Question Time 2nd October 2025
The Panel:
Hilary Benn (Labour)
Alex Burghart (Conservative)
Jonathan Buckley (DUP)
John Finucane (Sinn Fein)
Aoife Moore (Journalist)
Venue: Belfast
Hilary Benn (not his real name, Hilary James Wedgwood-Benn) has been the Labour MP for Leeds Central since 1999 and is the current Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.
A former pupil of £29,000 per annum Norwood Place prep school and £33,300 pa Westminster Under School, the 71-year-old attended secondary at the ‘Eton of the Left’ Holland Park School in London’s posh tree-lined and mansion-festooned Kensington area of the same name. Former pupils include Puffins’ favourite Polly Tonybee.
A graduate in Russian and East European Studies from the University of Sussex, Hammersmith-born Hilary has never had a job, preferring a career in ‘policy’ with various trade unions before entering parliament. In the interests of diversity and equality of opportunity, Hilary is the son of the late Tony Benn, a public schoolboy (Westminster, £66,000 pa) and veteran Labour MP. Not his real name, the honourable Anthony Neil Wedgwood-Benn gave up his title of Viscount Stansgate to remain in the House of Commons upon his father’s death.
Not to worry, despite Tony’s opposition to an unelected upper chamber, upon his passing, Hilary’s elder brother Stephen became the 3rd Viscount Stansgate and sits in the House of Lords as a hereditary peer. Following that death, Tony left over £5 million to be shared between his 4 children. Tax was avoided by placing the family country estate, Stansgate House, in trust. Tax was further avoided by, 14 years previously, the Comrades Benn altering their wife’s and mother’s will after she died. This ‘deed of variation’ distributed her property to the children upon her death, rather than to Tony, and in doing so avoided inheritance tax when Tony died.
Hilary also benefited from a tax-avoiding trust set up from his maternal grandmother’s legacy involving £234,000 worth of United Business Media shares.
John Finucane grew up in the exclusive Fortwilliam Drive area of North Belfast. His parents, Pat and Geraldine, were graduates of Trinity College, Dublin, where they met, with Pat graduating in law and pursuing a career in law as an IRA staff lawyer. It was his job to manipulate the legal process to keep Irish republican murderers out of jail, and to make life difficult for the British State in the European and UK courts through endless legal aid-funded compensation claims and by opposing anti-terrorist legislation.
Part of a notorious nationalist family, during the Troubles two of John’s uncles (one a former fiancée of Gibraltar IRA terrorist Mairead Farrell) were handed long prison sentences for possession of firearms and were suspects in other serious terrorist attacks. Another, described in a death notice in the Irish News as a section leader in the Provisional IRA, was killed in a hijacked car when it crashed into a lampost on the Falls Road.
On 12th February 1989, gunmen shot and killed Pat Finucane in his own home.
John is also a graduate in law and is the Sinn Féin Member of Parliament for Belfast North. Along with the other Republican MPs, the 45-year-old does not take up his Westminster seat but claims wages and expenses (that you pay for) all the same.
A brief summary of millionaire John and Sinn Fein’s money-making scams (that you also pay for) via legal and political processes can be found in a previous edition of QT Review linked here.
Teachers’ son Alex Burghart was educated privately at £43,000 pa Millfield School in Somerset before attending Christ Church, Oxford, and completing a PhD at King’s College, London. In an attempt to connect with working-class red wall voters, his thesis was titled The Mercian Polity, 716–918.
Following university, Dr Burghart taught history at £53,000 per annum Warwick School, followed by a position as a history tutor at King’s College, London. Burghart entered politics in 2008 as a ministerial advisor, rising to become the Director of Policy at the Centre for Social Justice and eventually a special advisor to Prime Minister Theresa May. Mr Burghart was elected as Conservative MP for Brentwood and Ongar in a 2017 by-election.
Within Parliament, the 48-year-old has been an active member of various committees, chaired the APPG on Adverse Childhood Experiences, and served as a PPS to Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He is currently Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
According to wiki, Jonathan Buckley is a Democratic Unionist Party politician who has been a Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly for Upper Bann since 2017. A native of Portadown, he currently serves as the DUP’s Spokesman for Economy, Business, and Energy and Trade Union Engagement.
Spelt the Irish way but pronounced ‘Eva’, Aoife-Grace Moore is a journalist and broadcaster, currently with the BBC and resident in Southern Ireland. The 33-year-old Londonderry girl is the niece of Patrick Doherty, who was shot and killed when taking part in an illegal march which turned to rioting in Londonderry on the 30th January 1972.
In 2020, Eva was one of a number of victims in the Eoghan (Owen?) Harris Twitter scandal. In what counts as high drama south of the border, Mr Harris, his partner Gwen and his sister ran a number of anonymous Twitter accounts accusing Ms Moore of having a big Sinn Féin bum and of being ‘turned on’ by Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald.
Because of her Londonderry credentials, Miss Moore was also accused by Mr Harris (a Sunday Independent journalist in the Dublin bubble) of being an ‘ex-pat’ and ‘Nord nat’ who ‘imports her toxic tribal politics into our Republic’. Gracious.
Grammar school girl Eva (Londonderry’s Thornhill College Roman Catholic grammar school for girls) is a graduate in multimedia journalism from the Caledonian University, Glasgow. During a peripatetic career with news agencies and local and national publications, Eva spent two years in Australia.
In her breathless LinkedIn profile, she claims to have been a print and digital journalist/account manager, ‘Sourcing features, stories, and original promotional content for marketing and internal communications for a major Australian brand. Other duties focus on SEO, social media, website analytic targets and exploring new digital media platforms.’
In fact, QT Review HQ is led to believe that, having ventured to the antipodes, the only job Eva could get was as a reporter for a magazine about lorries. The ‘major Australian brand’ being Isuzu trucks.
***
The programme began with a moment’s reflection given the killings in Manchester earlier in the day. Hillary Benn; terrible, so shocking. We must come together. Dreadful, said Alex, heartbreaking. No justification, no excuse. Anti-semitic, extremist terrorism. Finucane; horrific attack, exceptionally cowardly. Think about the rhetoric and language, and stick to a ‘unification of message’. Hmm.
Devastating, said Jonathan Buckley. Anguish. Shocking. Vulnerability. Theres a small Jewish community in Belfast who ‘have to keep their heads down’. Solidarity. Eva, we are no strangers to political violence in Northern Ireland and neither is Manchester, which was bombed by the IRA in 1996, with 212 people being injured, she forgot to mention. If you missed any of that, they’ll all say exactly the same thing after the next atrocity.
Question one. Why do the government keep calling concerned citizens ‘far right’ when concerns about immigration are raised? Hilary agreed with Mr Starmer that Reform’s policies are far right. Some immigrants paying taxes have been here a long time under indefinite leave to remain and risk being deported. They right be might be doing valuable pubic sector work, looking after your sick or elderly relatives. Or stabbing Jews, Hilary. Or rapeing.
Hilary played the Manchester synagogue card. Reform is divisive, and just discussed in the opening platitudes, there are enough people out there who want to divide the country. The questioner reminded Hilary that this was about concerned citizens, not Reform.
There is no justification for the use of such labels, began Robert. He then trumped Hilary’s Manchester synagogue card with ‘Europe in the 1930s’. Language is being poached from there and applied to the ‘highly different situation’ in the modern age. He then laid the Nazi card, which was the original meaning of far right, but is now used against those who raise concerns about immigration. The prime minister was distracting at the Labour Party conference. Mr Burghart hurled his cards at the table – a strong hand – in a flurry of all the things Starmer needs to distract from.
A lady in the audience believed in an inclusive society but saw the present situation as an insidious erosion of our culture. Mr Benn, your government doesn’t want to prevent that. She referenced the ‘consensus’ in the South of Ireland. Given none of the parties there get more than 25% of the vote, perhaps she meant census? Never mind. In the consensus, 20% of the Irish population identified as not being born in the country. That doesn’t make any sense either, does it?
Eve, who one suspects wants to replace the Union with a united Ireland, ironically took issue with the phrase ‘insidious erosion of our culture’. We’re all human beans. Keir Starmer is being eroded from both the left and the right. A shortage of resources in public services isn’t caused by mass uncontrolled, unlimited immigration, she claimed.
Harry Potter spoke from the audience regarding the increase in the population in Northern Ireland, setting up Fiona to frame the discussion by quoting some fiddled stats and move the Overton Window towards rural County Antrim in the 1950s. She claimed 3.4% of the population of Northern Ireland is from an ethnic minority, up from 1.8% in the 2011 census.
This is a straightforward lie. The 2021 census showed 13.5% of the population were not born in Northern Ireland. Added to which, some of those born in Northern Ireland will not be ethnically Northern Irish. In the four years since the census, the native population will have diminished further. Even according to La Bruce’s fiddled figures, the ethnic minority population of the province doubles in a decade.
Jonathon Buckley agreed with the original questioner. People with genuine lived experiences, eg living next door to a house of multiple occupancy, have genuine concerns. These have had a dramatic impact on Belfast. Calling people racist is lazy politics. An audience member asked how come Kier Starmer’s comments about an island of strangers aren’t denounced as divisive? Quite.
A lady in the audience mentioned the rioting and vigilantism over the summer, following alleged sexual assaults by ‘Romanian speakers’ in Ballymena. Twenty-eight women have been murdered in Northern Ireland in the last 6 years. Why don’t they riot when the perpetrators look like someone you might work with or play football with? Really?
What she didn’t mention is that amongst those convicted or currently accused of the killings are: David Lukasz Mietus, Svetlana Svedova, a Mr Morelli, Kornelijus Bracas, Andrzej Pajaczkowski and Ahmed Abdirahman – a disproportionately higher number of foreign perpetrators than you would expect.
Food for thought on this day of all days, the Jewish festival of atonement, when wrongs are supposed to be righted, not lied about.
© Always Worth Saying 2025
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