Question Time 6th November 2025
The Panel:
Anna Turley (Labour)
Graham Stewart (Conservative)
Paul Nowak (Trade Unionist)
Tim Stanley (Journalist)
Venue: Sunderland
If you think the parliamentary representative for Redcar should be a Northern type, perhaps honed in the steel mills, the unforgiving North Sea coast or the remote rolling countryside of the nearby North Riding, think again. For the MP is the ludicrous Anna Turley, a kent-born long-time resident of Islington who once stood for the council in London’s Wandsworth.
Comrade T was educated privately at the £36,000 per annum Ashford School and is a graduate (History) of Greyfriars, Oxford. Puffins will be unsurprised to read that Anna has never had a job in the real world. A fast-track civil service entry, her experience of steel mills, rugged coasts and north country farming extends as far as pushing a pen at the Department of Work and Pensions and the Cabinet Office.
A foray into the private sector saw her take a series of positions with communications companies (ie lobbyists) and think tanks (ie lobbyists). These included the Ledbury Group and a spell as deputy director of the local government research organisation, the New Local Government Network. Impressed, the voters of Redcar pleaded with her to head north. Or rather, they didn’t and local Labour councillors didn’t with gusto.
Paracuted into the North East as part of an all-women short list and with the blessing of her Islington MP, a certain Mr Jeremy Corbyn, councillors staged a protest outside the office of their parliamentary candidate. A rift between the council leadership and Tom Blenkinsop (MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) and Anna Turley led to ten Labour councillors either being deselected from their wards or resigning from the party. Gracious!
Those words are chosen with care from the organ of record that is the Teeside Live website – and for a reason. Later, Ms Turley won an unconnected libel battle with the Unite Union – one of Labour’s biggest donors – and Swawkbox over an article taken from a Unite press release published by the online news site.
It claimed Turley broke the rules when joining Unite as part of an effort by a WhatsApp group of Labour MPs trying to influence a forthcoming challenge intended to dislodge sitting union supermo Lenin McCommunist – not his real name, Len McCluskey. The court found against the union and Swawkbox and awarded Anna £75,000 in damages. Fingers crossed that she isn’t one of the non-readers not reading this unread review!
As your illusions of what it takes to be a Redcar MP might be shattered, so might your assumptions of a Merseyside trades union leader. Upon further examination of the self-defined Merseyside TUC General Secretary, Paul Nowak, images of docks and happy but poor cheeky scousers begin to fade. As with Comrade Turley, grammar school boy Comrade Nowak enjoyed a selective education (Wirral Grammar School) with his ‘Merseyside’ home being in posh Bebington, on the Wirral side of the Mersey.
My temp informs me that Bebington is considered a desirable and affluent area. Named as the most desirable postcode in England in a 2015 study, good schools, employment, green spaces, and affordable housing pronoucded it better than places like London. It also has a low crime rate and a reputation for being a pleasant place to live. Historically part of Cheshire, it is home to the Lady Lever Art Gallery.
A graduate in Urban Studies from Liverpool John Moores University, Mr Nowak claims to have become a trade unionist aged 17 through a part-time job at Asda. He became active in the Communications Workers’ Union while a call centre worker. His TUC profile states, ‘Paul had always been employed on temporary and agency contracts, so understands the insecurity of never having a permanent contract.’
However, his LinkedIn profile shows that only a few years after graduation, his feet were firmly, comfortably and permanently tucked under the trades union table. His procession of proletarian non-jobs included with ACAS, the BEIS Green Jobs Task force, the Strategic Trade Advisory Group and a 26-year-long stint at the TUC, which culminated in him becoming general secretary in 2022. He is also a non-executive director and president of Unity Trust – the trade union bank. Would you trust them with your money?!
Speaking of places of birth, myself and Stuart were born in the same place in the same year. Even further north than Redcar, there is no private hospital. Assuming he didn’t drop to the pavement outside a State Management pub during a mad dash to the stirrups, he will have been delivered in city’s only NHS maternity ward.
At the time, the service used the infirmary of the local workhouse for such matters. I kid you not. More plebian than Starmers’ father being a tool maker, or the young Bridgit Phillipson not having central heating upstairs, why doesn’t Mr Stuart bang on about it? Perhaps tonight he will?
Grammar school boy Tim Randolph Stanley (Judd School, Tonbridge) hails from Sevenoaks, Kent, and is a Cambridge graduate. It was there that he completed a PhD focusing on American politics and history. In the early 2000s, Stanley began writing as a historian and commentator, specialising in the USA. His first book, ‘Kennedy vs. Carter: The 1980 Battle for the Democratic Party’s Soul’, hit the presses in 2010.
Therefore, all of tonight’s panellists, and La Bruce, enjoyed a selective education. Mr Stewart, leaving the dank walls of the Carlisle workhouse of his birth far behind, attended £54,000 pa Glenalmond College. But crashed back to earth, not only as a Conservative MP, but as one who represents the Beverley and Holdness constituency – a place which might with more accuracy be called North Hull.
***
Question one: How hard can it be to keep the correct prisoners in prison? In fairness to the prison authorities and their recent difficulties, the non-tinged wrong release was called Smith and was confused with another Smith. As for the non-non-tinged one, am I allowed to say they all look the same? Or will they send me to jail, only to be released when a different Worth-Saying’s done his time?
Perhaps not surprisingly, Anna Turley took a different angle. ‘We cannot allow this to go on.’ This also happened under the previous government, which means we have to invest in our prison service – with money we haven’t got, she omitted to mention. La Bruce reminded us that Justice Secretary David Lammy had already said that stronger checks had been introduced immediately, before the latest embarrassment.
He called for them to be in place, said Anna, while perilously dancing on a pinhead while juggling words. He said they were, barked the chair. He called for that to happen, and it’s clearly not happened, there is an issue with the system, the chaos it’s in, replied Ms Turly. The prisons are a rock that the new Labour government has lifted to reveal a mess underneath. ‘Like so many of our other public services,’ she added for good measure.
Here was his chance. Had a spin doctor slipped him a piece of paper scrawled with, ‘Well, back in the day, chaps like me had to escape from the workhouse.’ Instead, Graham Stuart wanted to baffle us with statistics. The number of prisoners wrongly released in the first year of the Labour government is the same as the number wrongly released by the Tories in the previous three. As if the Tories’ record was something to be pleased about. Something had gone badly wrong since Labour and David Lammy took control.
He highlighted the contradictions in the timing of what Mr Lammy did and didn’t know during Lammy’s answers to the House during Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday. Lammy said the evening before he was buying a suit so that he would look smart for his mother at PMQs. But later claimed it was then that he was being told about the prison mistake. QT Review HQ are no fans of Lammy, but the suit line must be allowed to count as a joke.
The most dishonest government I’ve ever come across, continued Mr Stewart, despite the high bar set by himself during the past 14 years. La Bruce interrupted to say, let’s talk about your record. Another chance. The face could have dropped. The voice could have wavered. ‘Oh, the Union workhouse all those years ago.’ Nope. Instead, he sat like a pudding while La Bruce told us how many prisoners the Conservatives had mislaid and how many prison officers had departed the depleted and struggling service.
More than three years’ worth in one year since Labour came to power, Stuart chanted again. We hear a lot about broken public services, but since the election, everything has got worse. And the Secretary of State, the Deputy Prime Minister (Lammy), refuses to answer the question even though it is in a file in front of him.
Ministers have to take responsibility, began Paul in a fake Liverpool accent. But Paul was ‘struggling to keep a straight face’ while listening to Graham, especially given the Tories’ track record on public services. Applause. Paul is a prisoner to statistics too. Twenty-five percent of positions in the probation service are vacant. The prisons are 99% full.
They are at breaking point, which partly explains the issues. ‘I’ve been in prison’ – maybe he is a Scouser afer all? Oh, been in prison with prison staff and its a difficult environment to work in. Ultimately, this is a systemic problem caused by fourteen years of neglect. Not sure how that explains Lammy’s duplicity in the chamber?
Three times more now, chanted Graham when he could have won the argument by whispering his father was … at his mother’s bedside in the workhouse, and there wasn’t any central heating upstairs or downstairs.
More stats from Paul, criminal justice funding has been cut by 22%. I wonder what the stats are for foreign criminals and how much we could save by, never mind sending them back, not letting them in in the first place. A decade and a half of austerity, chanted Paul. More applause. Why has it spiked, wondered La Bruce? Raising prison officers retirement age to 68. Paul wondered how many of the audience would like to be on a ward of violent men when that age.
Tim Stanley didn’t get it. The whole point of a prison is to keep people in it. He does have a point. Tim mentioned prisoner Kebatu, who, according to Tim, is, ‘The Ethiopian gentleman who said to them I don’t think I’m supposed to go.’ Kebatu is the illegal immigrant who sexually assaulted a young girl in Epping, Stanley, camp it up another time. Stuart smirked and giggled. Shame on the pair of them.
Tim hoped someone would be sacked, perhaps a minister or someone more junior. It would be outrageous if the justice system was dependent on the honesty of crooks to keep people inside. He thought the back and forth between political parties to be a ‘soap opera’.
However, he did agree with the idea of systemic failure caused by austerity. He also blamed privatisation. Tim referred to the good old days, which for him were ‘during the war’ when people went from the military into the prison service. He found imprisonment both cruel and too liberal and too lax. He wanted to sack a few people and then have a discussion about solutions to systemic failures.
At which point, I’d served my sentence – 2,000 words in front of Question Time on a dark November evening – and released myself to bed.
© Always Worth Saying 2025
The Goodnight Vienna Audio file
