Category: BBC

Tempestuous climate on QT

What a show – it was horrible. The panel was more balanced on last night’s Question Time than it used to be, and the fur flew.  Before the end, I had to turn off – it was too painful.  The main issue this week was Extinction Rebellion:  for the panel included Rupert Read of that distinguished band of vandals.

On the panel, presided over loosely by Fiona Bruce, were Grant Shapps, speaking for the Conservatives but increasingly acting as the only voice of reason that evening; Lisa Nandy of Labour, who became increasingly detached from any semblance of reality as the evening wore on; Rupert Read of Extinction Rebellion, of whom more later but who made even Lisa Nandy look reasonable; Theo Paphitis as the voice of the frustrated rest-of-us; and Julia Hartley-Brewer, the rent-a-mouth whose sole virtue is being able to expose hypocrisy by being rude to everyone else.

We kicked off with the environment, climate change, and the actions of Extinction Rebellion, and voices rose to fever pitch such that you might imagine the rise in global temperature was solely caused by the Question Time panel. There is no logic in debate anymore. No one on the panel was arguing for climate change being a fantasy or unimportant. No one was arguing against its being hastened by mankind, so you would have thought all would be sweetness and light. It was the very opposite.

Maybe it would have been easier if they could just have said to Read that he is a nutcase and taking such complete nonsense it is only a surprise that he does not laugh at himself, but instead this was in form a civil debate, and as a result it turned into a shouting match.

It takes a lot for me to be on Julia Hartley-Brewer’s side, but she made the unchallengeable point (which Grant Shapps missed) that the Industrial Revolution was the greatest and most beneficial thing ever to happen to mankind.  It is a pity that the point could not be taken further, to analyse the anti-industrial rhetoric of Extinction Rebellion, to compare their (unscientific) protest that millions, or even billions, will be killed by climate change with the utter certainty that millions would die of disease and starvation were the Industrial Revolution to be reversed anywhere in the world.  Again Hartley-Brewer nailed it with her characteristically undiplomatic approach, that Extinction Rebellion is a “quasi-religious death cult”.

Rupert Read believes himself, which is worrying. He said that he wants the government to start by’ telling the truth’, but every statement he made was wrong, and he must have known it. When Grant Shapps demonstrated that Britain has cut carbon dioxide emissions mare than any other country, Read said the figures were fiddled (they are not); he made wild claims on what ‘the science’ says which bore no relation to any scientific papers; he said that no one was talking about acting on climate change until the Extinction Rebellion began – somehow ignoring decades of work and public concern on the subject, begun incidentally by Margaret Thatcher.  ‘XR’ must have a point, he said, because they are invited onto QT: well so was Nick Griffin of the BNP, mate. His knock-down proof of the rightness of Extinction Rebellion was that a sixteen year-old, traumatised autistic girl supports them. He even compared himself to the suffragettes and Martin Luther King.  There is delusion there of the highest order.

Even so, Read was cheered from the audience, which he took as validation. The audience may indeed care about the future of the environment – don’t we all – but does not mean accepting every contradictory madness proposed by his cult.  After that I was not convinced by Julia Harley-Brewer’s description: there is nothing ‘quasi’ about their religion.

We were also introduced to Lisa Nandy, a Labour Party star – she has been tipped for leadership. Please put her on television more – she discredits herself and her party wonderfully. She castigated Hartley-Brewer on the environmental issue (don’t feed the troll, Lisa) saying that environmental catastrophe would harm the value of pension funds – but somehow omitted to say how sudden deindustrialisation, or Corbyn, would not.

It was a relief to get off climate change, and the climate in the studio could cool.  Of course the next topic was Brexit, for some light relief.

On Brexit, out came Lisa Nandy, coming into her own.  She accused Boris Johnson of junking a deal with the EU:  she insisted that there was a deal agreed but somehow it had never been allowed to go before parliament. Well, the rest of the country know perfectly well that there was a deal, for we have memories going back more than five minutes, and that it was put before the Commons three times and each time Nandy and her colleagues voted against it. Challenged on this by Grant Shapps, she claimed there was another deal agreed by all parties (presumably known only unto her and not to the government nor the EU) which was not put.  This was fantasy. Just repeating the same untruth again and again makes enough people believe it to vote, but it is horrid to watch except in morbid fascination.

At that point, Rupert Read came back in with his one good point of the evening:  Brexit, deal or no deal, is not the end which will allow us to get back to normal politics: from that point the Government must start negotiating more trade deals with the EU, so it goes on. It sounded a bit odd after he had just been castigating all and sundry for using ships, aircraft and lorries – surely he would want a complete, self-sufficient autarky to keep those environmentally harmful ships in port?

With no sign of reality breaking out from anyone but Theo Paphitis and Grant Shapps, I finally gave up.

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Jeremy, hunted by his own quick hounds

I rarely watch BBC Question Time these days, but last night it came from Chichester, a pretty pocket-city in Sussex and I was winding down after a late meeting.

The star of the show was young Tom Hawood, a journalist for the blog site Guido Fawkes, for bursting several of the panellists’ personal bubbles. The rest of the panel were the usual rent-a-bore crowd and, in the BBC’s usual version of balance were all Remainers, all but Tom, and the audience with him.

We had Vicky Ford (Conservative MP, ex-MEP, voted Remain but now says we must come out), three identikit lefties whose names I did not bother to note (one non-party, one Green and one Labour – I think she was the one with wild, dyed hair) and Tom Harwood.

The stand-out moments were not from the usual bores – they were there to mouth platitudes and did so. As long as you get some in the audience to applaud, you need not think. The usual pop standards were there; about Tory cuts, which statistics do not bear out, and how the two Tory candidates’ spending pledges do not add up (which is fair enough) followed by wilder demands for spending.

Then came the sugar tax.  Four of five took the lazy line that since obesity causes cancer so sugar must be taxed, but Harwood shocked them by a dissenting voice, noting there is no evidence it has any effect at all, which you would think a clincher.  The Green (or Labour; they are basically the same) asserted that the tax has caused drinks companies to change the formulae of their products to reduce the sugar.

Then a man spoke from the front of the audience – a dying man. He told the panel he has a few months to live, his cancer caused by artificial sweeteners in the Diet fizzes he used to drink. Yes – to reduce obesity, drinks companies have replaced the sugar with carcinogenic compounds. This should have halted conversation, redirected thought.  Apparently not.

I should have said that Vicky Ford was there as part of Team Hunt, and on was faced with Jeremy Hunt’s words.

The first subject was uncomfortable in the hostility: foxhunting.  No one actually wanted to discuss it, and the subject was rushed over by all – from the panel because it is a distraction from Brexit, which is itself distracting government from all the things it should be concentrating on, and from audience members who did not want the debate opened up or hunting even considered.  Yet here is a culture-war battlefield where resentments still burn. Most of those in vociferous opposition to hunting have no idea of the realities, at least not going by what they say about it. The word “cruelty” trumps all but misrepresents every aspect of the sport. Jeremy Hunt was right to champion re-legalisation of the sport after which he is named, but maybe this is a topic for later discussion there the discussion was suddenly shut down by mutual consent.

It was here though that the blow came for Jeremy Hunt, and again it was the young journalist who landed it: it was not from the narrow issue, but the repeated times that Jeremy Hunt has spoken, and then immediately retracted on hearing the reaction: whether hunting, or abortion reform, or taxation, or of course whether he would bring the United Kingdom out of the European Union without a deal: he was portrayed as a man who has said that in office he would not do the things he wants to see.  In that case, if Jeremy Hunt does find himself in Number 10, are we to expect the Jeremy Hunt of this week, or the Jeremy Hunt of six weeks ago or six months ago, or the man of six months hence?  He is portrayed as the solid, reliable candidate (for which read ‘boring’) but can he now be considered reliable?

  • Tom Harwood on Jeremy Hunt, taxes and on turning your back on the EU’s ‘national anthem’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAvsYe91qtY

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Jeremy Hunt:

 

Betsy Ross and the losses of Victory

Perhaps Nike could change their name from Nike (“Victory”) to Ētta (“Defeat”), as they have been routed in the culture war. If you missed it, for Independence Day 2019, the company launched a new range of trainers, the Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July, with the Betsy Ross flag on them – and were then accused of racism, and immediately withdrew the range, and were then accused of being unpatriotic and lost a $1 million subsidy and the respect of millions of customers.

A single accusation of possible racism caused the whole range to be pulled, at a loss to the company we can only imagine. Into this stepped Doug Ducey, Governor of Arizona, not in a formal address but (in the modern style) in a series of Tweets:

“Words cannot express my disappointment at this terrible decision. I am embarrassed for Nike.  Instead of celebrating American history the week of our nation’s independence, Nike has apparently decided that Betsy Ross is unworthy, and has bowed to the current onslaught of political correctness and historical revisionism”.

In retaliation for this slur against the United States, the Governor withdrew a state subsidy that was to help Nike develop a factory in Goodyear, Arizona. From our side of the pond it is hard to imagine a politician not siding in terror with the Cultural Marxists, but here is the Governor of Arizona punished the company for rolling over to the mob. That is sturdy resolve we do not see amongst British politicians.

Now Nike is facing a boycott by American patriots.

The BBC report was its usual one, accepting the accusation of racism without demur: of the Betsy Ross flag they wrote “Although opinion is divided over its origins, the flag was later adopted for use by the American Nazi party.” and give prominence to a picture of an American Nazi rally in the 1950s where it appeared. They say the alt-right have used it too. Truly, the BBC are incurable. (The only divisions of opinion on the flag are not political; just whether Elizabeth Ross herself designed it and whether Washington had a hand in it.)

My first reactions to the story were surprise: first that a politician has not rolled over to the first whiff of accusation, and secondly that one of the richest companies in the world, which sells sneakers to the poorest at hundreds of dollars a pair, lives off taxpayer subsidies.  In America they have name for that: ‘corporate welfare’.

A passing word too for those boycotting Nike; good for you. Perhaps you could help us in Britain to organise boycotts of companies here who bow before a handful social justice warriors with laptops and nought else.

It is not of course that protesters are actually offended, just pretending to be offended, unless the offence is just that someone has different priorities from theirs. They are not offended: they want power over those companies.  As this site noted before on this:

The Betsy Ross flag, for those unfamiliar with our colonial cousins, was the first independent flag of the new United States, or the most famous version of it, in a pattern first sewn (according to some accounts) by Betsy Ross of Philadelphia.  The canton of the flag has a ring of thirteen stars, for the thirteen newly independent colonies. It has been used in patriotic celebrations ever since it first flew during the War of Independence and is a common display on Independence Day.  We will not see it disappearing:  it appears each 4th July, and at Presidential inaugurations, including that of Barack Obama, who was not exactly alt-right.

The proof it the inherent racism in the flag was a photograph showing the American Nazi Party displaying it at a rally in the 1950s, beside a vast icon of George Washington. That the flag has been used by millions of Americans of all opinions, religions and races over two hundred years is weighed as nothing when a Nazi purloins it.

(I shall have to hide my collection of Beethoven in that case, as Hitler was a fan, and swear never again to eat pickled cabbage for the same reason. The latter is no hardship.)

What now for Nike / Ētta? A single expression of concern that need not have gone beyond the company’s wall has left them looking cowardly, which is not a good look in sportswear, has cost them $1 million in corporate welfare, millions more in losing the sales of goods they had already made and marketed, and now they are facing a consumer boycott. Mighty as you may be, never think to yourself ἀνίκητος εἶ ὦ παῖ.

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