Question Time comes tonight from Norwich.
On the panel we have Andrew “Let’s be a proud international aid superpower” Mitchell, ex-local MP who lost his seat in 2010 Charles Clarke, anti-Easter Egg campaigner Jo Swinson, anti-man campaigner Germaine Greer and Peter Hitchens.
The LiveBlog will also stay open for the bizarreness of This Week, with Andrew Neil, Michael Portillo and Alastair Campbell. Expect the Blue Nun Bingo to be as aggressively competitive as ever.
David Vance, TheEye and David Mosque will be moderating the abuse here from 10:30pm. See you later!
So the score :-
Left 5 ( including Mitchell and Dimblebore )
Right 1
agreed, right in politics and the only one right in the head.
Hoping that Peter breaks the Phillips Index for boos and heckles from the impartial BBC audience. Still got Douglas Murrays personal best from a few weeks ago to beat, so should be a good one!
Topics-the Archbishop, energy bills(no mention of the UEA down the road though), Southern Cross( no Ipswich NHS scandal though), Syria/Libya(International aid link) with mt wild card being the slut walk as the new feminism-burka good and empowering, bunny girl less so!
“Live ! From Norwich ! It’s The Pricks Of The Week !”
<<“Sale Of The Century” theme tune>>
Charles Clarke says the government does not have the right to ignore what they said before the election.
No one reminds him, we will legislate against university fee, opps we brought them in!
Every party in politics lies before an election, its fact we should get over it.
Unlike Lablour with the EU referendum !
Actually…Ill give Cameron this, he was consistent about University fees from the get go. He did say that it wouldnt ever be free and that people would be expected to pay for their education.
Otherwise, its business as usual with the only thing differentiating the tories from labour being the spelling of their political party name!
Mailman
Interesting mix of panellists — some of them rather pompous( young MP)
Poor old Hitchens will be needing a good bath today having put himself through the BBCs slime pit.
Dimbleby is beyond a disgrace now-hope Craig will let us know about Dimblebys % interruptions of Hitchens as opposed to Greer.
Her stuff about troops on Viagra was another disgrace too-but no-one took on this saintly old catwoman on day release from her care home( the nearby Uni)…why not,pray?
Finally if that private school patronising toff that dared to ask Hitchens whether he had ever been to “third world” countries does not get her own BBC show (and soon!) then I`ll be surprised…maybe that`s the way to bypass the job applications now if your name isn`t Dimbleby or such like.
Are you watching Pyonyang…for THAT`S the way to do it!
Greer is a Beeboid through and through. Left-wing, Green, wealthy , lives in a big house with acres of land in East Anglia. Ticks all the right hypocrite boxes.
She was some piece of work wasn’t she? Clearly new nothing about Hitchens or she would have been aware of his extensive travel. I thought her “shut up and just let me be right all the time” type jibe demonstrated her experience of yelling in a boozy student union bar.
And then we had her “well I went to Nepal”. How very bloody Islington Revolutionary. Where the rich folk go for a bit of faux slumming it and pick up a nice few pashminas to save the local economy. I don’t suppose she even priced up Waziristan, Dharfur, Khazakstan, Yemen or other such places.
The author, V.S.Naipaul described such people as ‘revolutionaries with return tickets’. Always liked that. These bloody awful, hollow, compassion tourists, wear their trips abroad like campaign medals. What was she doing in Nepal? Lecturing the Gurkahs on ‘moderate’ Islam?
What was the point that the redhead girl was making?
She was making the point that she doesn’t like Peter Hitchens, because he doesn’t go along with the so called “liberal” concensus.
Her point was that self-righteous indignation is the same thing as informed opinion, and that anyone who didn’t agree with her must be ignorant, as there is no other possible interpretation of reality.
Loved the section on foreign aid. Having just followed the audience view about the nasty cuts and the impact that they were having we had a wonderful about face on the subject of overseas aid, especially as the question was asked in the context of making cuts in this country.
I was particularly fascinated when Greer accused Peter Hitchens of quoting numbers i.e. money as though it was inconsequential. In fact it was the heart of the argument. The numbers weren’t just innocent numbers. Those numbers are choices. They represent a deliberate choice to not spend money in one area so that they can spend it in another. So the money India spends on its nuclear programme, its aircraft carriers, its major new deal with the Russians for fleet based jets are all choices to put money there and not to spend it on their own citizens.
This self regarding elite always like to harp on about us interfering in the other countries and their right to their own sovreignty free from foreign interference. I would love someone to challenge them on how us deciding that they have made the wrong spending decision is not the same inteference.
Greer’s worst moment was when she basically accused an audience member of molesting his daughter. Unchallenged by Dimbleby or the useless Hitchens. I won’t be forgetting that one.
and I won’t be forgetting her comment about all soliders includi our own raping at some point. There was nothing conditional about it either. And that went unchallenged as well and was about as disgusting as you could get
Andrew,
Don’t worry, Russia, China and India will bail us out when we are in trouble……. er…..
Three thoughts come to mind while reading these comments:
1. Why don’t we ask India and Pakistan to relinquish their nuclear weapons as a condition for receiving aid payments, as it appears that we are funding a nuclear arms race between them (while we ourselves cannot afford to run the Ark Royal!).
2. The QT audience should be asked for a show of hands as to who reads the Daily Mail and who reads the Guardian. We would then see if the BBC were “gerrymandering” (as if we didn’t already know).
3. Last nights performance looked a bit like the beeb were getting back at Hitchens for his recent blog remarks about the program.
We can’t ask India or Pakistan to give up their nukes in exchange for cash. As soon as anyone even suggests it publicly there will be a huge cry of “What about Israel’s nukes?” Every time anyone starts speaking too loudly about Iran or Syria having nuclear weapons, there is the inevitable noise from the usual suspects about how hypocritical it is to allow nasty old Israel to have nukes but not let everyone else have them.
It’s just not going to happen.
Hitchens was mostly pathetic, not even as useful as Janet Daley.
Simple, we just apply the same rule to Isreal.
In fact we apply the same rule to the whole world!
Pacific,
I have a sneaking suspicion I know what would happen to Israel if it had no nuclear weapons and it is not about peace and love !
Why do you say Hitchens was pathetic?
Because his position that all sex education was wrong was very weak, and his illogical conclusion that everyone supported the sexualization of children made him come across as a puritanical fool. Except for his correct statements to that horrible redheaded girl about the folly of international aid, his points in support for his own arguments were either irrelevant or just waffling without saying much at all.
I think you’re wrong David. For starters his position WASN’T that “all sex education is wrong” AND his “illogical conclusion” was a sarcastic response to the boos and jeers from the obviously fixed (to-the-point-of-ridiculousness) audience.
PH is very old fashined and could easily be described as puritanical but his point was perfectly valid: the more sex education the more STD and abortions etc, he said a perfect truth: the stats belie the nay-sayers. DD was in fine interrupting irrelvant bullshit form but the key point was the ‘bravery’ of the audience plants (obvious) the BBC have cooked their own goose by putting the video online and there are 2 or three CLEAR leftie wanker upstarts with their overly loud “hah” and histrionics (one even jumps up his “hah” is so contrived, he looked like he could even be the Archbishop in disguise). The Daily Mail is 2nd only to the Sun in readership and the FEMALE readership is the highest of any UK newspaper…how many people clapped? ONE! One person clapped his statement. This to me is the clear and undeniable truth of the bias of the program and audience.
Span, I’m pretty sure Hitchens did say that all of it was wrong, adding that it’s been proven to cause promiscuity and lead to more abortions. It only leads to more abortions because the procedure is more easily available now than in the past. False causation there, not helping the cause.
And even though his quip about the audience favoring child sexualization may have been sarcastic, it did – as I said – make him appear foolish.
I thought the whole sexualisation of children question was quite interesting. The question came from the audience but didn’t seem to like Hitchens answer. Their reaction for me suggested that they already had an answer in mind and that it was quite a widespread view, which could in turn raise its own questions about how that audience was picked.
All that said, Hitchens did miss a trick. He is predominantly christian in a growing secular society so he has a tendency to come across as puritanical and obscure what might be some very relevant points. As a former marxist, Hitchens is probably well versed in the history of cultural marxism. He would know quite well about how sex education had been used by Georg Lukacs as a tool to weaken western attitudes and would probably also be familiar with the work of Frankfurt School leading lights such as Marcuse building further on this.
In other words sex education isn’t neccessarily bad, but some key left wing figures worked out a way to use for their own ends. Had he concentrated on that, he might have put together a better argument. Especially as Greer played into his hands with her disgustingly sinister suggestions about fathers kissing their daughters because it perfectly underscored her mindset.