As someone who has tracked the BBC’s coverage of the EU for some time, Question Time last night from Cardiff was wearsomly predictable. Nigel Farage was bumped off last week’s programme from Teesside because the producers were worried that he would have made highly damaging remarks about how the EU was responsible for the closure of Corus steelworks. He was reinstated for last night’s edition. The audience was palpably strongly anti-UKIP (evidenced when they applauded loudly when gratutious insults were made against Mr Farage); and so, too, of course, were the four other panellists. The question chosen about UKIP was this:
Are Nigel Farage’s rude and attention seeking remarks about the President of the European Council not conclusive proof that UKIP and he have become nothing more than a boorish national embarrassment?
This showed breath-takingly deliberate (even by QT standards!), ad hominem bias against Mr Farage. Dimblebore proceded to shut Mr Farage up every time he made, or tried to make, a point in his defence. The exchange became a vicious tirade against both Mr Farage and his party. UKIP was treated exactly the same way that BNP was when it appeared. Mr Farage was called – variously – cartoonish, racist (by the boorish Janet Street-Porter), and a carictaure of himself, all without a breath of balance or attempt at intervention by Dimblebore, other than to say Mr Farage must take it all on the chin. All the while, the blood-crazed ‘audience’ jeered and booed at every opportunity.
UKIP’s appearance on this programme could and should have been an opportunity to discuss a substantive issue about the EU. Instead, the producers made it open season against both Mr Farage and his party. This was bias at its very worst.
Agree – this was shameful, hypocritical TV at its worst.
As I’ve mentioned on another thread, I don’t think Nigel Farage’s speech played well outside the already committed, although I liked it. But it was all too predictable that he was going to be set up like this.
From the “spontaneous” round of applause from the audience when Peter Hain said people were glad to be in the EU, it was obvious that the audience was stacked. I realise Wales is not UKIP territory, but couldn’t they find any UKIP supporters for the audience? Or perhaps the problem is that they did, and made sure they were weeded out.
On another subject the Radio 5 scum are NOT happy that the BBC is planning cut backs, in particular the Asian network and Radio 6. Viki Pollard asking views, needless to say they are only reading out those in support of the BBC.
Regarding last night’s QT I really find it amazing that UKIP and the Tories don’t demand a balance in the audience. When you consider the number of people who voted Tory or UKIP at the last elections you’d think from the QT audience that no one did.
Week after week we see anyone who tries to oppose the Scottish mong and his vile party shut down by Bimblebore. For example last nigt as soon as Farage went off topic Bimblebore shut him up, yet a twat like Hain was allowed to spout all sorts of crap quite freely.
Martin I bow to no one in my loathing of McBruin but do you really have to use the term mong? It rather undermines your argument and is akin to referring to black people as “darkies” for example.
Robert,
In my sheltered life, I had never heard the expression “Mong” until Martin used it. A bit of googling suggests it means “retarded” which seems a pretty good description of Brown to me !
Grant it seems you have led a sheltered life or you are not British. Mong is an insulting term for people with Down’s Syndrome. If you are happy using the term fine, but I find it offensive and people that use such terminology are the ones who come across as retarded.
Really? Since when…I used to work with people with downs and not once had I ever heard that term being used to describe them?
Mailman
That is not the meaning of the word at all. If it has in any way come to mean that, it is only because it has been hijacked like the word “gay”, which means carefree and happy – there are obviously a lot of very happy people around these days.
Robert,
There seems to be some dispute about the meaning of the word “mong”.
sorry lads but you are all being a bit dim. Mong is short for mongoloid ie a person with mongolism otherwise known as the non pc oldy world term for Downs. Ask yourself when people use the phrase which stupid voice accompanies it. Either you are living in bubble or have never been in a playground or you are being deliberately obtuse.
I disagree. The Labour members are usually suitably heckled and jeered by the audience when they pass their predictable comments. The Tory contributors on the panel i usually find to be more reasoned and usually come off sounding much better and getting a much better reception from the audience. To be fair, if i was a Labour MP i wouldn’t volunteer to go on QT at this time, the audiences generally have had enough of listening to their nonsense now after 13 years. I guess if you watch the BBC wanting it to be something, then in your mind thats how it is. The same as if you want the Daily Mail to be factual and reasoned you can make it so in your head, despite it infact being a comic full of lies, exagerrations, quoting “our sources”/”sources close to . . .” etc for anything it wants to make up and also being full of spin worse than even anything Labour would ever dare use. Its all about self reasoning
Lets have a recap on the BBC version of impartial broadcasting shall we?
The BBC routinely rig polls.
The BBC rig audiences whenever and wherever it can.
The BBC rigs guest interviews.
The ends justify the means you see! The BBC have a world view and that political narrative is served by some of the most bigoted and prejudiced ideologues the nation has to offer, they have the power to spread their world view, there is no effective control mechanism to stop them and an inbred groupthink isolation leads them to view those on the outside as enemies.
The vast majority of people support Farage and the UKIP hatred of the EU federal monster, but the small minority have the loudest voice because the BBC is part of that minority, we are in effect being held hostage by the tyranny of the minority.
The BBC feels no shame at rigging the QT audience because the narrative demands that the minority view is the only correct one, all other views are considered wrong, the BBC is corrupt both morally and ideologically staffed with lying cheating bigots unable to see past their prejudices.
QT has become a rigged kangaroo court where the enemy is subjected to the kind of planned abuse that Stalin and Hitler would have approved of, the enemy becomes less than human and a peoples enemy, the selected screaming shouting rabble hurling the carefully encouraged abuse.
Much as you and I might wish it, I’m afraid the vast majority of people don’t support Farage. They don’t give a damn about the EU as long as they get their regular fix of Eastenders.
Sadly true.
It was quite an obvious set up. I am aware that Wales has a Soviet style economy. The private sector being well on the way to extinction. Therefore the default survival postion of a Welsh voter is to vote for more state – the bigger the better. Hence the EU.
What puzzles me ,and maybe I missed it, in which case please put me right was the lack of a question on Stafford hospital.
The Stafford situation could hardly be more serious . The implications are horrendous and I know people, particularly if elderly, in real fear of having to go to an NHS facility.
As for Janet Street Porter- her lamentable ignorance concerning the history of Belgium was laughable. To accuse Farrage of “racism” – the people of Belgium are the same race as us- is typical of the refllex action of a libleftie when unable to deal with an argument.
A very poor question time indeed.
Can anyone explain the appeal of Janet SP to TV execs ? The woman has a face that could curdle milk , a voice that is painful to listen to and quite frankly doesn’t seem that bright !
I was amused to see her on a Channel 4 Gordon Ramsey show (can’t remember which they all appear the same) where she was raising animals for slaughter in the grounds of her house in rural Yorkshire. I always imagined she would live in a vibrant and culturally diverse inner city but it seems not 🙂 Anyway she was shown walking through the mud in her own garden wearing totally inappropriate clothing and what seemed to be brand new boots. Amazingly despite living in North Yorkshire she didn’t appear to have encounted mud before. It was hard to not laugh.
You really don’t think beeboids actually live in the sort of shithole communities they like to promote do you? Same with beeboids and child molesters and drug dealers. The BBC speak up for these perverts but they wouldn’t want them actually living next door to them. Tha’ts what council estates are for.
Same thing with mobile phone towers. Beeboids don’t like these transmitters being put up next to their posh homes (that’s what council estates are for) yet beeboids love their iphones.
Normally I hate JSP however on thurs she came across as reasonably balanced apart from the attack on Farrage.
She even bigged up Maggie T as more polite than good old one eye. She had ago at our glorious leader for being a bully and she seemed for the first time like a normal person. Maybe living in the home counties is rubbing off on her.
Almost everything that came out of JSP’s mouth consisted of rabid man-hating. She failed to restrain, on every question, her prejudicial hatred of men generally. If her hysterically ill-considered rants constitute being “reasonably balanced” these days then this country truly has gone mad. Her reflexive use of the leftist-dehumaniser “racist”, when Nigel was busy kicking her ass, did raise a smile though.
It was just an excuse to ambush UKIP who are a threat to Liebour.
BBC spinning rubbish again. On Radio 5 it’s an anti Tory and Murdoch rant about the BBC having to cut back.
The debate is totally one sided with only those in favour of the BBC getting airtime. Needless to say my text saying the BBC should be scrapped totally hasn’t been read out.
Agree with all the comments – the audience had obviously been hand-picked, vetted, and stacked, even allowing for the celtic tendency to prefer statist sucking at the public teat.
And Dimblebore’s blatant bias was, as usual, just breathtaking.
Was I alone however in thinking that Liam Fox gave a particularly poor account of himself? He could have skewered that odious creep Hain on several occasions and yet failed to do so.
Either the BBC only have useless Tories on or this is the best that the Tories offer up. I remember when I think Labour had Yvette Cooper on and she was hammering the Tories over inheritance tax, I can’t remember who the Tory was, but it took Iain Hislop to hammer Cooper for Labour coming out with a very similar proposal.
Only Daniel Hannan has had any bottle on QT.
Well it’s true that Wales is over-dependent on the public sector ….. and the economy would actually benefit from a massive cull of public servants who might actually turn their talents to doing something productive.
At the same time UKIP is very unpopular in Wales because it is seen, and actually is, an anti-Welsh, narrowly English nationalist party. Basically it only appeals to elderly folk who’ve come to Wales to die. Of course the BBC is fully aware of the lack of mainstream support for UKIP in Wales, which I guess is the reason why they arranged for Falange to appear in Wales. A dirty trick – most certainly.
Only just had chance to watch last night’s QT, and you have to say that the section regarding Farage’s “damp rag” quote has all the hallmarks of a classic QT ambush.
There was the constant interuption of Dimbleby, he really did his best to stop Farage getting into his stride, he also stopped Farage from correcting the panel’s own idiotic remark – JSP’s accusation of racism was embarrassing – Dimbleby and Fox references to the two world wars was innappropriate – and there was an unusual amount of audience supplementaries – and notice also (at risk of being accused of being a conspiuacy theorist) none of those asking the supplementaries had a Welsh accent – unlike the topics either side where there was a predominance of Welsh accents.
I noticed the accent thing too. The section where they were accusing Nigel of being a bully and UKIP of being a national embarrassment etc had a very similar format to the mobbing action they did on Griffin last year. Scripted audience and panel members throwing one unopposed rock of moralising condescension after another as Comrade Dimblebee held the target’s hands behind his back. Combine that with strategic use of camera shots and sound and I think we’ve all figured out how they operate now. I suspect that they’ll be employing many more dirty tricks in the run up to the general election though.
IT’s getting worse me thinks. Totalitarianism at it’s best. Dimblfuck should go and plant some flowers and tend to his fucking garden. Janet street porter is an alien who should be put out to sea on a burning dingy
One seriously has to wonder, what, in fact the British people want and expect from the forthcoming election. it would appear, judging by the closing of the gap between the conservative and labour parties, and by their performance at this (and other) Question Time(s), that they are quite happy with the present governmental incumbents, thank you.
Can that really be the case? After 13 distastrous years of labour mismanagement, they surely can’t be begging for more, can they?
How is it that a trawl through the comments on various articles in various on-line newspapers that there appears to be a shrill “get-them-out-at-all-costs” clamour, yet the gap is closing?
I appreciate that the conservatives appear not to have too much to offer any more, and are probably just another shade of red, but do the public REALLY want another term of the nutters currently in power, when through gritted teeth they could so easily be rid of them? Have they a death wish? I’m mightily confused.
“One seriously has to wonder, what, in fact the British people want and expect from the forthcoming election.”
State dependent voters are unaffected by the recession and credit crunch.
It’s the self reliant private sector tax payers that finance the state who feel the pain.
Chris, the public struggle to remain angry for more than a few weeks. This I’m afraid is human nature and isn’t going to change. Add to this a certain naivete and ignorance, for example it is now widely accepted that the recession is over and those nasty Tories will bring it back with cuts. Add gullibility to the mix so that politicians can be shown to have lied and lied again, but are still believed come the election, and finally add fear and selfishness. Why vote for austerity and reconstruction when you can vote for more comfy bail outs and deferred debt payments.
Taking all of the above into account then Labour and their propaganda arm the BBC may well get another four years in control.
This may not be such a bad thing. It might be good to leave the mess to those who caused it so that they can dig themselves an even deeper hole, and aim for a more radical right of centre coalition and abolition of the BBC at the following general election.
A prospect beyond contemplation. What state do you think we would be in and what would be left of this country after another four or five years of this shower? It’s shocking enough to look back at what they have been up to for the past thirteen without having to look to the future with them in it as well.
John,
Excellent point. There is a view that the economic and social problems of the UK still need to get a lot worse before the British will do something about it.
The question is, after this election, will there ever be another ?
Remember, New Labour are simply the political arm of the BBC. They share not just the agenda, but the ‘forces of hell’ viciousness against their political opponents.
Nigel Farage was bullied in the BBC’s set-up feeding frenzy. BTW the BBC just had a semi Gordon Brown’s bullying is not so bad, everyone’s at it, on the One Show.
Ah the One Show, the last bastion of BBC intellectualism !
Yeah true. Question Time and five minutes of the One Show was all I could take this week as the BBC causes me to have acid reflux.
I am firmly of the opinion that the 50 year supremacy of what we call the libleft unreality in this country and the US is over. The counter revolution is on the way. How and when the final disintegration of the unreal world the libleft has tried to create happens is impossible to predict as we are living through it and cannot see.
This makes the coming election largely irrelevant so I am little concerned by it..
Cameron belongs to the past as much as does new labour.
What new alignment and what new men and women rise to prominence no one knows but it will happen.
The powerful never seem to be as strong as at the moment when their power is about to end.
The change will not be the ersatz “change” offered us by the elites but real change.
WE may not like it but it has to happen. We will probably become much poorer and find life hard but that is a price well worth paying if our nation and our culture is to be preserved for the coming generations.
Cameron is a poor leader, of that there is no doubt. The Tories should be 25 point ahead in the polls, not 5. But the BBC are clearly having a strong influence here, every Tory policy is attacked by the BBC, every Tory cock up no matter how small is hammered yet Liebour scum get away with literally murder (David Kelly and the recent hospital deaths) without so much as a mention by the BBC.
The BBC play down any Labour sleaze, for example on expenses, the BBC like to continually remind the public of Tory sleaze on expenses (duck houses and moats) but ignore or bury the REAL sleaze which is from Liebour, for example the total disgrace that is 5 bellies smiff, Blears, Darling and McTwats house flipping, not to mention the Labour MPs who have been charged now with criminal offences.
The Tories only have themselves to blame, someone senior should have taken Cameron aside and had a quiet word some time back.
Dave, I really hope that you are right !
The BBc is the big problem – there is no doubt about that. Listen to either Radio 5 news or Radio 4 pm and you will get a quote from a Labour party MP saying ” — the Tories will make things worse” at the end of every interview no matter what the subject. The BBC must know that to balance this a conservative should be on to answer the almost throw away statements put out by every left winger invited onto their programmes, but there never is. This is what I find really appauling – it is a message that is never questioned and allowed to go unchecked.
If the BBC manage to get Labour re-elected then this will be the last election we will have. Already the EU passes 70% of the laws in another year or two it will be 100%. Parliament will cease to be soveriegn – it will end in tears, authoritarian rule almost always leads to unrest – History is littered with evidence.
Its been said by someone that the Commons is mainly there just to manage EU edicts. Sadly true.
Nonetheless, Nigel Farage’s disgusting comments towards Rompuy make me a lot less likely to vote UKIP. Farage just came over, to me at least, an unpleasant saloon bar bully.
I’m not in the UK, so I could only view the clip on him responding to the question. A bit irritating the number of interruptions from Mr Dimbleby, but nothing that leads me to think he is nothing but the exemplar of what the BBC should be when I left Blighty 7 years ago.
Taken in context, Farage’s comments weren’t too much. He was hardly polite but, then again, when your own country has just become the involuntary satellite of a communistic new federation, and this is your first chance to express your feelings directly to its unelected leader, then politeness is hardly the order of the day.
We are currently engaged in nothing less than a war for our own national sovereignty. The fact that the BBC has hidden the entire context of Farage’s remarks from its involuntary subscribers gives even more justification for those remarks. For the BBC, it’s more important that its audience gets to fret over an impolite speech to our unelected new ruler than to educate them about the implications of the status quo that inspired it.
Janet Street Porter is one of those ‘anti-racists’ who choose to live in as white and monocultural a plave as can be found – in her case Pately Bridge in the Yorkshire Dales.
Cameron’s trendyism is causing the tories to shed voters like nobody’s business
New Labour/Blue labour
same PC crap