Tonight Question Time comes from Workington which has been a Labour stronghold since its creation in 1918 except for a short lived Tory by-election win in 1976. It is represented in the House of Commons by Labour career trade unionist Tony Cunningham.
On the panel tonight we have Damian Green MP, Andy Burnham MP, Melanie Phillips, the utterly insane Clare Short and someone called Noreena Hertz who is engaged to Danny Cohen, the Channel Controller of BBC One.
The LiveBlog will also cover the surreal This Week, with Andrew Neil and Michael Portillo.
David Vance, TheEye and David Mosque will be moderating the abuse here from 10:30pm, so we look forward to seeing you!
Noreena Hertz/Danny Cohen. Talk about keeping it in the family.
I know nothing about Noreena, but am willing to predict that she is a “useful Jew” and there will be a catfight with our Mel who will be booed and hissed by the rigged left-wing QT audience.
So boringly predicatable, I shall be tucked up in bed with my hot mug of cocoa instead of watching.
She sounds alright in that she’s an economist whose book is titled ‘the silent takeover and the death of democracy’, plus there’s a potential totty factor
Dick,
It is “The Silent Takeover : Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy”. So we know where she is coming from !
She’s definitely on the Left.
She signed a letter to the Guardian before the election (along with George Monbiot, Yasmin Alibhai Brown, and a host of others calling themselves “progressive liberals“) announcing that she was switching from Labour to the Lib Dems because she believed they could bring about “a proportional electoral system; wider and better-defended civil liberties; a new, internationalist approach to foreign affairs and immigration; reform of the tax system to share wealth and curb carbon emissions; and an assault on the vested interests of the financial sector.”
Wikipedia describes her as “regarded as being on the centre-left rather than the further left position of Naomi Klein, to whom she is sometimes compared.”
I usually watch old movies and series (mostly pre-85) wrapped up all warm and snuggley with a cup of chocolate Ovaltine. The last thing I want is to be laying in bed and having something nasty shoved down my throat.
Third week in a row this year where the panel has been loaded heavily to the left.
I wonder how many weeks the BBC will let it run before finally giving in and attempting a token bit of balance? 4 weeks, 12 weeks, a year? Never? Come on BBC, a 3 right to 2 left panel is LONG overdue. Or how about a once in a decade show when you push the boat out and put 4 righties on against a sole lefty? Flying pigs etc.
As per normal 4 from the left and 2 from the right,
How mant Tories will there be in the ” balanced” audience.
who looks after the poor-torys
who keeps the NHS safe-torys
who looks after the schools-torys
who looks after the underclass which they have made-torys
Disgusting posh bastards, and this website loves em.
Well done Joe joe. Yes, “torys” rhymes with, well , “torys”. Excellent. Look forward to your next poem.
Grant, there’s a poem by Ted Hughes that has the same sort of rhyme scheme as Joe joe’s poem:
Who owns these scrawny feet? Death.
Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? Death.
Who owns these still-working lungs? Death.
Who owns this utility coat of muscles? Death
etc.
Not one of his best though.
you should read his twiitter ramblings
english must be his second language
Craig,
And there I was thinking I had discovered an original in Joe joe just to find out he is a plagiarist !
there was an accident at joe joe’s house
both books he owned were burnt-worse still,he hadn’t even finished colouring one of them in
You disgust me, i shit on your flag, why our partners the us prop up a thieving,robbing,murdering, two bit country like yours is beyond me.
oh you hurtful biatch 😀
I’ll never sleep tonight I’m so annoyed -oh and by the way,it’s not my country,you raving anti semite-I just back them 200% and will always be proud to do so
back to your colouring in books you imbecile
joe joe – Any chance of debating the issue of BBC bias? Or are you trolling for a fight? What directed you to this site, if you have the balls to answer.
I doubt they’ve dropped yet judging by the childish level of insult.
Joe joe,
Way past your bedtime.
thieving,robbing,murdering!
Oh dear did someone ancestors get beaten up by this 2 bit country then 😀 ?
who looked after the money and spent it= labour
who broke the NHS =labour
who grovelled after the schools hearts and lost =labour
who created the underclass which we now have =labour
Joe 13yrs and what ? what did they do to make the world a better place? so we give another bunch a chance and you don’t like it arhhh didums well which speck of dust are you from then ? I’m from Brum so go tell us !
Llew it’s a lot more than three weeks running. It has been every QT for as many years as I can remember. 4-2 to the left is as balanced as it gets. I have seen 5-1 and 4-1 and 1 floater before. It’s a racket really.
On the plus side – Melanie, a BBC favourite. WHY?
If one is seeking the odd token of ‘balance’ when deciding on the composition of debating forums, there is probably an attraction to having that person known by an oft-repeated pejorative in certain trendy, chatteratti quarters. That way whatever they actually say can be ignored through the prism of preconception.
But then, ‘utterly insane’ seems to have been taken elsewhere.
The difference being that, by evidence of word and deed, one has rather earned the epithet.
I think this piece by James Delingpole might provide an answer. It requires enormous fortitude to participate in such a rigged set-up. Very few people have the stomache for it.
The fact that Melanie is one of the few genuinely conservative voices that step up to the plate each time makes them jewels we must treasure. According to Roger Liddle he thinks she is his replacement.
“The big poser for Question Time: Will David Dimbleby quit over plans to move to Glasgow?”
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1353507/Question-Time-Will-David-Dimbleby-quit-plans-to-Glasgow.html#ixzz1Cz2jIPAu
Why not move ‘QT’ to Cairo (into new studios there, complete with prayer-room) preferably overlooking Tahrir Square -with Egyptian only panellists, paid for, of course by INBBC licencepayers?
Why not move QT to Gaza ?
Here is a review by Martin Wolf of Noreena Hertz’s book “The silent takeover”. He doesn’t seem very enthusiastic …
http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?A2=ind0107&L=GAMBIA-L&F=&S=&P=400679
Was late last night having watched Wallander, so turned to QT at 11 just as Hertz opened her mouth about forests,immediately greeted by bayng cheers from the assembled sheeple.
It was so nauseating I turned off and went to bed.
I am beginning to think that to watch QT one either needs a lobotomy or be totally high, which is a shame as the live blog is great
I thought Melanie Phillips was accurate, coherant and dignified when criticised. I thought Noreena Hertz probably had too much exposure for her abilities, ironically most prominent on economic matters when she held that more debt was necessary for growth, without sensing the ultimate probable outcome. Claire Short is the traditional shock participant for hard left views, hence it is worrying that she no longer seems to deliver that shock – a sign of how far the BBC and her audiences have shifted, possibly. As for Andy Burnham, he seemed to sit on the fence too much with continuous references to ‘getting the right balance’ and seemed unable to articulate a firm position in any direction. As for poor Damien Green, the man arrested for ‘grooming’ charges, I thought he did okay but suffered unlucky timing to have to field the forest sales question. Look forward to some burly right-wingers in a majority to spice up the programme in future.
Damien Green comes over as totally useless and weak
hence the reason why he is on
Itwf
Yes, QT only ever selects weak Tories and the weak Tories fall for it. Idiots.
Glad to hear that Melanie did well as I missed the show.
She can hold her own and then some, so it’s not really a shock I suppose.
I love Londonistan and The World Turned Upside Down. Great reads both.
Noreena Hertz was embarrassingly awful and unwatchable. Talk about people being overpromoted. She just yapped on, lapping up audience approval for her attacks on ‘cuts’. Even Dimbleby had to ask her to stop. Utterly unoriginal and a poor man’s Melanie on Egypt,
The audience was grotesquely unbalanced and public sectorist.
Clare Short’s anti-Americanism veered toward racism and nobody had the gumption to pick her up for that.
I thought there was quite a lot of irony in the way that the BBC ran a programme this week on how people got to the top implying it was often unfair. Then in the same week the fiancee of the Controller of BBC One gets invited onto Question Time!
Truly some are more equal than others….
I don’t often watch QT now – usually scan the names and can guess the likely scenario. I think the turning point was the way the makers got away with the outrageous edition in Oct 2009 (i think) when Nick Griffin was
subjected to a McCarthyite interrogation by a hand-picked left-wing audience and panel. Dimbleby got away with clear, unashamed bias (active bias too). While i’m not a BNP voter, I felt that that was the moment when QT left behind any lingering trace of balance, and since then the makers have not looked back, getting more and more openly biased towards the left-liberal-PC ideology that most politicians (including most Tories) and commentators now subscribe to. People like Melanie Phillips only have to open their mouth to illustrate how far to the centre-left the Conservative Party have moved. My only disappointment is that Melanie seemed quite passive compared to the three on the other side of the table – a sense of holding back somehow. She certainly didn’t come across as forthright as she normally does in her written pieces and on “The Moral Maze”. I have noticed the same with the fine Peter Hitchens when he’s on QT. It’s a shame, as it is so rare for any voice to be heard on television that falls outside the safe, liberal-PC consensus – therefore, when it does occasionally happen the speakers should be as forthright and combative as possible. It makes me wonder whether Phillips and Hitchens don’t want to antagonise the QT makers too much and get themselves removed from the guest circuit (which seems to exist). Would be interested to know what others think.