Question Time 27th February 2025
The Panel:
Luke Pollard (Labour)
Alicia Kearns (Conservative)
John Cauldwell (Entrepreneur)
Maya Goodfellow (Academic)
Freddie Gray (Journalist)
Venue: Derby
This week’s ‘live on iPlayer’ QT kicked off late owing to ‘events in Washington’ which one assumes to mean Keith meeting The Donald. Fortuitously as it worked out, as I’d invested £14.99 to watch my Local XI in a relegation derby on streaming, which didn’t finish until just south of 10 pm. There is a God in Heaven.
QT now being on a bit late for me, there emerged a good excuse to not watch much of it. Existence of God – and a benign one at that – confirmed.
Question one was about increasing the defence budget while cutting foreign aid. We live in difficult times, began Luke. The first duty of the government is to keep the country safe. Not safe from mass uncontrolled immigration, he forgot to add. He suggested the Russians will march on the Baltic states and elsewhere if they succeed in Ukraine.
Speaking of an occupied Eastern Europe, Mr Starmer is oddly dewy eyed and dishonest regarding the end of the Cold War. In his address to the Commons on 25th January announcing the increase of defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, Keith began by recalling the events of November 1989.
‘Mr. Speaker,’ he said, ‘as a young man, I vividly remember the Berlin Wall coming down. It felt as if we were casting off the shackles of history, to a continent united by freedom and democracy.’
Strange. For in the late 1980s Mr Starmer was a left-wing extremist. After leaving Oxford in 1986, Starmer edited a Trotskyist magazine produced by Socialist Alternatives, the British section of the International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency, the IMRT.
Amongst the apologetics for Marxism in the publication was praise for Mikhail Gorbachev and the soon-to-collapse Soviet Union. Not only that, the publication promoted extreme left-wing terrorist groups such as the New People’s Army in the Philippine Islands.
Can we trust a word Keith says? No! Has he previously sided with the enemies of this country? Yes!
Is 2.5% of GDP enough to spend on defence, La Bruce asked of Luke Pollard. Hollowed out by 14 years of Tory rule, he replied, but wouldn’t commit to more than two and a half. Luke blamed the previous government for poor retention and over-running defence project budgets. Foreign aid hadn’t been cut, it had been ‘moved’.
Luke Pollard has been Labour MP for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport since 2017 and currently serves as Minister for the Armed Forces. The son of a submariner, he studied politics at the University of Exeter, where he rose to be President of the Students’ Union.
After completing his education, Pollard, 44, worked as a Labour Party researcher specialising in policy and media before moving into PR, marketing, and lobbying, both in the private and public sectors.
Openly ‘gay’, controversy struck in the 2019 general election when his constituency office was daubed with what the fake media described as ‘homophobic graffiti’. However, close inspection seems to reveal that it didn’t refer to homosexuality at all but said ‘pedo’.
Likewise, a 2021 St Valentine’s Day greeting, including a photo of Luke and his boyfriend, received a mixed response. Comments attached to the Twitter post included, “He looks a bit young for you” and “He looks 12 years old, you should be locked up”. One of Luke’s followers was more direct: “dirty Labour nonce”. Again, fake media preferred to report this as ‘homophobia’ from ‘right-wing trolls’.
Puffins will be relieved to read that Luke married his boyfriend in the summer of 2024, claiming in an Instagram post that they’d been dating for eight years and there was only a 10-year age difference between them.
Upping the defence budget was to impress The Donald, began Freddy. And it worked, added La Bruce. Freddy being Freddy Gray, a journalist at The Spectator. The 45-year-old man-of-the-people is a St Andrew’s graduate who attended Berkshire’s £56,000 per annum Bradfield College.
It’s not about the percentage, it’s about the capability, said Alicia. She juggled the numbers and acronyms to suggest the government are being disingenuous with their figures and commitments.
The interesting Alicia Alexandra Martha Kearns represents the Conservative Party on tonight’s programme. A Cambridgeshire gal, born to leftie parents and a former young activist with Amnesty International, Alicia didn’t start voting Conservative until 2015, rising to be their MP for Rutland and Stamford four years later.
A graduate of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge (Social and Political Sciences), reading between the gobbledygook lines in her biography suggests after university she joined the civil service and worked in various government ministries’ press offices.
As the dark arts of perception management were farmed out to contractors, shortly after converting to conservatism she became a client services director with the global communications consultancy Global Influence. They claim to “counter violent extremism, counter disinformation, [and promote] hybrid warfare and behaviour change programmes for Governments, militaries, and NGOs to build stronger and safer communities.”
If this kind of thing is such a big success, then how come The Donald is president, there’s war in the Holy Land, the AfD double their vote in Germany and the Taliban rule Afghanistan? And remember, while your money is being burned on memes and fake news, the Chinese and Russians are churning out shells.
Speaking of the Chinese, the 47-year-old is a director of The Great Britain-China Centre, which shares an exclusive Westminster correspondence address with The 48 Group of British Traders With China.
A London-based private company, 48 Group is dedicated to promoting trade between the People’s Republic and the UK and is named after a delegation of 48 businessmen who travelled to China in 1954 to break the business ice with the then closed country.
Fellows of the 48 Group have included Tony Blair, Jack Straw, Alex Salmond, Peter Mandelson and Ken Livingstone. The suspicion being that the group exists to get elitist members into well-paid cash for influence non-jobs on Chinese boards. As evidence, Mr Jack Straw famously denied being a member – despite being photographed at the group’s events – and embarrassed himself by accepting a job with a non-existent Chinese telecoms company when caught in a newspaper sting.
Take a step back, suggested Maya. The government is panicked and jump as The Donald tells them to. It’s morally reprehensible to take from the aid budget. She read out figures suggesting some of our defence spending is used for the Americans to project power on the global stage from British overseas bases. Is that a bad thing? She suggested we concentrate on Britain. A girl fight broke out with Alicia, who preferred to posture on the global stage.
Maya Goodfellow is a writer and academic specialising in the relationships between racial capitalism, bordering, the politics of international development and animal rights. Oh.
Her articles in The Guardian include: ‘You Can’t Shoot Climate Change – Richard Seymour [a ‘prolific Marxist intellectual’] On How [the] Far Right Exploits Environmental Crisis.’ I see.
As an anniversary fellow of the University of Southampton, she undertakes a three-year research project examining the rise in private security companies’ involvement in UK immigration enforcement. All the things we need to know.
The 36-year-old is also a director of the leftie Runnymead Trust and a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at SPERI, the University of Sheffield, where she concerns herself with ‘the politics of ‘the centre’ and the material elements of racism.’ Riiiight.
A PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, her 2019 doctoral thesis ‘explored race and processes of racialisation in British international development discourse about India between 1997-2017.’ I give up.
A hereditary academic, Maya’s father was the late Professor Michael (Mike) Goodfellow, a distinguished microbiologist known for his work on Actinobacteria. Mike is forgiven for siring Maya as he was born in Ecclefechan and educated at Carlisle Grammar School.
If Putin wins this, we are in real, real trouble, said John. He had a personal view that Putin, Trump and China’s President Xi are going to carve the world up. Europe has to join together militarily.
Founder of Phones4u, John Caudwell made his pennies from shifting mobile phones and has previously donated six-figure sums to the Tories. Speaking of age differences, as ever, the pretty young girl understands the heart of the rich old man. The 72-year-old’s partner is Lithuanian-born former Olympic cyclist Modesta Vžesniauskaitė. The well-matched couple are pictured here. No wonder he’s smiling!
Although age and money play no part in matters of the heart, in deference to Luke and Sydney Pollard, one feels obliged to point out that Ms Vžesniauskaitė is 31 years the junior of billionaire John.
Question two was, ‘Should we push back our Green targets?’ Yes. As I type, demand is low because it is a quarter past eleven at night and yet only 14% of our electricity is coming from the useless windfarms. We are having to import via the interconnectors. The gas-fired power stations are producing twice as much generation as the wind farms and the ludicrously polluting biomass ‘Green’ power station at Drax is going full pelt.
This is an expensive nonsense.
Remember: wind farms are not there to produce electricity. They are there to generate ground rents and subsidies for rich land owners. Also remember that in order to broadcast, QT needs its Albert Sustainable accreditation. This includes an obligation to promote Net Zero / Climate Change.
Transcripts of the programme are audited and could result in La Bruce losing her £30,000 an hour job. In the earlier press conference from Washington DC, JD Vance challenged the Prime Minister on freedom of speech in the UK. Rightly so.
All of this was lost on the panellists who, as you can see from the pen-biographies above, are lobbyists for third parties, many of them foreign.
Question three was, are British people becoming lazy? One in five people of working age are economically inactive, quoted La Bruce. If inactive means flat on your back in bed at 11:30 pm (dreaming of avoiding relegation after an unexpected away win) instead of watching the rest of Question Time, then count me in!
© Always Worth Saying 2025
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