Question Time 2nd May 2024
The Panel:
Bim Afolami (Conservative)
Peter Kyle (Labour)
Kirsty Blackman (SNP)
Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel Prize-winning Economist)
Anita Boateng (Former Conservative advisor)
Venue: Cambridge
The great thing about having your own column is that no matter how bad Question Time is, you can get it out of your system by venting through your column inches. Step forward and take a bow Lord Charles Moore, a panellist on last week’s programme and a Times journalist who used his inches this week (behave yourselves) to complain about his appearance on last week’s panel.
Although the studio audience is supposed to be politically balanced, Charles doubted it and was certain the questioners and those members of the public invited by Fiona Bruce to contribute, definitely weren’t. Tell me about it. His Lordship also mentioned a couple of things QT Review HQ spotted last week. Wes Streeting needed the assistance of two bodyguards when he arrived at the venue. Charles’s first appearance was in 1987.
Since then, his Lordship lamented, the fee hasn’t increased. Stuck at an inflation defying £150 for nearly 40 years, given the preparation and travelling required, Baron Moore of Etchingham wails, as if an Albanian car washer or Ethopion Uber Eats cyclist, he is on less than the minimum wage.
Also, back in the day, Robin Day wrote a thankful letter or made a cheery phone call the following morning. Guests dined together before the programme. Today only snacks are provided and these are sometimes taken standing up. Gracious.
Talk of dinner before a panel show reminds me of a corking putdown. Before QT was invented, a questioner on its precursor and current sister programme, radio’s Any Answers?, asked what the panellists had discussed over dinner before the programme. A certain Mrs Margaret Thatcher, at that time the newly elected MP for Finchley, replied that there hadn’t been much of a discussion, ‘We were mostly listening to Mr Woodrow Wyatt.’ Kerbang!
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Anita Boeteng (not her real name, Anita Boakye-Boeteng) was born in Hackney but moved to Redbidge aged ten and attended the local grammar school and subsequently graduated in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University. Not quite as modestly born as her Wikipedia page suggests, her ‘driver’ father turns out to be a Ghana-based businessman and after university Ms Boateng interned for Ghanaian President John Agyekum Kufuor.
Interestingly, despite being one of the Surrey Boetengs, in her articles published in the West African country, Anita refers to herself as Ghanaian rather than British.
Following her internship, Miss Boeteng became a researcher at the Policy Research Unit and then took up the same role at our very own BBC Question Time. A position she rather grandly describes on her Wiki page as ‘political producer’. After that, she moved into Westminster politics proper and has held numerous special advisory posts within the bubble.
At the moment, Anita is a partner at lobbyists Portland Communications where she specialises in delivering ambitious, integrated public affairs and corporate communications campaigns for clients facing regulatory, reputational and commercial challenges.
Portland is the brainchild of Tim Allen, a Blair prodigy, and is famous for promoting the Qatar World Cup through a series of unattributed weblogs and social media accounts.
Puffin’s favourite Alaistar Campell is a senior advisor there.
Interstingly, Labour’s candidate at the general election in this reviewer’s constituency claims on her website to be local and to have been a ‘senior manager in industry’ where she ‘shaped policies and regulation to protect millions of consumers.’
What she doesn’t say is that the ‘industry’ was also lobbying and the company was the problematic Bell Pottinger Communications (based 300 miles south of the constituency she will contest) of which she was a director.
Bell Pottinger’s clients have included General Pinonet and business interests close to disgraced former South African President Jacob Zuma.
One of the Berkshire Afolami’s, Bim’s father was a doctor, his mother a pharmacist. They sent their son to £46,000 per annum Eton College after which Bim read Modern History at University College, Oxford. Following graduation, Bim became a corporate lawyer and rose to senior executive level at the HSBC bank. Presently the Conservative member for Hitchin and Harpenden, he was elected to Parliament in 2017.
Bim’s wife, and mother of his three children, is the dippy Henrietta Jackson-Stops. Another lawyer, the St Mary’s Calne (£43,000 a year) old girl specialises in Dispute Resolution, Mediation, International Law, Immigration Law, Public Law, Arbitration, International Arbitration and Dispute Resolution.
Hetti also volunteers as a pro bono counsel (ie free legal representation) for an organisation called Bail for Immigration Detainees.
Those three children are Zachary, Samual and Frederick Gervase Essien.
Peter Kyle is the Labour MP for Hove and Portslade. After graduating from the University of Sussex in Human Geography, International Development and Environmental Studies, Peter did a tour of non-jobs in charidees, promotional video, advisory etc before entering Parliament in 2015.
Peter also holds a doctorate in Community Development. For his thesis, he authored ‘Building Capacity For Community Economic Development: The Case of the Kat River Valley, South Africa.’
Privately educated Mrs Kirsty Blackman is the SNP MP for Aberdeen North and the party’s Spokesperson For The Cabinet Office. After leaving £43,000 a year Robert Gordon’s College, Kirsty enrolled at the University of Aberdeen to read medicine but dropped out without qualifying.
Despite being middle-aged and married with two children, Kirsty last appeared on QT wearing a man’s jacket and with the sides of her head shaved. Furthermore, Ms Blackman uses X to say she isn’t straight and would appreciate it if people stopped saying she was.
Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, formerly of the World Bank and currently a professor at New York’s pro-Palestinian sit-in afflicted Columbia University. His wife is Anya, an author, journalist and director of technology, media and communications specialisation at the School of International and Public Affairs also at Columbia University.
Anya is a member of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation global board and was a member of the sub-board of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism.
Anya’s sister, Natalia, is married to the overbearingly smug, leftie ‘international human rights’ lawyer and troublemaker, the irritating Philippe Sands. Sands’ achievements include setting up the Matrix legal chambers with Cherrie Blair. A barrister, Sands has made his name, and his money, through the international courts. He is also an author and broadcaster and has written extensively of his family’s historical connection to Lviv in modern-day Ukraine (which old people like this humble reviewer recall as Lvov in the USSR).
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Question one addressed alleviating the cost of living crisis. With inflation now at 3.2% compared to the long-term average of 2.8%, one feels compelled to ask why bother? La Bruce immediately put Nobel-prize-winning star guest Joseph to work. As the camera focused on him, he resembled a tramp. If he can’t organise a tie, haircut and shave, how can he organise the economy?
Besides the war in Ukraine and the pandemic, Joseph introduced us to ‘reflation’, meaning walloping the prices up unnecessarily to make a bigger profit. Inflation is dropping as the interruption to supply caused by war and pandemic have been met with market forces, by which he must have meant increased production. But prices won’t come down again.
Why not, Professor? Domestic gas and electricity prices have fallen 10% this month even though we’re being clobbered by Net Zero. The professor suggested more taxes, especially taxes on reflation profit gougers. The professor then went mad and suggested higher public spending would increase productivity.
Peter Kyle declared that unbelievably expensive so-called renewables, under the umbrella of Labour’s new GB Energy utility, will somehow make energy cheaper. He spoke quickly and talked nonsense but dropped in words like ‘labs’ and ‘research’ which he hoped would appeal to a Cambridge audience.
A lady in the audience felt obliged to mention the ‘B’ word by which she meant Brexit. A gentleman wanted us to work more hours. The population increases but the total number of hours worked drops. He blamed early retirees and wanted to alter the tax system to penalise people drawing on their pensions. I have a better idea. Why not do the opposite? Make it tax-efficient to draw your pension and have a job. Why not allow two tax thresholds, one for your pension and another for a job?
Krusty Blackman set off. She had grown her hair back but bulked herself up in a successful attempt to capture the Glaswegian bin man in a bad toupe look. Everybody is struggling. It is 2024 and people can’t afford the basic necessities. She forgot to blame the madness of Net Zero.
La Bruce returned to Joseph. We need more investment but of what kind? Investment in public health. He defined the NHS as a jewel and wished ‘we’ had it. He went mad again, saying the tech giants in America were created by the public sector via the great innovative publicly funded universities. But Joseph, these aren’t publicly funded but make their money from private sector endowments and by charging fees to those they sell an education to. The guy’s a fool.
Question two. The people of Cambridge were desperate to know if the SNP is a spent force. No, we’re phenomenally successful, began Kirsty. Scots have the best A&E in the United Kingdom. 95% of children leaving school are going on to a positive destination. What on earth does that mean? She rhymed off lots of free stuff, eye tests, dental checks, which aren’t free at all and which are paid for by the poor old long-suffering mugged English taxpayer.
Peter Kyle outlined the importance of strong leadership and that it should focus on what the voters want and need. He pitied the people of Scotland as they suffer under both their own government and the Tory one in London. Someone in the audience mentioned ‘genocide in Gaza’ and complimented the SNP for being the only main party who’ve spoken out against it.
All parties have to compromise, began Joseph. Cameron had a split in his party so he had a Brexit vote. That was a mistake. How do you choose your leaders? It’s so strange. You have a vote within the party. So strange.
Anita contradicted Kirsty’s rosy view of Scotland and referenced falling educational standards and rising drug deaths. She continued the demolition and ended with, ‘I don’t think the Scottish people are going to stand for it much longer.’ The SNP are obsessed with independence which means they have neglected everything else, said Bim. He pointed out the English pay for all the freebies.
Question three was about the stabbings in London. The questioner’s observation was that youth work is now nonexistent so no one has their ‘hand on the problem’s pulse’. The responses revolved around toughening the law both in outlawing types of knives and harsher sentences for offenders. However, Peter Kyle wanted an extra offence put on the statute book of using children in a criminal endeavour.
The audience couldn’t cope with the idea of crime, of right and wrong or of good and evil. Stabbing people is a health problem caused by poverty, school exclusion and a lack of funding. Even a policeman the audience (who couldn’t have looked or sounded less Cambridgeshire) said this was a societal, not a criminal justice, issue. Someone else thought the ‘peer network’ was the answer, by which one assumes she meant the other members of a knife gang. How does that work?
This week’s stabbings happened in Redbfidge which is Anita’s original community. She blamed Sadiq Khan. Kirsty said in Glasgow stabbings were taken as a public health problem with a holistic solution. What she forgot to mention was that north of the border alcohol fuelled knife fights have been replaced by drug abuse deaths omitting the need for a fight.
At which point I safeguarded my public (mental) health by giving up and going to bed.
© Always Worth Saying 2024
The Goodnight Vienna Audio file
