The Aged P

Classic anti Farage tweaking via the Telegraph’s James Kirkup in a snarky piece about the forthcoming Farage/Clegg debates – Kirkup uses that pic of Farage perspiring during his UKIP conference speech alongside a standard stock photo of Clegg looking steady and serious…..par for the course, I suppose.

Young Kirkup claims that the format is nearing some sort of agreement

LBC, the radio station that hosts Mr Clegg’s weekly phone-in, will stage a debate expected to have fewer rules and restrictions than the BBC. The debate – also before a live audience – will be hosted by Nick Ferrari, a more combative broadcaster than Dimbleby, who is expected to allow more “lively” exchanges.

So far, so good….Ferrari won’t take any prisoners but, unlike anyone at the BBC (except maybe Andrew Neil) he does tend to resonate with white van drivers and their wives, a constituency that is not renowned for going starry eyed over beards and sandals.

But warning bells did start to ring in my head when I read about the TV debate

The two men will be given an hour to argue about the merits of Britain’s membership of the European Union, moderated by David Dimbleby.

Ah, Dimbleby, the Grand Panjandrum of BBC Question Time who inevitably intervenes when he feels a member of the BBCQT panel is simply not up to his own intellectual level. Pompous, smooth and trousering sackfuls of taxpayers’ money via the licence fee he is the epitome of BBC smugness, socially and culturally closer to Clegg than Farage. When you also hear that the audience will be carefully selected to demonstrate “balance” red lights should be flashing in the Farage camp because we just know the BBCQT definition of “balance” from week after week of handpicked rent-a-quote lefty androids who always seem to get chosen when Dimbleby’s eyes scour the audience for his “random” selection…..and isn’t it strange that they often seem to be allowed a few additional comments just in case the message didn’t get through.

During the 2008 and 2012 US Presidential elections the TV debates were organised and “moderated” by the big networks, all dominated by the same liberal/left viewpoint  as our own BBC. The Republican establishment is now coming under increasing pressure from the Tea Party movement to demand a less Democrat friendly structure to the 2016 debates.

I certainly hope that Farage and UKIP also box very cannily with the BBC. It is an organisation that is institutionally inimical to almost everything UKIP stands for.

When you sup with the Beeb you need a very long spoon…..

The Daily Mail picked up from The Commentator and UKIPIAN the case of Amy Rutland, the Labour Party official who fulminated against Eastleigh UKIP candidate Diane James on last week’s BBC Question Time (James, you might recall, very nearly snatched victory from the Liberal Democrats)

The question was about the impact that UKIP might have on the Tories future electoral hopes.

the camera swung to Amy Rutland, who launched a personal attack on the UKIP panellist, the Eastleigh candidate Diane James, calling her ‘disgusting’.
Miss Rutland, a politics graduate, claimed UKIP preyed on vulnerable people by ‘scaremongering’ about the number of Romanians and Bulgarians expected to come to Britain.

fortunately Diane James remained unhassled and dealt with her in a calm and effective manner – and there it would have ended if some salient facts about Amy Rutland had not emerged over the next few days.

Rutland is South-East Policy Co-ordinator for the Labour Party

Although identified by Stephen Twigg, the Labour MP on the QT panel, merely as “a questioner from the audience” she had been with him at a meeting earlier in the day
Now in itself there is no reason why a political activist should not be present in the QT audience. But there is considerable suspicion that the BBC was aware of her presence and that the chairman, the millionaire David Dimbleby, not only picked her out but then kept her in the spotlight by highlighting her remarks and pressuring Diane James to react rather than answer the original question

I suspect that Dimbleby and the producers choreographed the whole scene hoping to unsettle UKIP’s Diane James (who had impressed the media at Eastleigh) and to undermine UKIP’s policy stance on immigration.

Unfortunately it has backfired on them. Rutland has gone underground and the Beeb is backpedalling furiously.

But never mind – it was all paid for out of our pockets via the BBC Poll Tax (and it’s likely that £450,000 goes each year to David Dimbleby)