Question Time 25th September 2025
The Panel:
Lisa Nandy (Labour)
Luke Evans (Conservative)
Munira Wilson (Liberal Democrat)
Richard Tice (Reform UK)
Billy Bragg (Musician and activist)
Venue: Bedworth
Lisa Nandy is on Question Time too often. Having run out of fingers and toes to count on, this humble reviewer tallies her appearances at an estimated 25. There is only so much that can be said in a QT Review biography. Puffins are already aware Lisa has never had a job, is a graduate in Law from Newcastle University and that her real name is Lisa Eve Collis. Previously, in desperation, we have told of her patrician Indian public school boy father, Dipak, and her brainier sister, Francesca, a client relationship manager ‘currently looking for new opportunities’.
This time around, the spotlight falls upon her maternal grandfather. As a hereditary politician, working-class Comrade Lisa’s grandad was a member of the House of Lords. Lord Charles Frank Byers, Baron Byers, OBE, PC, DL, was also a public school boy (Westminster) and a graduate of Christ Church, Oxford (Politics, Philosophy and Economics). After serving in the Royal Artillery in the war, Byers became a one-term Liberal MP for North Dorset – enough to get him a seat for life in the upper chamber. Away from politics? A businessman and one-time director of Rio Tinto Zinc.
Ordinary northern workstock, Lisa’s mother, Luise, and her stepfather, Ray Fitzwalter, were both television producers. Luise’s credits include What the Papers Say and World in Action. Ray is also known for World in Action as well as 1999’s Manhunt: The Search for the Yorkshire Ripper.
Speaking of humble working people, Billy Bragg is a singer-songwriter, guitarist and left-wing activist. Not quite his real name, Steven William Bragg is a cap maker’s sales manager’s son from Barking and began performing in the late ’70s with the punk group Riff Raff. A solo career in the 1980s anti-folk movement followed. The sixty-seven-year-old is famous for his politically conscious lyrics and socialist activism and has released several successful albums.
During Laura Fairrie’s 2010 documentary The Battle for Barking, Bragg had a stand-up row with BNP London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook. During the shouty shouty, Bragg told Barnbrook, “You do not represent the people of Barking and Dagenham.” Hmmm. Does Billy Bragg? As forewarned by the then Barking parliamentary candidate Nick Griffin, mass, uncontrolled, unlimited immigration has had a devastating effect on the Essex town.
In the 1991 census, 93% of the population of Barking was white. However, by the 2021 census, the white British population had been racially cleansed to only 30.9%. The white flight included man of the people Comrade Bragg who decamped to a millionaire’s mansion on the not-so-diverse Dorset coast. A London luvvie enclave, near neighbours included proletarian artisans such as Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall, Keith Floyd, Ronnie Barker and GMTV’s Fiona Phillips.
Later, Bragg was to sell the 25-room Victorian villa (complete with indoor swimming pool) for a cool £2.5 million profit. Despite bashing bankers and threatening to withhold income tax unless bonuses were capped, socialist Billy, rather than donate the property to illegal immigrants, took a mountain of cash from buyer Richard Spencer – a real estate investment manager for Goldman Sachs.
Posh Richard Tice is an old boy of £54,000 per annum Uppingham School. Richard graduated in Construction Economics and Quantity Surveying at the University of Salford, after which he joined his family’s upmarket property and construction firm, Sunley Group. Founded by self-made grandfather Bernard Sunley, famous properties built by the company include the Dubai World Trade Centre (called the Sunley Building by locals) and Kings Hill Park near Kings Hill Golf Club in Kent. Not quite the kind of golf club estate Tarby or Brucie might live on, the houses would suit a rabbit or chicken that doesn’t like gardening.
Richard is the MP for Boston and Skegness and the former Brexit Party MEP for the East of England.
Luke Evans is the MP for Hinckley and Bosworth and has been since 2019. Shadow Minister for Health and Social Care, prior to a political career, Mr Evans was a GP, as is his spouse. The 42-year-old’s parents were also a doctor and a nurse.
There is such a thing as fear of what lies between the lips. Described as dentophobia, or dental anxiety, it is the fear of dental care and treatment. This phobia can range from mild unease to panic attacks and often leads to the avoidance of necessary dental care. Causes can include a past traumatic experience about the mouth. Perhaps brought on by too much Munira Wilson? If you’re acquainted with a dentophobe who you don’t like – send them this.
Toothy grammar school girl Munira Sherali Wilson (née Hassam) studied Modern and Medieval Languages at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, before training as a tax consultant at Ernst & Young. A lobbyist by profession, her clients have included former $1 million-a-year Facebook executive Nick Clegg, as well as Save the Children, the NHS and Big Pharma. She entered Parliament in 2019 as LibDem MP for Twickenham, taking over Vince Cable’s mortuary slap of a seat. Munira is Ed Davey’s spokesperson on education.
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Question one was about digital ID, which Nepo Nandi claimed were needed as a response to the present ‘immigration chaos’. In Nandy’s Wigan, there are politically unhelpful HMOs and asylum hotels. She went into detail about digital ID’s use regarding rights to employment and access to health records. Will it be compulsory to carry one, asked La Bruce? Mr Starmer is going to tell us soon, replied Lisa.
Luke saw this as a dead cat thrown out to distract attention away from Mr Starmer’s leadership problems. It’s called a gimmick, interrupted Richard Tice. They have a point. The language used by Starmer is ‘backing’, which suggests nothing will happen.
How will a digital ID card prevent people from coming to these shores, asked a gentleman in the audience. Nandy stammered. Don’t listen to these two, she said, pointing towards Tice and Evans. We’ll disrupt the criminal gangs. How’s that working out, wondered Richard aloud. Just another expense, said a Sikh man. It will cost billions, and how can it stop people coming from France?
The LibDems have put out a clear statement; they do not support such things. Munira Wilson added that people should not be criminalised for refusing to hand over their personal data to the state. It will cost billions, and how will it stop the movement of migrants? And the digitally deprived, such as the elderly, what about them? She suggested Nightingale emergency centres to process the backlog of asylum claimants. By which she means, letting them all stay.
Richard emphasised that this wouldn’t stop any boats. We already have two types of ID, passports and National Insurance numbers. It’s a matter of using them properly. Governments are bad at these big IT projects. This is a disastrous idea.
They have ID cards in France, it doesn’t stop anybody from going there, began Billy Bragg. He wanted to address the issue from the angle of civil liberties. If people aren’t acting in a ‘standard way’, the chances are they’ll be challenged by the authorities. To spoil a valid point, he continued by illustrating it through the example of ‘trans’ and ‘cis’ women.
La Bruce informed the audience, and all but one of the panellists, that they were wrong. The polling shows more people are in favour of ID cards than against. Has it occurred to the chair that it might be the pollsters who are wrong? There’s lots we don’t know about the plan, she pleaded, before inviting a show of hands. Not many in favour, maybe a tenth of the audience.
What La Bruce and the panel didn’t mention is that detailed plans for mandatory digital ID were, according to the Daily Telegraph, set out earlier this year in a report by Labour Together. Currently mired in a donations scandal, the left-wing think tank was formerly headed by Morgan McSweeney, now Keith’s controversial chief of staff.
Furthermore, it will only apply to adults seeking work – not to illegal immigrants seeking something for nothing. Moreover, digital ID has ‘backing’ from Mr Starmer rather than intention or commitment. In other words, it isn’t as what appeared on the Question Time box and it isn’t going to happen anyway.
A chap in the audience had been to a country which is very digital and it works well. The country was Estonia, with a population of 1.3 million, a third of whom live in one city. La Bruce returned to Lisa Nandy, what did she think given the idea was going down like a bucket containing a billion terabytes of sick?
Err, proper debate. Err, voter ID. Hold on, Nandy was against voter ID as it reduces the fraudulent Labour vote in the party’s racially segregated rotten boroughs. Then she lied, saying only certain people were being asked to show their voter ID. Not so. Err, she continued, far right. Richard Tice has opposed all of our measures. Because they aren’t working, he retorted.
Good job Nandy has family connections in politics and leftie media, because she’s useless.
The second question was about linking paracetamol to autism. What role should politicians play in such controversies? Luke said the science to date shows there isn’t a link. You have to balance risk and reward. Fever can lead to early pregnancy, he said. I don’t think that’s what he meant, but I shall mention it to Mrs AWS all the same.
He described the difference between correlation and causation. When consumption of ice cream goes up, so do cases of sunburn. Does that mean ice cream causes sunburn? No! After watching Question Time for about half an hour, this reviewer doesn’t get sunburn or a craving for ice cream but he does feel an irresistible urge to go to bed. Is this correlation or causation? I’ll sleep on it!
© Always Worth Saying 2025
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