I am back early from a short planned break from blogging after last night watching my regular fix on a Thursday night of Question Time on BBC 1. I have been a fan since it started, it really is essential viewing to me has I love politics, David Dimbleby is the perfect host but is the format becoming too boring or the main guests.
Each week a guest panel take questions from the public and argue their beliefs or mainly there parties beliefs. The panel consist principally of politicians from each of the main parties and when the show travels to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland a more local panel are called for. They are all hamstring by party lines at rarely answer the question these days more than in the earlier shows asked them any question and the majority of time they reply right along party lines. Who cares about history someone always goes back in history reminding others of their policy from yesteryear when I want to hear about now and the future.
I like the non-politicians they can be more interesting and some like journalists can even break cover from their newspapers political allegiances and theirs as well. We expect anyone from the Daily Mail to be more right wing of Genghis Khan and a guest from the Daily Mirror to be left wing with a well thumb copy of Karl Marx in his pocket but unlike the politicians tend to have a mind of their own and go off script.
Outside the politicians, you get an interesting group of guest so diverse and the best are those who may have political allegiances who are not nailed to the mast and answer questions. Always on offer, a healthy discussion can become very heated towards the politicians who try to snake their way out of a question. The odd guest to the show was controversial I am thinking about Nick Griffin leader of the far-right British National Party, when he was invited on the panel there was up roar with demands for him to be banned but the BBC would not relent and he got his platform for all the good it did him.
His attack on Jack Straw’s then-Justice Secretary left many speechless when BNP leader Nick Griffin launched a vile attack on his father’s wartime jail spell. "My father was in the RAF during the second World War while Mr Straw's father was in prison for refusing to fight Adolf Hitler".
Then you watch personal finance expert Martin Lewis chewing up a politician over student finance for using it as a "political football" and has made young people think they cannot afford to go to university. Labour's Chi Onwurah said tuition fees are "an obstacle" for people from working class backgrounds and should be scrapped. But Mr Lewis says they should not be "framed as a debt" and a generation has been "mis-educated" about how it works.
Last night Dianne Abbott was one of the panellist normally a red flag for me, as I am no fan and she turned up in the strangest of outfits. Grenfell was always going to be the first question up with the end of the Grenfell Tower review and Conservative Housing, Communities and Local Government minister Dominic Raab was on hand for a roasting a lady in the audience managed to get an apology out of him. Something I have notice the audiences have become more boisterous with the panel more so since Brexit also on the show were ex-Met Police commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty and Camilla Cavendish, former head of policy for David Cameron.
The discussion on Grenfell took up much of the show, which was bound to happen with some passionate questions coming from the audience who lived around Grenfell. Next the controversial move of the US embassy to Jerusalem, and the death and wounded of Palestinian protesters again the was plenty of passion from the audience and with most of the schedule programme time over there was just about a enough time for a third subject, knife crime.
In London, it’s bad and beginning to spread further a field. A somewhat boisterous encounter for some of the panel but why do people go on and on about youth clubs like it’s a fix for all evils but joking aside that is no fix to the problem. At the end of the day I think Question Time could do would out the politicians.
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