Daily Mail estimated Mr Serwokta’s pension would provide an annual income of £63,554.22 to be enjoyed during a dotage in his £750,000 mansion in Chipstead, Surrey, pictured here.
According to TaxPayers’ Alliance, by 2017 his remuneration had increased to an inflation-busting £107,788 and by 2021 Brother Serwotka’s annual pay had reached £124,608.
In 2016, Mark had a heart transplant.
In 2018, his new heart was put to the test as Mr Serwotka fell over the ‘careful now’ tripwire, observing there was ‘something sinister going on’ regarding ‘the most systematic attempt’ to stifle criticism of Israel.
Incidentally, with their giant public sector wages and pensions and a job for life, why the hell do civil servants need a union? Come to think of it, as Crown servants, why are they allowed to join one in the first place? Surely they should have a staff association with attendant binding arbitration and no-strike agreement?
Dom Joly (Comedian) agreed with Mark and added that Rishi Sunak is an out of touch alien, richer than the Queen.
It is a while since we played multi-cultural cricket. Here is our chance. Public schoolboy Dominic John Romulus (single) Joly was born in Beiruit (four). According to Wiki, he speaks Arabic (six), Czech (two) and French (single).
He began his education at high school in Lebanon (two) and completed it at the School of Oriental and African Studies (four). The family firm is Henry Heald & Co, a Beiruit shipping agency (four).
His divorced father married a Greek (three) and Dom has Greek half-siblings (two). His wife is Canadian (single). He is a rabid sweary Remainer (four) who sold his multi-million pound Notting Hill home to Salman Rushdie (four).
The Evening Standard describes him as ‘a large, chunky man with a pleasant, olive-skinned face and frank brown eyes’ (four). He lives the life of a county gent in Gloucestershire (glances towards the umpire). His parents are British ex-pats and his father was a fighter pilot. (How is he!!)
Out for 41. Not quite sultry English Ghanaian Swede Afua Hirsch’s impressive half-century but a good show all the same.
A lady in the audience, who was a hairdresser, said that ladies won’t spend £120 on highlights in her salon as they need to spend it on food instead. Cut your prices, love.
Question two was about refugees. A chap in the audience, setting off a hypersonic virtue signalling vacuum bomb, said he has Ukrainian, Syrian and Afghan friends but only the Ukrainian ones can come here under a home re-settlement scheme.
Dom Joly is enthusiastic about the arrival of a mass of uncontrolled unregulated refugees. Perhaps on a clear day, he can see them through a telescope installed on his Gloucestershire estate?
Despite just saying the country is packed with poor souls living in poverty, Mark decided we were the richest county in the world and could take an unlimited number of immigrants.
Somebody in the audience wanted big-hearted generosity for foreigners while our own people do without.
Children on the move, said Litha, with care having to be taken to make sure they’re not being trafficked. Litha was in favour of keeping some checks but not the 50-page document that she claims Ukrainians have to fill in at the moment. 150,000 frustrated virtue signallers are waiting to be matched with a refugee for an Instagram opportunity, she added.
An #UngratefulCow in the audience said she was proud to be Irish, was ashamed of this county, and wanted to live in Ireland again one day. Good, #SendHerBack.
Kate Andrews was also in favour of mass, uncontrolled, unlimited immigration. No need for a visa, no questions asked. She tried to out Litha Litha, and Litha got cross. They’d both arrived wearing the same outfit, there was bound to be trouble.
Lisa Nandy is a QT regular, so much so, her biography exhausted, there’s nothing more to tell about her. Last time she troubled the panel, I had to have a go at her sister. Suffice it to say, law graduate Litha has never had a job, has worn the same hairstyle and make-up since she was nine and is the daughter of an Indian public schoolboy. Of ordinary Northern stock, her mother is the daughter of The Right Honourable Charles Frank Byers, The Lord Byers OBE PC DL.
Privately educated Kate Andrews, of Andrew Neil’s Ghislaine Maxwell supporting Spectator, is also a QT regular. Her comprehensive QT Review style biography can be found here.
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If last week’s House of Commons press conference, with every Puffin’s favourite released hostage, hadn’t gone down like a bucket of sick, the next question would have been a Britain bashing wokefest about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. As ever, QT Review goes beyond the call of duty and tonight (possibly for the first time on Question Time) discuses a question that wasn’t asked.
Here’s the problem. Back in the day, no matter how posh ‘charity workers’ were, they had attended dreadful English boarding schools before living in un-speakable student digs. If subsequently incarcerated in a third world prison, they felt rather smug.
They would scratch their life story in Latin on the cell wall, build a scale model of Persepolis out of spit and mud and find three important uses for their urine. Before being released or escaping, they would politely ask the guards for pen and paper and write to the brigader-general in charge of penology thanking him for his hospitality.
Times have changed.
These days, too many ‘charity workers’ are daddy’s little princess ethnics who think they’re too entitled to be caught. And when they are, at the end of the embarrassment, they expect to be celebrities.
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Question three. Vicious fire and re-hire from P&O. Mark warned us we were about to hear crocodile tears from Damian and carried on by talking about ships registered in foreign countries and new workers being brought in from abroad and being paid £1.82 an hour.
QT Review can disclose it is even worse than that. The squeamish might want to look away now. Given the routes covered by P&O, some seafarers brought in from tropical island paradise maritime nations such as the Philippines and Indonesia …… will have to live in Hull.
Mark wanted to nationalise everything in sight.
Kate criticised P&O. As well as being a journalist, it turns out she’s a lawyer too and informed us the weight of the law will come down on the shipping company. I wouldn’t bet on it.
Given the number of different jurisdictions a multi-national shipping company exists in as a legal entity, they can appear to employ the staff where the law is most profitable for them. If you want them to base and recruit their staff here; cut taxes, de-regulate and get rid of the dinosaur trades unions.
Litha was mega triggered. Dom Joly blamed the government. Bruce pointed out that it was P&O what had done it, not the government. It didn’t matter, Dom blamed the government for everything, as had all of the panellists (except poor Damian) and the entire audience throughout the whole programme.
Maybe sack the lot of them and replace them with real people from outside the BBC’s bubble?
© Always Worth Saying 2022
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