Question Time 25th May 2023
The Panel:
Laura Trott (Conservative)
Peter Kyle (Labour)
Munira Wilson (LibDem)
Janet Street-Porter (Broadcaster)
Theo Paphitis (Businessman)
Venue: Gravesend
A man went into a fellside pub and ordered two pints of beer. One, he drank alone. The second remained on the bar and into which he placed his medals. Half-familiar with the eccentric customs of the British military, one felt obliged to engage him in conversation. A gentleman of Kent, having served Her Majesty in various hilly and wet places, he found himself in early middle age and, aided by a reasonable army pension, had adjourned to the Lake District for more slopes and moisture, albeit for pleasure while unarmed and not disguised as a bush.
Introductions complete, tall tales of derring-do and an arm wrestle ensued. Having lost the arm wrestle, I’m not at liberty to steal his stories (while he dines out on mine), but amongst the Debatable Lands v The Garden of England bravado, (association football and the post box were invented in Carlisle, beat that) he told me the following and, unlike news of every arms dealer’s favourite Sultan’s secret firing range underneath Dungeness, I’m sure he wouldn’t object if I told you too.
Gravesend is so-called (despite what you may read in the Domesday Book or hear from a friend fluent in Old Dutch genitives) because it is the place where, owing to the vagaries of tide and sandbank, London’s dead bodies surreptitiously committed to the Thames are washed up.
If proof were needed, take heed of the lifeless fishmonger’s slab eyes and unknowing stares of tonight’s Gravesend Question Time panel (and La Bruce).
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Question one, a fruit picker in the audience asked what is the correct level of immigration into the country. Laura spoke for us all by saying it’s too high but then tried to explain away the excess with skill shortages, the Ukraine and other tired pro-mass, uncontrolled, unlimited immigration tropes. Then she blamed a Labour Party who have been out of power for 13 years.
Laura Trott MBE is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Sevenoaks. Laura grew up in Oxted, Surrey, attended Oxted School and Pembroke College, Oxford, from where she graduated with a degree in history and economics.
Puffins will be pleased to read that in the year 2021-2022, Ms Trott claimed over £200,000 in expenses from you, including on 11th February 2022, 63p for car mileage. Exactly a month later, Ms Trott had an easier commute and only claimed 54p.
Despite her constituency only being 19 miles from parliament, Laura made 43 travel claims during the year, many for the £14.40 it costs to travel from Sevenoaks to London.
Before entering parliament, the 38-year-old was employed in public relations, rising to become a director of Portland Communications, the nice people who advocate for Gulf state despots, arms dealers and the junk food industry. They also funded the unhinged Remainer party, Change UK, who until tested at the ballot box briefly provided care home facilities for the likes of Anna Sourbry and Chuka Umunna.
Laura’s husband is Bahador Mahvelatie. When not picking fruit, ‘Mids’ as he is known, is a partner at Price Waterhouse Coopers whose scandalous activities are too numerous to list. It’s never a good sign when you’re so corrupt that you’ve been banned from India.
Even Labour’s Peter Klye pretended to think that the figures were too high. He focused on the seven million people on NHS waiting lists and millions more who are not economically active. Better funded public services (ie higher taxes) could solve the problem.
Peter Kyle is the Labour MP for Hove and Portslade and has been serving as the Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland since 2021. Kyle has been a Member of Parliament since 2015 and has previously served as a Shadow Justice Minister and Shadow Education Minister. In addition, he has been a vocal supporter of remaining in the European Union and championed lowering the voting age to 16. In the 2020 Labour leadership election he endorsed looser Jess Phillips.
Openly “gay” and a graduate of the University of Sussex (Human Geography, International Development and Environmental Studies), Peter has never had a job and prior to becoming an MP held non-employment in charidee, promotion and advisory.
Peter’s interest in young people has led him to be Chair of Governors at the Brighton Aldridge Community College, Chief Executive of Working For Youth and of The Body Shop’s Foundation’s Children on the Edge project. A friend tells me that the pages of The Gay UK hold an interview with Mr Kyle where he boasts of a school in his constituency having a ‘gay group’ and another having won a Stonewall Award. Puffins may recall page 17 of Stonewall’s Introduction to Supporting LGBT Young People which suggests, “Meeting strangers from the internet is extremely appealing.”
Theo pointed out the question needed an answer rather than an attack on the opposition. He saw immigration as several different pots. Illegal immigration – not dealt with. He then claimed there were skills shortages. Skill sets need to be brought in. His third element was colonialist. Apparently, we’re supposed to be saviours to many other countries who, let’s face it Theo, kicked us out in previous decades. Despite being prompted twice by La Bruce, he refused to prefer less immigration.
Janet Street-Porter has bought two houses and is therefore aware of how difficult it is in central London to find skilled tradesmen. There has to be a recalibration of secondary school education. More apprenticeships are required and more trades should be taught in place of university.
She lied about the NHS’s dependency on foreigners by saying it relies entirely upon them – which it doesn’t, especially in un-enriched parts of the country
Munira decided that you as a taxpayer and citizen has a responsibility to every single soul in the world, even those who hate us. She lied about the number of foreigners working in health and social care. She saw no limit to the number of immigrants who can swamp this country. She spoke out in support of the university fat cats who run an immigration scam via higher education courses.
The daughter of fruit pickers from Zanzibar, tombstone-toothed Munira Wilson (nee Hassam) was born in London in 1978. A graduate of St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, Munira joined Ernst and Young as a tax advisor after being awarded a degree in Modern Languages (French and German).
In an attempt to outdo Portland Communications and Price Waterhouse Coppers, the grammar school girl’s previous employers were recently fined $100 million for cheating committed by its audit professionals during exams required to obtain and maintain Certified Public Accountant status in America.
Speaking of graves and tombstones, Miss Murina has been the MP for Twickenham since 2019 – Puffin’s favourite corpse Vince Cable’s old seat.
La Bruce said she would repeat the question to the politicians. The present net number is 606,000 immigrants a year. What should the number be? Fewer, said Laura. Who so you want not to come, asked Bruce. HGV drivers Laura replied, we can train our own.
Same question to Peter Kyle. He replied we wouldn’t need so many here if our education and training systems were better. All this could be paid for by taxing non-doms. The very people who are most mobile and most able to avoid UK taxes, Peter. He also suggested abolishing the 20% wage discount payable to those on the shortage workers list.
One such university fat cat is Theo Paphitis himself. Chancellor of Solent University in Southampton, he chanted out the bullet points his sweating vice chancellor had emailed to him in panic earlier in the day.
Fruit picker Theo hails from Cyprus. Despite pleading an immigrant childhood of poverty in the mean streets of Manchester, a previous edition of QT Review was able to trace the early La Familie Pathitis to a nice house in Chester. Man of the people Theo, who drives a chrome-plated Maybach and dines at the Ivy, made his fortune by falling off a log while shooting fish in a barrel as he printed his own money during the high street mobile phone contract boom.
A number of those in the audience made the point that British people are excluded from skill shortage work precisely because all those positions go to foreigners – even the training places.
La Bruce didn’t bother asking Murina Wilson the same question. We all know what her answer would be. A policy followed by successive governments – mass, uncontrolled, unlimited immigration to the point that it becomes replacement.
Question two, is the Labour leader Kier Starmer offering enough?
Yes, said Peter Kyle. He spoke quickly, rattling off the Labour Party’s vacuous non-offer to the voters while bashing the Tories. The questioner wasn’t so sure. Many young people are unconvinced and don’t see enough of an improvement with Starmer.
Peter set off again. He was a mile off target and was talking to the advocacy industry, not the room.
Street-Porter spoke out in praise of the ‘charismatic and electrifying’ unindicted war criminal Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. She rubbed salt into Peter Kyle’s inability to connect with voters by announcing Kier Starmer not the kind of bloke you’d want to get into bed with. Rather, Starmer, the senior law officer forced to apologise for not prosecuting Jimmy Savile, was ‘decent’.
On the topic of bed …
Janet Street-Porter was born in Brentford, Middlesex, and grew up in Fulham where she attended a local grammar school – Lady Margaret Grammar School for Girls. After finishing her schooling, she went on to study architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London where she met her first husband, photographer Tim Street-Porter – a career in fashion beckoned.
From fashion journalism at the tabloids, she moved to radio and then commercial television where she became synonymous with youth, or ‘Yoofff’ programmes as she preferred to call them, while hammering through four husbands.
Currently, a presenter in the bear pit that is morning television on the Loose Women sofa, previously she appeared I’m Desperate For Publicity Get Me Into The Jungle hosted by reality TV favourite Mr Anton Dec.
Eliminated on day 17, Ms Street-Porter returned home to salubrious headlines as, during her absence, Her Majesty’s press had tracked down Janet’s fourth husband, ‘life coach’ Mr David Storkin, 22 years her junior.
At the time of the nuptials, which took place at 3:30 am in a Las Vegas chapel of Love, Mr Stokin was an unemployed salesman.
The course of true love darest ran smoothly at all for the unlikely couple. Mr Storkin confided to the tabloids that Ms Street-Porter was a sex-mad control freak who made his life hell, treated him as a sex slave, wouldn’t let him work and make him live on pocket money.
Puffins salivating at the thought of sex, sex and more sex, should be reminded that this is happening under a naked Janet Street-Porter, possibly while she talks dirty in THAT voice.
Not quite Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstong-Jones or Doctor Cripin and his good wife, the Street-Porter-Storkin spats reached their apotheosis with the lady having salad cream thrown over her. Divorce followed. In fairness to Mr Dorking his mitigation of, “She was not listening to a word I said. The only way I could get through to her was to chuck salad cream at her,” does ring true.
Munira talked a load of tripe. She said the economy has crashed which it hasn’t. She appeared to assume that interest rates should be one percent or half a percent for an eternity which is nonsense.
Would her LibDem Party form a coalition with Labour, asked Bruce. Munira wouldn’t say.
The LibDems are expecting you to vote for them without knowing whether or not they will form a coalition government. How stupid can they get?
Peter declared Labour fantastic, having a 15% lead in the opinion polls and on the pathway to government.
Therefore, asked La Bruce, on less-bad form than usual, will you rule out a coalition with the LibDems? He didn’t say yes or no but that Labour wouldn’t need to.
Laura was really, really sorry for all of Boris’ mistakes but he’s not here any more. She repeated Sunacks five pledges and compared them to all of the pledges that Starmer has dropped.
The next question was about scroungers at food banks. The questioner, not a stick insect, had to rely on them from time to time which reminded this humble reviewer, not an insomniac, that he needs to rely upon his beauty sleep.
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Incidentally, I wasn’t joking. Forget about Sheffield FC, Notts County, Corinthian Casuals and Queen’s Park, the oldest football pitch in the world is the gravel upon Carlisle Castle’s parade ground. The beautiful game having been invented to entertain Mary Queen of Scots (not her real name; Mary Stewart or Mary I of Scotland) while a prisoner in the keep. True fact.
© Always Worth Saying 2023
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