Friday, September 06, 2013
Brian's Big Debate today
I was one of about 50 people in the BBC radio audience today (including a passelof schoolchildren brought in to keep up the numbers) so I got to speak 3 times and I think anybody in the audience who wanted to did.
This links to the recording.
We had the normal Lab/Nat/Coms plus the Herald (the one that publishes Alex Orr saying UKIP shouldn't be allowed to stand but allows no reply) & Oxfam (fakecharity).
The questions on which I got to answer were:
Syria: I said we had been lied to for so long to bounce us into illegal wars that nobody could believe what we were told now. In particular that we were told that the Serbs were committing genocide in Kosovo but in fact it only happened after we took over when our KLA/police were allowed to kill 210 people at Dragodan outside the UK military HQ. I was pleased to get that on the record but it was ignored. Mike Fisher, another UKIP member also said we had been lied to so many times.
Welfare reform & Glasgow's role as most unemployed city: After a lot of discussion in which everybody complained about not getting enough subsidy I got on and said "All these politicians know that the only way to produce real new jobs is by getting the economy growing. They all know we could do it but only UKIP actually wants to & they don't get on the air." I should have mentioned the current 6% rest of the world growth rate and used the word censorship. Mike Fisher lamented the way the SNP use such things divisively as if unemployment was only happening in Scotland but not England.
Technology: A rather silly question about young people being much more capable of using mobile phones and other new technology than the questioner and was this a bad thing. When I got the microphone I aid "The default position of the parties here when faced with new technology is how can we ban or restrict it. If we want a growing economy we should embrace technological progress as only the party we aren't supposed to discuss do."
None of this will set the heather on fire but it is all grist to the mill.
Incidentally the guy sitting beside me was very much an old socialist but lamented the fact that the socialist parties were against progress. Also, pragmatically, that there was a place for the free market to create the wealth. We very much agreed on nuclear. I suspect that with enough time I could have converted him to our side since the only real thing we disagreed on was the need to retain & glory in the word "socialism". He had been an SSP activist but was contemptuous of the way their meetings tended to be lectures about oppressing of trade unionists in 1920s Venezeula and matters similarly unconnected to progress.
Mike Fisher has pointed out I neglected to mention his all-important point that the four pillars of the UK are its four countries that form the 'family' that make up the United Kingdom. That was but one point as a beginning of my anti-separatist, anti-SNP campaign but it received a reasonable amount of applause from the audience.
This links to the recording.
We had the normal Lab/Nat/Coms plus the Herald (the one that publishes Alex Orr saying UKIP shouldn't be allowed to stand but allows no reply) & Oxfam (fakecharity).
The questions on which I got to answer were:
Syria: I said we had been lied to for so long to bounce us into illegal wars that nobody could believe what we were told now. In particular that we were told that the Serbs were committing genocide in Kosovo but in fact it only happened after we took over when our KLA/police were allowed to kill 210 people at Dragodan outside the UK military HQ. I was pleased to get that on the record but it was ignored. Mike Fisher, another UKIP member also said we had been lied to so many times.
Welfare reform & Glasgow's role as most unemployed city: After a lot of discussion in which everybody complained about not getting enough subsidy I got on and said "All these politicians know that the only way to produce real new jobs is by getting the economy growing. They all know we could do it but only UKIP actually wants to & they don't get on the air." I should have mentioned the current 6% rest of the world growth rate and used the word censorship. Mike Fisher lamented the way the SNP use such things divisively as if unemployment was only happening in Scotland but not England.
Technology: A rather silly question about young people being much more capable of using mobile phones and other new technology than the questioner and was this a bad thing. When I got the microphone I aid "The default position of the parties here when faced with new technology is how can we ban or restrict it. If we want a growing economy we should embrace technological progress as only the party we aren't supposed to discuss do."
None of this will set the heather on fire but it is all grist to the mill.
Incidentally the guy sitting beside me was very much an old socialist but lamented the fact that the socialist parties were against progress. Also, pragmatically, that there was a place for the free market to create the wealth. We very much agreed on nuclear. I suspect that with enough time I could have converted him to our side since the only real thing we disagreed on was the need to retain & glory in the word "socialism". He had been an SSP activist but was contemptuous of the way their meetings tended to be lectures about oppressing of trade unionists in 1920s Venezeula and matters similarly unconnected to progress.
Mike Fisher has pointed out I neglected to mention his all-important point that the four pillars of the UK are its four countries that form the 'family' that make up the United Kingdom. That was but one point as a beginning of my anti-separatist, anti-SNP campaign but it received a reasonable amount of applause from the audience.
Labels: BBC, Scottish politics, Yugoslavia
