General British politics discussion thread

It's hard to imagine any Daily Mail readers would be on the fence at this stage. Their key demographic is college educated women - they draw them in with the infinitely long page of celebrity pictures and gossip. Either those women are smart enough to stick to that side of the website and ignore their political coverage or they're already Tory supporters.

I don't think that graphic is the sign of bias that people think it is.

If QT was doing an EU program then the UKIP representative was always going to be an MEP as they had no MPs. The other parties would then be asked to put forward someone with a pro-EU slant. Their chosen representatives would logically be MPs as these are the best known people. The Tory/Labour MEPs were generally non-entities who weren't clever enough at politics to get themselves selected for a safe/winnable seat, not the sort of people the party would put forward for QT.

So to an extent it's less a case of BBC bias and more an example of the poor regard the two main parties had for the EU parliament.

I wouldn't disagree that they loved having Farage on.

But I still stick with the way it worked was the that the BBC would contact UKIP and ask for someone for an EU QT, preferably Farage. And they'd be given Farage.

The same BBC researcher would contact Labour and ask for someone for the same EU QT, suggest a few top names, and be given Barry Gardiner. Ditto with the Conservatives. The BBC don't get to pick the politicians, it's decided by who Central Office is willing to put forward and presumably things like 'whose turn is it, who needs a bit of publicity, who is local to whichever area this weeks QT is being filmed' came into it.

But why keep asking UKIP they were not the only Brexit voice out there. They could have had DUP Maps for instance. UKIP were indulged too much not only for the referendum but going back to before the election that led to it.

Imagine they had labels, like they do for food, on newspapers and news websites. They could have categories such as showing what parties their owners have donated money to or otherwise implicitly back. Which parties their journalists have worked for in the past or who are/were married to (I see Sarah Vine's name on the front page there too).

Like we can all have a good laugh at how horribly biased the likes of the Mail and Express are but there are a whole cohort of society who don't even realise it who read them regularly. They then are convinced that they have come to their own pro-Boris/Tory, anti-EU positions entirely independently of the poison that they ingest every day in the form of these publications.

I saw this last night:

"What a fool I was. I was only a puppet, and so was Ulster, and so was Ireland, in the political game that was to get the Conservative Party into power."

Carson. There's a statute of him at Stormont, an entity he never really wanted and barely supported (as a Dubliner he wanted the entire island to stay in the UK and didn't support the actions of the NI Government after partition, refusing the offer to become Prime Minister)

101 years ago, famed speech by an idol of Unionists and they still don't get it.

Delighted for them. Some of the poorest people in England live there but used to be out voted by the rich who would then gut the council services which they didn't need themselves.

But shure the rich Tories in London these days are all Russians who probably couldn't make it back to vote 😜