Question Time 10th November 2022
The Panel:
Mark Harper (Conservative)
Emily Thornberry (Labour)
Caroline Lucas (Green)
Theo Paphitis (Businessman)
Stephanie Flanders (Bloomberg)
Venue: Wells
In the interests of equality of opportunity, Stephanie Flanders (NHRN, Stephanie Hope Arlidge) is a hereditary journalist and BBC type. The daughter of Michael Flanders, one half of Westminster School old boys light entertainment double act Flanders and Swan, Stephanie was educated at £30,000 a year St Paul’s Girl’s School before taking a First in PPE at Balliol College, Oxford. Her grandfather was Times journalist Claud Cockburn, a second cousin of Evelyn Waugh. Her uncles include journalist Alexander Cockburn, Andrew Cockburn (Harpers Magazine) and Patrick Cockburn (Financial Times and The Independent). Cousin Laura is a US-based journalist. The American side of the family proper includes writer Lydia Davis. Husband John has written for The Guardian and Observer.
After Balliol, Ms Flanders was an economist at the London Business School and Institute for Fiscal Studies before moving into journalism with the Financial Times. Between 2002 and 2011 the 54-year-old was at the BBC and presented Newsnight, as well as various other programmes, before leaving to join JP Morgan Asset Management. She is currently back in the media with arch-globalists Bloomberg News.
Stephanie herself made the news when an astonished nation learned over the breakfast cereal of the then Labour leader Ed Milliband’s ‘tangled love life’. Beneath a Daily Mirror headline announcing “How I fell In Love With Ed”, readers read a breathless Stephanie tell of a ‘fleeting’ liaison with Labour Party swordsman Mr Milliband when they ‘dated’ in 2004 despite Mr Milliband having recently ‘first met’ his wife Justine with whom he was ‘secretly going out’. Gracious.
Worse things have happened. And to Ms Fladers at that. Her liaison with Ed Balls also appeared in print with Stephanie self-describing the sensation as long but brief. Behave yourselves. A brief relationship, a long time ago. What did you think blushing Stephanie meant?
***
Question one, are nurses justified in taking industrial action? Theo Paphitis (businessman) hoped it didn’t come to that. He blamed both the government and the nurses union for the impasse regarding nurses’ 17% pay claim.
Calling all nurses. Why not work longer hours? They keep telling us there’s a shortage of tens of thousands of nurses. In the private sector that would mean one thing and one thing alone – a much sought-after chance for overtime.
A health service worker in the audience talked of attritional damage over the last twelve years. He rattled through the catchphrases while trying to justify spending more on the staff while the patients go without.
Emily Thornberry (Labour), wearing a poppy alongside a Ukrainian flag the wrong way around, wanted negotiation and settlement. When pressed by Bruce, she said she didn’t want the nurses to go on strike.
The audience was packed with health service workers and their relatives. I must say, none of them appeared to be going without. A ‘diagnostic lead for the southwest’ had more chins than a ward for people with sore chins during a chinitis epidemic.
Caroline Lucas, wearing a proper poppy pinned on top of a white one, spoke passionately in favour of spending endless amounts of taxpayers’ money on the NHS. I wonder what Caroline spends her money on? Private health care? Wouldn’t surprise me. Do Puffins honestly think that the type of people invited onto the QT panel actually use the NHS?
Theo Paphitis, one of the Weybridge Paphitis’s, tells of coming to England penniless in the 1960s from his native Cyprus where his father worked on a British military base. Apologies to Mr Paphitis in advance if my usually reliable stomach is having an off day, but my gut reaction is that they were a lot better off than he suggests. A suspicion bourne out my Mr Paphitis Senior buying a house upon their arrival, albeit in Gorton, a working-class area of Manchester.
Their time there must have been brief. In the days when divorces were published in the local newspaper, and beneath the marriage-wrecking shenanigans at a Frodshom caravan park, we find the Paphitis’s residing in a very pleasant part of Chester. After the divorce, Mrs Paphitis relocated to London where Theo was state educated before embarking on a career in insurance which morphed into property investment and retail. As well as residing in a Surrey mansion, man of the people Theo drives a chrome-plated Maybach. Here’s Theo and the vulgar monstrosity parked on double yellow lines outside the exclusive Ivy Restaurant in London where a rabbit’s leg costs £25.00.
As a regular on Question Time, Puffins are familiar with Emily Thornberry’s (not her real name) biography. Properly addressed as Lieutenant Colonel (temporary) The Right Honourable and Learned M’Lady Emily Ann Nugee, King’s Council MP, of the parish of Islington South and Finsbury, her ladyship is popularly known as Lardy Thornbelly.
Lardy is an hereditary legal type, her father being an international lawyer and a one-time Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations. Husband Sir Christopher George Nugee, son of a pre-eminent Chancery barrister, is a High Court of Appeal judge.
Caroline Lucas (not her real name, Caroline Savage) is the Green MP for Brighton Pavillion. As a measure of how incestuous QT has become, the 61-year-old was on the programme this time last year (4th Nov 2021) alongside tonight’s fellow panellist Lardy Thornbelly. Unfortunately, although Ms Lucas has been on the programme before I can’t copy and paste my old prep as private schools keep putting their prices up. Suffice it to say, public school girl Ms Lucas was educated at £44,000 a year Malvern College and is married to public schoolboy (£42,930 a year Malborough College) Richard Le Quesne Savage who is an English master at Ardingly College whose fees have now reached £40,500 per annum.
As well as George Soros-funded lobby group Best For Britain, Caroline’s donors include Mark and Margaret Constantine who made their money from retail outlets at those environment-destroying entities known as airports.
Convicted criminal Caroline (Faslane CND sit-in breach of the peace) studied at the Universities of Exeter and Kansas. Following the family tradition, one of Mrs Lucas-Savage’s sons is an academic in Berkeley, California. Fortunately as the Lucas’s criss-cross the Atlantic their aeroplane emits fresh air from its engines unlike the exhaust of your little car which, as you pop to the shops or got to work, changes the weather and destroys the planet.
The second question was about MP’s standards. Crawling through the filth in a toxic open sewer filled in insects and detritus, all six hundred and forty-nine of them left in the Westminster gutter while Matt Handcock does something similar on Mr Anton Deck’s ‘I’m a Celebrity Jungle’ television programme.
Lardy blamed twelve wasted years of Tory rule. Yawn. Bruce pointed out that there are more Labour MPs suspended from a party whip than Torys. That includes you, racist Rupa Huq and you, ‘Israel-sceptic’ Jeremy Corbyn. Caroline ranted and wanted a general election. Lardy said she was an MP and she didn’t behave like that. The venom aimed at Mr Handcock sniffed of protesteth too much. Where do you think Lardy would rather be? On Question Time or being paid to stuff as many bugs and kangaroo’s testicles into her mouth as she can?
A silly woman in the audience started screeching about illegal immigrants being treated like, erm, illegal immigrants.
Stephanie didn’t want a general election and possibly a fourth prime minister in one year. She said the markets wouldn’t like it. Theo had had enough of politicians and called a curse upon all their houses. Mark Harper (Conservative) soothed the choppy waters with well-delivered insincerity. There was no need for an ethics Tszar, dear me no, civil servants shouldn’t be judging politicians. Caroline blamed the voting system. She thought they’d be less horse trading and dishonesty in politics if there were endless hung parliaments.
Is COP 27 realistic when the biggest emitters of CO2 aren’t attending? The biggest emitters being China, India and Russia, pointed out Bruce. Caroline thought it was important anyway. The highway to climate hell. Oh dear. COP 27 is the only game in town. Greenlighting oil and gas. We have to keep fossil fuels in the ground. No new exploration. This was all the fault of the ‘rich countries’. Green jobs. She decided renewables were 9 times cheaper than hydrocarbons, which is just bollocks. All of this nonsense remained unchallenged by the ordinarily endlessly interrupting La Bruce.
Stephanie looked to some kind of technological change to appear from nowhere and cure all the media-political elite’s groundless phobias. Theo called Just Stop Oil protestors Muppets. When challenged by Caroline, he suggested the protestors chain themselves to the railings at Westminster, perhaps to keep all the Muppets in one place.
Lardy is going to be net zero by 2030. Energy will be cheap and millions of jobs will be created.
There’s no such thing as man-made climate change and Net Zero is a money-making scam which makes ordinary people’s lives a misery, said no one.
***
Although tonight’s Question Time dodged the topic, QT Review remains on the ball and must address a likely midterm election Georgia run-off that will decide who controls the US Senate. Regarding the voracity of such a December 6th contest, I will, if I may, refer to part of the 13th November 2020 QT Review which addressed the Peach State’s electoral process during the stolen presidential election of that month.
According to the state’s own records, in 1998 there were 4,113,223 registered voters in Georgia. By the 3rd November 2020 presidential election, there were 7,587,625. In 1998, 7.6 million people lived in the state. Across the next twenty years, the population grew to 10.6 million. Therefore, the population increased by 39% but the electoral roll increased by 82%. According to the State of Georgia’s own figures, at the 2016 primary elections, 24% of the electoral roll was ‘inactive’. Inactive means they shouldn’t be on the register; ie are dead, no longer resident in the state, in jail or never existed in the first place.
Ray Pearson of Red State Nation made the following calculation. Ray focused on Fulton County which includes Georgia’s biggest city, Atlanta. He discovered the following: the 2019 Fulton County census put the population at 1,063,937 of whom 21.4% were under 18 and 12.7% were foreign-born. Ray assumed that half of the foreign-born residents remained non-citizens and 4% of the population had felony convictions which is the Georgia statewide average. This gave a voter pool of 751,826 in a county where there were 808,742 registered voters.
In other words, there are more voters than those eligible to vote. Even assuming an impossible registration rate of 100%, tens of thousands of extra fraudulent entries are on the Fulton County electoral roll.
Ray also looked at recent historic changes in population and voter registration. As with Georgia as a whole, voter registrations had increased way beyond the increase in the population of the county, especially since Clinton’s loss in 2016. Between 2012 and 2016 the population of Fulton County increased by 5% with voter registrations increasing by 4%. However, between 2012 and 2020 the population increased by 4% but voter registrations by 36%.
In the November 2020 presidential election steal, Biden collected 73% of that Fulton County vote.
The electoral process is bent. It is impossible to have any confidence in the Senate majority decider run-off on December 6th, which could be why the BBC avoided the topic.
© Always Worth Saying 2022
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