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Saturday 10 May 2014

UKIP In Charlie Bloom Meltdown

You may not have heard of Charlie Bloom. He’s from the Southampton area. He doesn’t belong to a political party. He worked hard for over 45 years and is now enjoying his retirement. And last Thursday he was in the audience for BBC Question Time. Here, he demonstrated the ability to spot a spiv at fifty paces.
And another squeaky finger up the bum time

He told Nigel “Thirsty” Farage “I'm old enough to have read about McCarthyism and I'm old enough to have read the Rivers of Blood speech. I'm also aware of what happens in elections where a climate of fear is caused amongst the electorate by the charismatic, the bombastic and, to me, the very dangerous. This has driven Europe to war in the past ... I have no time for you sir, none”. It was the one moment when Farage was on the ropes and wobbling.
This intervention provoked a veritable tsunami of reaction from anguished UKIP devotees. The combination of paranoia, abuse, ignorance and other forms of bigotry was remarkable in its vehemence, as witness “‘Shouty man’ on BBC Question Time [Charlie Bloom] was planted by the Lib Dems as revenge for Clegg’s annihilation by Nigel Farage” from an appropriately-named specimen called UKIPhobia.
Quite apart from the impossibility of any political party planting a member in the Question Time audience, this showed a determination not to engage with Bloom, or accept his objection to Mr Thirsty, but to play the man before the ball. And someone called David Jones did just that: “oh dear we have a Labour voter on our hands what a shock”. So a Labour and Lib Dem supporter at the same time. Or maybe not.
The queue of Kippers wanting to discredit Bloom, rather than debate with him, was seemingly endless. And it included Marty Caine, who has passed before my inspection before: “It is called [BBC Question Time] because you are supposed to ask questions not verbally abuse someone because the [Lib Dems] are failing”. So that’s another who thinks taking issue with Farage makes you a Lib Dem.
Perhaps someone out there in Kipper land could manage a different form of abuse? You betcha, says Sarah: “You are utterly retarded. You think you're a communist street urchin in 1940s Stalingrad” moaned Nationalist_UK. Zelo Street regulars may recognise the kind of language used by James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole, who likes derivations of the word “retard”. He’s in UKIP too.
As, it seems, is someone calling themselves “Dirty Politics”,  who widened the abuse to include Bloom’s family: “What a nasty lefty homophobic bigot you are planted by the BBC, with an equally disgusting daughter who has horrendous views”. Yes, the party of Roger Helmer calls “homophobic bigot” on others. And now it’s the BBC’s fault, and not the Lib Dems or Labour.

But don’t worry Kippers, you’re not paranoid, as they’re not coming to get you. Yet.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Quite apart from the impossibility of any political party planting a member in the Question Time audience,

Just out of interest, why would this be impossible?

Anonymous said...

Just out of more interest, the words I had to type to get my comment above published were marecip PLANT.

Spooky or what?

Tim Fenton said...

@1

You may find this interesting:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/newswatch/ukfs/hi/newsid_4200000/newsid_4202800/4202877.stm

Unknown said...

You're a Nazi and I don't have time for you.

OMG LOOK HE WON'T DEBATE ME!!!

I say, Porter! said...

I did. Thanks, Tim.

Anonymous said...

In UKIP land if you don't agree with what they say you should not be allowed to say it.

I think those who are attacking the man and not the ball are demonstrating this very well.

Anonymous said...

"Quite apart from the impossibility of any political party planting a member in the Question Time audience".

I'd be interested to know if you can actually back up this ludicrous claim?

Tim Fenton said...

@7

The link I provided further up the comments answers your point.

Anonymous said...

The link says nothing about making it impossible for a political party to plant one of theirs into the audience, which is what you claimed. ...

"They are then questioned about their views, voting intentions, background etc, in much the same way as an opinion poll.

I ask again, more directly, how do YOU know that it is impossible for a political party to plant one of theirs into the QT audience? You don't know do you?

And for fecks sake, use a captcha that generates human readable text. Not much point if the words are so warped even a human can't read the squiggles. We don't all have the ability to hear the letters spoken.

Tim Fenton said...

In response to the last comment, I will not be taking questions on wife beating.

And, as should be obvious, I have no control over the Captcha.

office_tramp said...

In reality the process of getting on QT is so random the lib dems would have to have about 100 potential stooges waiting in the wings on the off chance one of the production team got back the after they've filled in the form on the BBC website.

office_tramp said...

And, as I pointed out to the Kipper who told me I needed to "wake up" on Twitter, it's not like they haven't also got form for trying to pass off party workers as an ordinary members of the public...

Anonymous said...

Six years on, I can assure anyone who reads this that I had no idea if I would be selected for the audience. I submitted my request in writing. Equally, I had no,idea I would be asked to speak. I just kept my arm up. I think persistence paid off.

Do I regret anything I said to Mr Farage? No. The audience’s reaction said it all. He had no coherent answer to my second reposte about multi nationals leaving the UK. I’ve just watched the evening news about Nissan. 01/01/2021 will let us know who was the fear monger as I’ve been accused of being elsewhere.

We live in strange and dangerous times.