Last night’s Question Time panel saw David Dimbleby joined by John McDonnell, Dominic Raab, Ukip’s Louise Bours, Jermaine Jenas and Zoe Williams. As the group ran through a range of topics from the refugee crisis to the rise of Donald Trump, the last question was about the proposed ban of rugby in schools.
After 70 doctors and academics signed an open letter to ministers calling for the ‘high-impact collision sport’ to be banned, what did the panel think? Raab, the Minister for Human Rights, said that while safety issues do need to be taken into account, the positive effects of contact sports cannot be ignored:
‘These kind of sports have got a potential and a power to reach certain youngsters particularly from tough backgrounds that nothing else does.’
However, the Guardian‘s Zoe Williams didn’t appear to agree with Raab when it came to who plays rugby. Williams said she had interviewed the academic leading the research. During the interview, Williams asked her why she was bothering to look into rugby as ‘it’s just a weird thing posh people do’:
‘I remember interviewing the academic who did this research when she first started, and she’s a massive health epidemiologist and I was like “what do you want to do rugby for? It’s just a weird thing that posh people play”.’
In fairness, Williams ought to know what ‘weird things’ posh people do. After all, she was privately-educated at Godolphin and Latymer, the fee-paying all girls school.
Update: Williams has issued a statement via Twitter to clarify her point. She says that the point she was trying to make was that her original impression had been incorrect, and that the academic had convinced her that rugby did warrant research — and that the sport is very dangerous.
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