Our party of five featured in the opening of Any Questions with one of us being selected to hit the first ball of the evening with a question.
We were attending the BBC4 live program in the local village of Warminster. The questions flowed and received a diversity of responses from 2 MPs, Labor and Conservative, a right wing think tank convenor (Farage in disguise) and a journalist, broadcaster, activist who provided the audience with answers and responses that illicited much applause. She was the Village Hall favourite. She had strong options, well articulated and based in her life experience. The others were shallow by comparison careful to run an ideological or party line that would keep ther options open. The audience responded to their political complicity with scattered unenthusiastic applause.
The PopCon man (Popular Conservatism!) responding to a question on immigration and posited a formula that all British citizens should be required to earn £17,000 to stay. This would no doubt result in a mass exodus of residents given the minimum wage is £15,000. But we moved on despite protestations from the journalist. Both Labor and Conservative MPs seemed to have much in common with the occasional barb.
The Labor MP elected in the most recent election had already dumped Starmer no doubt hedging his best as a minister or advisory role. He headed up a Labor MP think tank on economic growth!
The Conservative had been a conservative in successive governments since Cameron and had supported Remain but had moved on…. and so had the Party so no more positions for him. It was a live controlled discussion that wandered into questions that no one could agree to disagree.
And the evening concluded with applause and a reflection by the moderator that this was democracy in action. It was but my question that was rejected came back to remind me of the predicament we are all in - ‘Given we have the answers why are there so many questions’!
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