Belated thanks to readers who wrote in about the BBC’s Question Time last week (still viewable here). It was a slightly odd edition, I thought. The panel – Margaret Hodge, Danny Alexander, Sarah Woollaston, Tony Robinson and me – found ourselves in agreement on more things than is usual on the show.
On party-funding we agreed that the parties are all in a mess – albeit in slightly different ways. Likewise we thought that although there may be an argument for it, this isn’t a great moment to raise MPs pay. We all wanted the NHS to remain solvent, though disagreed on the priorities. And everyone was concerned about the coup in Egypt. I think the only point of real contention was between the chair – David Dimbleby – and me.
The first two questions (MPs pay and party funding) were both about procedural matters and had already taken up nearly half the programme (in the end we had only ten minutes to talk about the rest of the world). Feeling slightly fed up about this I thought I would express a feeling I had – which I also sensed from the hall – about the oddity of our political priorities in Britain these days. As viewers will have noticed, this did not go down at all well with David Dimbleby, who took it as a direct criticism of the BBC, himself and indeed the programme’s producers. I didn’t intend it as such but I certainly got a good telling off.
Anyhow – I suppose that is the thing about live TV. It has great upsides and great downsides. The downsides include being spanked in front of the nation by David Dimbleby. The upsides include being able to say some things about the fascist nature of the Muslim Brotherhood which I think are heard on prime-time all too rarely these days.
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