Chasing tales

I was in the audience of BBC Question Time last week. They showed the audience into a big room and we were asked to write two questions on cards and hand them into the team, who took them away to decide which ones to use for the programme. A few minutes later, the presenter David Dimbleby explained that the best questions are chosen from the audience’s most popular topics. He said Question Time is an audience-led programme in that respect. I couldn’t help wondering at this statement. When I was phoned up to tell me I could be part of the audience I was told to make sure I was up-to-date with the news. While we were writing our questions on the cards, BBC news 24 was playing on a big screen, making it clear whose agenda was really driving those questions. Unfortunately the big news item at the time was Prince Harry’s apparently imminent departure to Iraq. Amazingly enough, this turned out to be one of those popular, audience-led questions…

I did manage to make a couple of comments on the programme. One was in response to the question ‘Iraq: withdrawal or retreat?’, which referred to the 1000 plus British soldiers that were being sent back from Iraq (or rather, to Afghanistan). I made the point that Dick Cheney said the partial withdrawal of British troops shows how well things are going in Iraq. And that it was one thing if we were fooled by him once, but if we were fooled by him twice we were idiots! Later, when the discussion moved on to gun crime, I made the point that the government’s slogan was ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, yet the second half of the promise has been neglected. That the biggest cause of violent crime is poverty and yet billions of pounds were being spent on an illegal war in Iraq. I should have said that, for all the talk of ‘integration’, there’s so much evidence to suggest that the perceived lack of ‘social cohesion’ is largely the fault of white people. A study at Lancaster University has just concluded that white school children are far less tolerant of religious and cultural difference than their Muslim counterparts, for example. And I have just recently been to the Second Huntley conference about radical Black publishing in London, which reminded me that Black British writers have had to set up separate publishing initiatives because, for decades now, most mainstream publishers won’t touch writing by Black authors with a barge pole.    

I was disappointed by Alex Salmond’s populist position on road-pricing (he’s against it – he calls it the toll-tax, cleverly (con)fusing it with Margaret Thatcher’s disastrous poll tax).