Saturday 26 January 2019

In defence of the Derby Question Time ‘mob’.


Last week was a notable one for Derby, my home town. First they dumped premiership Southampton out of the FA cup on penalties in a thrilling FA cup replay. Then they acquired the reputation of UK’s most  Brexity place when the audience on BBC’s Question Time, held in the city, made it plain that they want the Brexit they voted for – a full one. Sunderland eat your heart out.

Yet the post programme inquest has featured allegations of impropriety and institutional racism  against the BBC and host Fiona Bruce. Bruce firmly, and incorrectly, contradicted  Diane Abbott’s contention that Labour and the Tories are neck and neck in the opinion polls (the BBC have subsequently issued a correction). A Labour Party activist present has also alleged that during the pre-show warm up, Bruce insulted Abbott and wound up the crowd, inciting abuse against her.

Diane Abbott was right about the polls – it was a significant gaffe from the new presenter. Yet many of those keen to sympathise with Abbott have seemed equally keen to engage in a few insults and caricatures of their own at the expense of the Brexit cheering audience.

The allegations against the BBC originate from Derby Momentum activist Jyoti Wilkinson, whose account of events has echoed around social media. Wilkinson writes that the audience were selected for their xenophobic views (which seems incredibly unlikely and has been firmly denied by the BBC, but nonetheless has entered into the folklore of online conspiracy theorising). He claims that Fiona Bruce’s warm up  ‘had the desired effect, and the carefully selected audience guffawed in delight as they had now been given licence to air their bigoted views in public’. He states that ‘audience members barracked and abused her, questioned her legitimacy and jeered, empowered by the licence they felt they had been given by the BBC to do so’ .

Wilkinson depicts the audience as a braying mob led on by the rabble rousing former host of Antiques Roadshow. He even claims that the ‘… most reactionary members of the audience were identified [during the warm up] so they could be returned to during the show’.

Who were these reactionaries, hand picked by Auntie for their bigotry and antipathy to Abbott? In the main, simply people who were wholly dissatisfied with most of what they heard from the panel on Brexit. Angry and vociferous? Certainly. Racist? Neither Wilkinson nor anyone else has produced evidence of racist comments.

That did not prevent leading Labour backing commentator Paul Mason from asserting in the aftermath that Question Time is ‘staging hatred’  and that it has becoming a ‘theatre of racist cruelty’. For Anne Perkins in the Guardian, Question Time features ‘whooping mobs looking for confrontation’. Labour MP Chi Onwurah made the remarkable statement on her twitter account: ‘To be clear I'm not accusing Fiona Bruce or the BBC of racism but thru their ignorance of Labour's actual position in the polls & biased contradiction of Diane's veracity they created a fertile environment for racist abuse’.

The Derby audience are portrayed as a bigoted, racist mob, led on by an  institutionally racist public service broadcaster. Apparently all it takes is a mistake over polling figures and a poor taste gag to send the Brexit backing supposed xenophobes  into an abusive rage. There is not even an  attempt to differentiate between the few who may have been out of order pre-show or too exuberant during it, and the very large majority who simply had a strong opinion over Brexit and a desire to express it forcefully.

How does a belligerent and vocal audience  become transformed  so readily into a xenophobic rabble in the mind’s eye of Question Time’s critics? Ever since the referendum some Remain campaigners who never accepted the result have taken every opportunity to associated Brexit with xenophobia. So much so that they now interpret vociferous backing for Brexit as de facto bigotry. So for example, Paul Mason recently described Brexit to a US radio channel as ‘very focused’ on ‘xenophobia [and] white privilege’. This sort of guilt by association has been common and constant from figures on the Remain side of the debate since the morning of June 24th, 2016. A large section of a public audience cheering for Brexit is, for people immersed in this bubble, inexplicable in any terms other than ignorance and bigotry.

Inevitably there have been demands to tame Question Time or regulate who speaks and what is said. Mason wants it rebid and the Guardian’s Anne Perkins offers suggestions as to how to take the edge off those she characterises as the ‘mob’.

What is so good about Question Time is that it is one of very few opportunities people get to directly question the politicians, pundits and experts . Yes, it’s not always pretty, and politicians of all stripes get humiliated and booed. But whether you agree or disagree with those cheering for a full Brexit, or  if you sympathise with Diane Abbott's treatment, last week’s Question Time was a stark reminder of the gulf between elites and very many ordinary people. Brexit voting audience members are unlikely to get an apology from their detractors, and don’t demand one. But anyone wanting to bridge that gulf needs to resist the dehumanising caricatures aimed only at delegitimising the Brexit vote and avoiding the question of democracy it starkly poses.

Monday 7 January 2019

Questioning the Epistemology of Decolonise: The Case of Geography

I wrote this piece: Questioning the Epistemology of Decolonise: The Case of Geography for the Social Epistemology Research and Reply Collective. It was a response to the uncritical adoption of "decolonise" as a moral imperative (as opposed to a political position) at the 2017 Royal Geographical Conference in London.


It is not on the usual topics I write about, but for me making the humanist case for knowledge, and defending this as a gain from the Enlightenment, are very important for people on the Left.