Quote of the day 14th June 2018

"Only the SNP could give an unplanned walk-out all the spontaneity of a North Korean military parade."

(Stephen Daisley, from an article on the SNP's walkout at Westminster yesterday, which you can read in full here.)

Comments

Jim said…
I dont want my advert shown at half time, I want it shown during the penalty shootout at the end of a game.

I have said for a long time now that PMQs is just a silly media hunting circus, where MPs get to ask often silly party point scoring questions, the PM fails to answer, but tries for party point scoring instead.

The best bit is, these "elite" politicians actually think that people are watching, or even care. No one i know who has a genuine interest in things rely's on legacy media, so it really is nothing more than an an even more boring episode of strictly come dancing.

10:19 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
I understand exactly where you are coming from and there is a lot of truth in what you say.

And yet:

1) Every recent PM has admitted that they spent a lot of effort preparing for PMQs and most of them have admitted that they felt nervous, hated it, or both.

Anything which provokes that response from Prime Ministers, which makes them feel that they're being put on the spot, must to that extent mean that they are being held accountable. And people do notice when a PM never answers a question. (Cameron often did; May sometimes does; Blair rarely did; Brown hardly ever did.)


2) Childish though the behaviour of politicians often is (and has been since I was a small boy, and probably well before that) a lot of people watch PMQs. If there was never anything interesting discussed and never anything informative in the questions and answers, they probably would not bother.

However imperfect PMQs are, the fact that so many people watch them means that holding and broadcasting that session is making some people take an interest in how the country is run. That is a good thing.
10:42 am
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