Question Time LiveBlog 30th June 2011

>> Thursday, June 30, 2011


Question Time comes tonight from Birmingham; a post apocalyptic prison-city which was extensively remodelled in the mid 20th Century by Adolf Hitler and is located in a huge bomb crater somewhere in the Midlands. Highlights include nightmarish buildings, utterly miserable public transport and sadistic traffic systems. For this reason Birmingham has been designated an IKEA World Heritage Site.

Birmingham currently holds the world record for fruitless scratch card scratching and bitterly screwed up lottery tickets.

On the panel tonight we have Secretary of State for Transport Philip Hammond MP, Shadow Business Secretary John Denham MP, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers Christine Blower, Labour supporting Sir Richard Lambert (although recently in favour of deficit reduction) and Polly Toynbee.

LiveBlog commenters are kindly asked to leave sharp objects at the door. Your moderators accept no responsibility for injury or damage to nearby objects. Alcohol is virtually essential.

The LiveBlog will also stay open for the bizarreness of This Week with Andrew Neil, and Michael Portillo. They are joined on the Sofa of Mediocrity by Gisela Stuart MP; hindered by some people calling themselves "Michael Rosen" and "Trevor Beresford Romeo OBE" who all of you down wiv da kidz peeps will know as "DJ Jazzie B". Plus a political round-up from Adam Boulton. Joy.

David Vance, TheEye and David Mosque will be moderating the abuse here from 10:30pm. See you later!

27 comments:

Andrew 5:59 PM, June 30, 2011  

How very subtle of the BBC - all they need now is to make the audience up of ex Greenham Common womens camp residents

Si 6:06 PM, June 30, 2011  

4 far left Marxists and 1 Conservative In Name Only. That's a balanced panel.

Natsman 6:07 PM, June 30, 2011  

From your synopsis of that benighted city, it's a wonder that anyone is considering buiding a high-speed rail link there...

Grant 6:17 PM, June 30, 2011  

How can the BBC, week after week, really justify the bias on QT panels ?
1 wet Tory,  5 Leftists , including Dimblebore.  ( Is he not on strike today to complain about his pension ?  ).
Come on Dezzie and Scottie, please try and tell me this is not
BBC bias ? !
And more to the point, why do the Tory wimpos put up with it ?  Are they masochists ?

Grant 6:17 PM, June 30, 2011  

Si,
The Bore makes it 5  !

Grant 6:18 PM, June 30, 2011  

Natsman,
It is to allow Brummies to make a high speed escape.

David Preiser (USA) 6:26 PM, June 30, 2011  

Birmingham has a good orchestra, anyway.  I don't think I have enough alcohol on hand to deal with this week's installment, though.

PhilLaw 6:36 PM, June 30, 2011  

Went to Birmingham once. had a great balti and bought some dope from some (black) street vendors. The only time I have done that. And it wasn't for me. Prefer real ale myself. Oddly enough their pitch was about thirty feet from the entrance to a police station.
I always had fond memories of the place.

David Preiser (USA) 7:19 PM, June 30, 2011  

Real ale is probably getting harder and harder to find with all the pubs closing.  The top-selling beers in Britain are Heiniken, Stella, and Budweiser.  An indictment of 13 years of Labour rule if ever there was one.

David Preiser (USA) 7:20 PM, June 30, 2011  

<span>Real ale is probably getting harder and harder to find with all the pubs closing.  The top-selling beers in Britain are Heiniken, Stella, and Budweiser.  An indictment of 13 years of Labour rule.</span>

cjhartnett 7:42 PM, June 30, 2011  

Hoping that Gisela Stuart remembers her independence-if she does we may yet be surprised, because I have found her to be as good as Labour allows!
Toynbee, Blowhard?...urgh...waddling champers bottles avoiding the top peoples care home that is Womans Hour.
To be fair though-In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg was fine-so why the hell does the BBC continue to "do politics" when they no longer have any mandate to do so?...not since Birt as far as I can see!

Grant 7:42 PM, June 30, 2011  

David P,
Don't they sell Irn Bru in New York ?

Si 7:51 PM, June 30, 2011  

Sadly, there just aren't many true Tories left. Even John Redwood is suspect.

David Preiser (USA) 8:01 PM, June 30, 2011  

No, Grant, we just have a few varieties of 40 oz. bottles of malt liquor.  A couple of them have poetic names like St. Ides and Olde English.

Grant 8:54 PM, June 30, 2011  

David P.
I always wondered where the English sold these brands, now I know.

George R 9:03 PM, June 30, 2011  

-I'll be watching Glenn Beck's final show on 'Fox News' instead tonight (Sky channel 509, 10 pm).

 Video of show (and archive) available here tomorrow:

http://thedailybeck.com/

Jeremy Clarke 10:25 PM, June 30, 2011  

Ye gods. Doesn't Toynbee have a home to go to?

Yes, yes, I know she has at least three but I am starting to wonder if she has a specially adapted broom-cupboard at White City, such is her omnipresence at Beeb towers.

Note to QT production staff: other (more lucid, intelligent and rational) left-wing commentators are available. In fact, Johann Hari might soon have a little more time on his hands.

Buggy 11:44 PM, June 30, 2011  

Aged 16, I <<ahem>></ahem> 'became a man' in Birmingham.I've never been back. Or wanted to. Ever.

I wish I'd done the deed somewhere else. Even Billericay. Or Canvey. Or Leysdown. But Brum ? Damn my youthful hormones.

Still, at least the (very) lucky girl wasn't a Brummie. So I've that to salve my pride.

Incidentally, the French have a phrase "Etre de Birmingham", meaning to be bored to death.

(This according to Bill Bryson, so if it's not true go bag on the beardy Yank, not your humble servant here).

Buggy 11:47 PM, June 30, 2011  

"Ye gods. Doesn't Toynbee have a home to go to?"

Silly. Tuscany season isn't for another fortnight yet.

Betty Swollocks 8:38 AM, July 01, 2011  

Buggy.... Toynbee lives in a cupboard in BBC HQ !!

Roland Deschain 8:53 AM, July 01, 2011  

Never thought of it like that, but the long-standing dominance of Labour in Scotland might explain the popularity here of Tennents.  A brew that looks, tastes and smells much the same going in as it does coming out.

Roland Deschain 8:59 AM, July 01, 2011  

Ooh!  Look who's on Any Questions tonight.  Sir William of Bragg!

cjhartnett 12:09 PM, July 01, 2011  

Lord Bragg of Burton Bragstocke to give the Bard his true title!
The Beeb loves its self educating wannabies who want the House of Lords whilst whistling "Remote Control" by the Clash at the same time. No sense of irony at all, these sages of the Entitlement!
Bragg ticka all the boxes for "lifelong learning"...if he gave all his guitars to all those prisoners he serenades inside, then he could at least be the politician he was born to be.
Bragg personnifies Red Wedge gone to seed-Kinnock would be very proud.."well alriiiight!!!"
Presumably Bragg will be cycling up to the venue-not far, and far kinder to the environment. Or maybe a hovercraft floating on his own sense of self-satisfaction and self-righteousness at the very least!
Oh God-he`s going to be at Tolpuddle again as well. THat should lose the unions a few members anyway!

George R 6:23 PM, July 01, 2011  

"BBC Question Time's most biased panel yet?"

By Matthew Barrett

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/leftwatch/2011/07/bbc-question-times-most-biased-panel-yet.html

Grant 6:57 PM, July 01, 2011  

It is not funny. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the "coalition government" gave Barge a peerage.

cjhartnett 11:36 AM, July 02, 2011  

Grant!
Relax, my friend.
If you heard him garbling his prejudices and Socialist Worker slogans under the concerned but compassionate Dimbleby Minor on the show: I think that you`d find that we have nothing to fear.
His Winter Palace down on the Dorset Coast is our future Peoples Palace. It will be providing assisted dying facilities for the Unions once Tolpuddle dies on its arse...Blears, Hain...what titan of the left can we be expecting this year...Laura Penney?...Strauss Kahn?..

All Seeing Eye 10:50 AM, July 03, 2011  

test

Antony Jay

"But we were not just anti-Macmillan; we were anti-industry, anti-capitalism, anti-advertising, anti-selling, anti-profit, anti-patriotism, anti-monarchy, anti-Empire, anti-police, anti-armed forces, anti-bomb, anti-authority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place, you name it, we were anti it."
Antony Jay, Telegraph, July 2007

Andrew Marr

"..the final answer, frankly, is the vigorous use of state power to coerce and repress. It may be my Presbyterian background, but I firmly believe that repression can be a great, civilising instrument for good. Stamp hard on certain 'natural' beliefs for long enough and you can almost kill them off."
Andrew Marr, The Guardian Feb. 1999

Jeremy Paxman

"But the bigger question is whether the BBC itself has a future. Working for it has always been a bit like living in Stalin’s Russia, with one five-year-plan, one resoundingly empty slogan after another. One BBC, Making it Happen, Creative Futures, they all blur into one great vacuous blur. I can’t even recall what the current one is. Rather like Stalin’s Russia, they express a belief that the system will go on forever."
Jeremy Paxman, The James McTaggart Memorial, 24th August 2007

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