BBC's Question Time Special Asks What Brexit Britain Will Look Like? The Answer? Pale, Male & Very Grey

Monday Night’s BBC Question Time special posed the big question, What will Brexit Britain look like? The clue to the answer could be found by looking at the panel. Dominated by white middle aged men, where only gobby women (no more than two) on the right of the political spectrum are invited to speak.

Having intravenously administered a medicinal dose of alcohol to numb the pain of sitting through the agonising programme, my rancour subsided only to be replaced by reality induced despair. How could the BBC exclude young people (anyone under 40 would be a start) and black people (even a dark brown panellist would have shown willing) from a discussion purporting to be about the future of Britain? Of the three pro EU voices, not one was female. Then the dulled, toxin imbued penny dropped. After the EU immigrants are gone and the combination of isolationist xenophobia and misery claims our young people, these clones are all we’ll be left with.

Just before the EU vote, research showed the extent to which women’s voices were being side lined from media debates. Despite other research indicating that women voters could decide the outcome, the Remain camp continued to wheel out white haired men, largely New labour/Blairite, grandees such as, Alistair Campbell, Baron Mandelson and Gordon Brown. Between them, these men have got more baggage than Heathrow’s terminal 4, so the idea that they could speak to minorities, women or the disenfranchised working classes, anywhere in this country, was dangerously delusional.

Harriett Harman also rightly complained of the gender deficit in media representation 4 weeks before the EU vote. The problem with that is, the man who headed up the Labour “in” campaign, Alan Johnson (himself a New Labour grandee), was responsible for giving the media gigs to his old boy mates. And who appointed him to that powerful job? Harriet Harman,while interim leader. Which begs the question, why didn’t she appoint one of her female colleagues to that key role?

Despite the cast having failed at the box office, they just keep getting the staring roles. Airbrushed out of Monday night’s Question Time was the almost certain collapse of the NHS if EU immigrants’ rights are not secured imminently and what a xenophobic country, with hate crime on the increase, will do to the fabric of British society. 

In the months following the referendum result, 5,500 EU workers in the NHS handed in their notice. Surveys suggest that they left because they didn't feel welcome. A recent survey of EU NHS staff confirmed that the vote had made the UK a less appealing place to work. Thanks to successive governments reducing training places here for doctors and nurses, the NHS is already experiencing chronic staff shortages. In a recent Channel 4 Dispatches programme, recruiters were practically begging Theresa May to secure the rights of EU immigrants to work here because without them, the NHS will collapse. 

A German doctor's response to David Davis' reassurances that he would be entitled to get British citizenship (after living here for 20 years) was instructive. "Citizenship isn't just a decision of the head" he said, "it is also a decision of the heart". That was a polite way of saying, "You can take your citizenship of little Britain and shove it where the sun don't shine". 

In the coming years, it's not immigration that will dominate British political discourse, it will be emigration. Who can blame anyone with a lifeboat for clambering in, while the good ship Britannica is sunk by a bunch of deranged sailors drunk on a cocktail of omnipotence, lunacy and stupidity.