Question Time 21st May 2026
The Panel:
Kirsty McNeill (Labour)
Harriet Cross (Conservative)
Stephen Flynn (SNP)
Thomas Kerr (Reform UK)
Ross Greer (Scottish Greens)
Venue: Dumfries
From the home of both Robbie Burns, Scotland’s national poet, and John Laurie, Dad’s Army’s dour Sgt Fraser, on tonight’s QT can we expect to be newly sprung for June, or to be doomed, doomed, doomed? Read on!
Do Puffins ever feel as though they’re living in a John Pertwee Dr Who? A one where the Master has hijacked a factory in the Midlands on behalf of an alien race and is churning out ostensibly humanoid plastic dummies infused with a malevolent force? Hmm.
Kirsty McNeill is the Labour MP for Midlothian and has been since 2024. She also serves as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Scotland.
A graduate in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (what else) from Oxford University (where else), she went on to be president of the Oxford University Student Union. Since leaving Baliol, obviously, Kirsty has never had a job outside of charidee and politics.
While working with development charities at the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles, Kirsty came to the attention of Mr Gordon Brown. Previously a Glasgow City Councillor, she joined the Downing Street staff, and after being a speechwriter to McDoom, was promoted to ‘advisor in charge of external affairs’ in the run-up to PM Brown’s unsuccessful 2010 general election campaign.
Subsequently, she took part in the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations Emerging Leaders Programme and a Rookwood Leadership Institute course.
Who they? Rookwood are a California-based organisation whose purpose is to ‘support leaders to transform themselves, their communities, and the world towards liberation and sustainability for all.’ Beyond that, their leftie, globalist mission statement claptrap becomes too difficult for a mere earthing to understand. Suffice it to say, Rookwood is funded by the usual suspects, including George Soros’s Open Society Foundation.
Closer to home, since being elected to parliament, LGBT Ms McNeill has enjoyed four-figure donations from disgraced Morgan McSweeney’s disgraced Labour Together, as well as from another list of usual suspects – Trevor Chinn, Stuart Roden, Gary Lubner – wealthy Centrist Labour Together-leaning donors who have transformed the post-Corbyn Labour Party into today’s Starmerite mess.
Besides taking money, Kirsty also accepts positions on quangos. As if a mannequin (with a death blaster concealed in a rotating right hand) being distributed to as many high streets as possible, the 46-year-old is currently a Non-Executive Board Member of Labour Climate and Environment Forum and a Non-Executive Board Member of Larger Us.
The Chair of the Advisory Board of Our Scottish Future, a Non-Executive Board Member of the Institute for Public Policy Research, a Non Executive Board Member of The Center for Countering Digital Hate and Chair of the Board of Civic Power Fund.
In which direction will these donor and quangocrat factory-produced global menaces lean in the forthcoming Labour leadership election? And if towards Burnham, does that mean he’s no more than another one of them?
Ross John Greer is the co-leader of the Scottish Greens and a Member of the Scottish Parliament for the West Scotland region. Hailing from outer Glasgow’s posh Bearsden, the 31-year-old is a university dropout (Strathclyde, Psychology) who has never had a job.
Another LGBT type, Ross left university early to become a communities adviser for Yes Scotland during the independence referendum, then worked for the Green Party for eighteen months before becoming an MSP at the farcically early age of 21.
Ginger, posh, green, LGBT, skinny with goggle specs, a politician, and living in Glasgow, Mr Greer has become a death threat magnet, hospitalised on two occasions due to the emotional and physical toll of campaigns against him. Both of the traditional West of Scotland bone crunching variety, and also via briefings, leaks and smears – some of which come from his own side – resulting in cripling stress-induced chest pain.
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Question One: Mary, in a posh English voice, asked should we introduce a price cap on food?
No. Next question.
Absolutely, we could do it, said Stephen Flynn (SNP). He referenced food banks, where the price of food is capped at ‘free’.
‘It’s a noble thing’ to turn modern-day Britain into the empty shelf utopia of Soviet Russia in the 1970s. How are you going to pay for it? wondered La Bruce. Out of the retail bosses’ bonuses, he replied. Well, we’re all consumers, and there are 70 million of us. Every million-pound bonus consifcated would knock 1.4p off your annual grocery bill. The man’s a genius. Not.
Born in Dundee, 37-year-old Stephen Flynn studied History and Politics at the University of Dundee, later completing a master’s in International Politics and Security Studies. Never having had a job, Mr Flynn passed his time as a political assistant within the SNP before becoming an Aberdeen City Councillor. By 2019, he was MP for Aberdeen South, rising to be a shouty and easily ignored Leader of the SNP in the House of Commons.
Thomas Kerr (Conservative) disagreed. Such things are Westminster, not devolved, issues, and the SNP can’t do this anyway. He suggested, to scattered applause, that taxes should be cut instead.
Tomas Kerr was the Tory group leader on Glasgow City Council until after the 2024 general election, when he defected to Reform. Puffins seeing Mr Kerr for the first time might be tempted to assume he was previously employed for decades delivering newspapers (a ton at a time) in the Highlands on a bike with square wheels. In fact, beyond an eight-month stint as a retail assistant at Marks & Spencers the weathered 29-year-old has never had a job.
Listing his skills as public relations and political communication, Thomas interned at the Scottish Parliament and was a campaign coordinator before getting his knees beneath the table at the City Council, as a Conservative specialising in licensing.
QT Review HQ will take this opportunity to repeat one of its truisms. If these PR types are so good at their jobs, then how come everybody hates them?
A Doonhamer spoke. He thought food would be more affordable if the minimum wage were cut. Think that through…
On the topic of thinking things through. Hold on. Bonuses are taxable, so that would be a personal grocery saving of 0.7p a year.
Kirsty was against. Farmers and retailers say it isn’t workable. La Bruce pointed out a government announcement quickly forgotten. Rather than a U-turn, Kirsty preferred ‘an ongoing dialogue’ about how to bring down prices. Kirsty, who, let’s face it, appears able to afford food in abundance, suggested an EU deal would bring down prices. She had a laundry list of (non) savings announced by the government.
So much for the never-had-a-job community, let’s hear from your resident reviewer/shelf stacker. Cut business rates and employee National Insurance contributions, abandon net zero, replace ‘sell by’ and ‘best before’ with look and smell, bring cheap stuff in from outside the EU, stop shadowing EU regulations, and declare war on ‘sick’ pay and the like. I could go on.
Harriet thought it wouldn’t work too. Dairy farmers will pay the price and are hit time and time again. Rather than shilling for Soros, she was doing it for her in-laws, and rightly so.
Harriet Cross was also first elected to Parliament at the 2024 general election and is currently an opposition Conservative Party assistant whip and the MP for Gordon and Buchan. The 35-year-old has had a job! A graduate of Imperial College London with a degree in Zoology and a master’s in Rural Land and Business Management, Harriet had a career in chartered rural surveying before entering Parliament.
Daughter of a pharmacist, her peripatetic childhood included stints in Harrogate and the Republic of Ireland. Boyfriend is geologist Tom, a son of dairy farmers.
They cap the prices in Croatia and Hungary, chipped in La Bruce. Harriet preferred to cut the cost of doing business here.
A farming Doonhamer spoke. She, in a roundabout way, sowed for a bigger subsidy for herself.
Ross announced Dumfries to be one of the richest countries in the history of the world and yet thousands and thousands of children go hungary.
He wanted the difficult price cap rather than the more difficult child with an empty stomach. He squared a (Carlyle?) circle by announcing the price of food could be cut while simultaneously making everyone in the supply chain better off.
He criticised the big supermarkets and quoted Tesco’s £2 billion profit. On a turnover of £66 billion, he forgot to mention. A margin of 3%, which will knock three pence[1] off a litre of milk while bankrupting the retailer, so you’ll never be able to buy another.
The problem is the middleman. He decided that supermarkets make a massive profit out of alcohol and declared that expensive, smaller retailers are cheaper than lower-cost supermarkets. Has he not heard of competition, the free market and economies of scale? No, he hasn’t, because he’s never had a job. He couldn’t even say ‘fishermen’ and kept on saying ‘farmers and fishers’.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the Temp informs me of the following recent annual results: Asda, £764 million profit on a £21 billion turnover (profit margin 3.64%). Morrisons’, £381 million loss – ie the shareholders pay you to shop there. Sainsburys, £1 billion on £33 billion (3.3%). Aldi £400m on £18 billion (2.2%).
Enough of this tripe. Another famous son of Dumfries, sort of, was Thomas Carlyle; essayist, historian and philosopher. Born in nearby Ecclefechan, as one of nine children to a stone mason who built the family house with his own hands, it was he who invented the too complicated for me to understand Carlyle Circle.
When a student of mathematics, science and moral philosophy, Thomas walked the 100 miles from Ecclefechan to attend the University of Edinburgh.
Time spent not making TikToks, gassing on panel shows, tweeting, tiptoeing through the woke, or attending quangos, but on strengthening character, encouraging discipline, and providing valuable time for deep reflection.
It is no coincidence that those times fostered the large-scale universially enriching expansion of economies of scale that we now know of as Britain’s Industrial Revolution, while our age appears marked by seemingly endless decline.
[1] If you’re paying more than a pound and a bit for a litre of full fat milk, then shop about. Competition brings down prices, not politicians.
© Always Worth Saying 2026
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