his is how racism and rightwing extremism is normalised. Thursday night’s Question Time featured a lengthy racist rant by an audience member: “Close the borders, completely close the borders,” she frothed with hateful rage, adding in lies about foreigners being showered with never-ending freebies while destroying the education system and the NHS. It took the commentator Ash Sarkar to challenge her unabashed bigotry with truth, pointing to research that migrants pay in more to the state than they get back. In a cheeky recycling of a quote popularised by the rightwing US pundit Ben Shapiro, Sarkar silenced the bigot: “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”


Yet Question Time then saw fit to clip the 82 seconds of hate, accompanied by a succinct summary of the audience member’s rant. Lies and hatred, uncorrected and unchallenged, rippled across social media from the account of the BBC’s self-described “flagship political debate programme”. At the time of writing, the video had been viewed more than 2 million times. By sharing the video, the BBC seemed to imply that this wasn’t racism – it was simply someone’s opinion for us to agree or disagree with, in much the same way that we might debate the top rate of tax, or whether the railways should be renationalised. Who’s to say who is right and who is wrong? This was just another valid perspective to roam free in the marketplace of ideas – or such was the implication.

Much responsibility lies with a press that systematically incites bigotry against migrants, refugees, Muslims, benefit claimants and trans people: indeed, mainstream newspapers print bile that is not strikingly dissimilar from the Question Time rant. This includes “respectable” broadsheets such as the Times, which was belatedly forced to correct misleading coverage claiming a Christian child was “forced into Muslim foster care”. By the time the corrections were made, the damage had already been done.


Does the BBC not perhaps consider its responsibilities in a society in which hate crimes have doubled over the space of half a decade? As a public broadcaster, the BBC should surely be a bulwark against racism, not an amplifier of its message. The broadcaster may defend itself by claiming that interviewing the likes of Tommy Robinson, a racist thug and convicted fraudster, allows his views to be challenged. Yet it has only helped build up such monsters, seemingly oblivious to the fact that giving a platform to racism legitimises it, or that racism cannot be defeated by the Socratic method.

We are ruled by a prime minister who has a history of racism and bigotry and who – quite unlike previous Conservative leaders – is idolised by far-right figures and movements, trashing the demarcation between centre-right and what lies beyond. Our national broadcaster uncritically pumping out racist rants is just another legitimisation of such bigotry. If we remain silent, the dial will shift further – and we may find that such beliefs become even more mainstream than they already are.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/21/normalise-bbc-racism-hate-crimes-question-time




Is she not as entitled to have her say as anyone else?

My boss used to borrow Owen Jones' parent's cat when they got mice in their flat. Someone beat that for tenuous.

My boss used to borrow Owen Jones' parent's cat when they got mice in their flat. Someone beat that for tenuous.

Owen Jones didn't have parents, that's a sexist, transphobic statement. ....Probably racist too, as the intention is keeping mice out.

He is right, I note no one has actually tried arguing any points as ever.

He is right, I note no one has actually tried arguing any points as ever.

The way she has been treated is utterly disgusting, and whatever the circumstances, I hope a lot of people are assessing their behaviour very hard.

He is right, I note no one has actually tried arguing any points as ever.

I wonder if we have anyone on here who could rise to that challenge.

He is right, I note no one has actually tried arguing any points as ever.

I note you haven't.
I have to say I didn't hear the woman.
Firstly Jones is a twat of the highest order. Secondly to suggest that immigration control in itself is a racist endeavour and should never be spoken about is stupidly and worryingly wrong.
The man just sees other people as so far below him in intellect that they will blindly follow anything that they see. He's a f**king vainglorious moron.

Immigration control is a racist endeavour though.

Immigration control is a racist endeavour though.

I think the most interesting takeaway from that is that Ash and Owen are making economic justifications for immigration that could come straight from the Economist. Oh what interesting bedfellows this strange new world is throwing up.

Immigration control is a racist endeavour though.

Immigration control is a racist endeavour though.

Owen Jones on Caroline Flack;



Here is is 6 days later, plastering some womans face on top of an article in which he labels her racist, far right extremist, hateful, frothing, a liar, bigoted.

I think you'll find she first chose to plaster her face on National TV via BBC QT, then the BBC chose to plaster her face on twitter.

Victim blaming of the best kind.

Victim? Was she forced to go on QT and say those things?

or do you mean like this...?

There is something very telling in the chattering-class rage over that woman on Question Time who said ‘close the borders’. It feels too intense and utterly disproportionate. Why are so many influential commentators and activists fulminating against one woman who has authoritarian views on the immigration issue?

It’s because it allows them to demonstrate their moral superiority over what they view as the corrupted throng, the racist masses. To these people, this isn’t one woman. No, this is a woman who embodies mass sentiment, who represents the fallen working classes, and who sums up the worldview of the bovine Brexit-backing hordes whom the well-educated elites hold in utter contempt.

The most striking thing about this woman is how swiftly she has been turned into a representative of the throng, an unofficial spokesperson for those sections of the public who have allegedly been brainwashed by racist propaganda and Brexit demagoguery. Her angry comments about closing the borders and putting a complete stop to immigration, alongside her haughty disdain for immigrants who cannot speak English, are not being treated for what they are: a hardline outlook which, as poll after poll has demonstrated in recent years, is not shared by the majority of British people. On the contrary, she is being held up as symptomatic of a nationwide bigotry that us good people – newspaper columnists, Labour activists, correct-thinking academics – have a duty to expose and crush.

So in the eyes of anti-Brexit campaign group Best for Britain, this woman represented the audience itself: ‘Truly sad to see such a misinformed audience’, it snootily said (my emphasis). And of course Best for Britain thinks that allowing such views to be expressed to ‘millions of people’ will help to ‘normalise… the expression of such racist views’. In short, monkey see, monkey do: if the millions – the masses – hear this stuff, it will unleash their latent hatreds.

Corbynista Owen Jones further pursued this classist and elitist media-effects idea. ‘This is how racism and far-right extremism is normalised’, he said. ‘Normalised’ is the new word the middle-class commentariat use to mean infected – their real concern is that putty-minded ordinary people will see the QT comments and think hatred is normal and good.

This is why there was such fury with the BBC for broadcasting this woman’s comments and also sharing them on Twitter. The Beeb has been ‘grotesquely irresponsible’, said columnist Tim Walker. They really do see words like this as petrol on the fire of mass hatred that exists in Brexit Britain, much as Mary Whitehouse fretted that sex scenes would make men into rapists.

‘This explains why Brexit happened’, said columnist Steve Richards. That warrants unpicking. What’s being suggested here is that irresponsible broadcasters allowed racism to be aired and this caused millions of people to vote in a stupid way. This demeans both the decency and the agency of those who supported Brexit, who are reduced to unwitting imbibers and repeaters of hatred they heard on TV.

The mask slipped in one journalist’s comment that QT might as well be broadcast ‘live from a Weatherspoons [sic] at midday on a Monday’. And there we have it. To these people, this woman is the dim masses. She’s the rough, workless Wetherspoons crowd. She’s those uncultured oiks who drink cheap beer on a Monday afternoon. She’s them.

This is why they leapt with such relish on her comments: because they need this woman. For them, she is their prejudices made flesh; she is proof that they were right to view the Brexit-voting masses as a dangerous underclass. She is proof that they are good, the poor masses are bad, and that we need the BBC to save the public from itself by refusing to broadcast comments like hers. The irony is too much: their hatefulness was far more visceral than the woman’s, and it exposed the sheer snobbish intolerance of what now passes for ‘progressive’ politics.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show.

I think you'll find she first chose to plaster her face on National TV via BBC QT, then the BBC chose to plaster her face on twitter.

What do you mean by immigration control?

Question Time is purely culture war for entertainment these days. Tedious polarised bullshit where some “classical liberal” tool bickers with someone from Novara media, with a baying crowd who can bellow something that makes a good 30 second social media clip for Piers Morgan and Owen Jones to get stuck into the following day.

None of these characters, whether audience members or pundits, are normal people.

Question Time is purely culture war for entertainment these days. Tedious polarised bullshit where some “classical liberal” tool bickers with someone from Novara media, with a baying crowd who can bellow something that makes a good 30 second social media clip for Piers Morgan and Owen Jones to get stuck into the following day.

None of these characters, whether audience members or pundits, are normal people.

Which race was this woman being racist towards?

Which race was this woman being racist towards?

If you go back and watch episodes from the 90s, it makes you realise how dreadful the current version is.

You used to get (somewhat) sensible debate. Now you get a room full of people reciting pre-rehearsed lines trying to milk as much applause as possible in order to "win" the debate.